|
|
| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
| |
| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | [gislist] Galileo project - an alternate to GPS 2 of 2 |
| Date: |
01/05/2006 09:40:01 PM |
| From: |
mervyn frankel |
|
|
Message
The Galileo Project
By GWYNNE DYER
One critic called it "the Common Agricultural Policy of the sky," a
reference to the European Union's expensive and wasteful farm support
program, but the Galileo Project has been launched at last. On December 28 a
Russian rocket boosted the Giove-A satellite into orbit from the Baikonur
cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The small British-built satellite is the first of two designed to test the
orbital components of the new European satellite navigation system.
Another will follow early in 2006, and once the testing is complete the
launches of operational satellites will come every couple of months until
all 30 of them are in orbit by the end of 2010.
It is being touted as a technically superior commercial rival to the
quarter-century-old US Global Positioning System - but no bank in the world
would lend the Galileo Project money if it were truly a commercial venture.
Talk to the EU's public relations people, and they will rhapsodize about the
technological beauties of the system. Galileo's rubidium-based atomic
clocks, the heart of the system, are 10 times as precise as the ones in the
American GPS system, and will give positions accurately to within one metre
(one yard) or less.
Galileo will give a faster fix, and will penetrate inside buildings, into
city centers, under trees - all places where GPS is currently unreliable.
But the truth is that Galileo will not be technologically superior for long,
and it is a lot more expensive than just sticking with GPS.
There are no reliable estimates of the final cost of getting the Galileo
system up and running: the working figure is 3.4 billion euros ($4 billion),
but it could end up being much more.
The projected revenues are even hazier, since they assume that Galileo's
increased accuracy will lure large numbers of users away from the American
GPS system, which is freely available to anyone - but the forthcoming
upgrade of the GPS network should make it even more accurate than Galileo
within the next 10 years.
Few of Galileo's private investors would be risking their money if the EU's
prestige and its huge resources were not also committed to the project.
THE REAL motives for the Galileo Project are not commercial or even
political (although it does provide another pretext for subsidizing Europe's
space-oriented industries).
It is fundamentally a strategic project, aimed at ensuring that the EU will
have guaranteed access to satellite-nav information no matter what happens
politically in the world in the next 30 or 40 years.
Just as the Russians could have relied on receivers for the freely available
GPS but put up their own Glonass system instead, so the Europeans do not
want to be utterly dependent on Washington's good will.
GPS was originally built with US taxpayers' money as an entirely military
system. Its main purpose, early on, was to provide accurate positioning data
to American nuclear delivery vehicles, but US authorities quickly realized
that it was also a superb tool for enhancing the country's diplomatic clout
abroad and the military services' public image at home.
They let private companies produce receivers that enabled civilians to use
the satellite data (with the accuracy deliberately degraded so it was less
useful to other military forces), and transformed the world's navigation
industry.
The major drawback of the free and universally available GPS system is that
it comes with no guarantees whatsoever.
At any time the United States government can choose to degrade the
positioning data available to civil users, or even to switch the system off.
It is unlikely to do such a thing except in a grave emergency, but remote
contingencies are what strategic planning is all about.
If, for example, there were to be a Chinese-US military confrontation in the
Taiwan Strait 10 years from now, and the US decided to switch the publicly
available GPS service off in case Chinese cruise missiles used it, air
traffic systems all over Asia would collapse.
It was this sort of consideration that convinced the old Soviet Union to go
ahead with the rival Glonass system, and similar motives drive the EU's
determination to press ahead with Galileo now. Once Galileo is operational,
the US will lose a valuable diplomatic lever that it has quietly enjoyed for
the past three decades, so the Bush administration mounted a major
diplomatic campaign in 2004 to persuade the EU to drop the project.
It was particularly insistent that Galileo's positioning data not be made
available to China, which it sees as its emerging strategic rival.
Given the EU's perception that Galileo is a key element in assuring its own
long-term strategic independence, the American diplomatic offensive was
bound to fail.
So the US has now decided to make the best of the situation, and agreed to
|
|
Sponsored by:
For information
regarding
advertising rates
Click Here!
|
