How Hypersonic Glide Vehicles Navigate Through GPS Blackout #Shorts

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]At Mach 8, the plasma sheath makes electronics useless. So, how does it know where it's going? Above Mach 5, air molecules ionize around the vehicle, forming a plasma layer that absorbs and reflects radio frequencies, including GPS.

[00:00:18]GPS is gone. Data links are gone.

[00:00:22]For up to 20 minutes of glide, the vehicle is completely deaf to the outside world. The primary fallback is inertial navigation. Ring laser gyros and accelerometers tracking every motion since launch. But INS drifts. Even military grade units accumulate roughly 1 nautical mile of position error per hour of unaided flight. To correct it, some vehicles use stellar navigation. A small star tracker telescope fixes on known stars to re-anchor the INS solution, combined with terrain matching on terminal approach. The vehicle reconstructs its position to within meters, entirely without GPS. Blackout isn't a failure mode. It's a design constraint engineers solve with sensor fusion.

[00:01:13]Follow War Tech Engineering for more.