“Galileo – is it worth it”
Last week I attended a discussion on “Galileo – is it worth it”, hosted by OpenEurope at the House of Lords committee rooms.
Lined up was:
Richard Peckham, Business Development Director (UK), EADS Astrium
Peter Brookes, Senior Fellow, National Security Affairs, The Heritage Foundation (former Deputy Assistant Defence Secretary in the George W. Bush Administration)
Dr. Stephen Ladyman MP, former Minister of State for Transport
Bernard Jenkin MP, member of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, former Shadow Secretary of State for Defence
Not sure that I learnt much as all played to form. The industrialist took the industry line (EU should invest €2.1 billion), Tory politician (EU waste of money), Labour Politian (wanted it stopped but couldn’t quite say so), Ex US Politian (don’t undermine NATO and don’t trust the Chinese - see here)
It seems that unless there is a political carve up it’s “doomed”. The most interesting part of the discussion was on the impact of loss of GPS (failure or executive switch-off). There is general agreement that loss of GPS would be disastrous for the EU and US economies (and others presumably) and therefore the US Administration would never switch it (the open access bit) off. OK then, if it’s that important then why don’t we need a back up! I think a trick was missed here and should have been explored further.
It’s well documented that GPS is easy to jam and goes wrong and as I said in a recent post the continuity of service is possibly the only remaining defensible argument for continuing with Galileo.
October 16th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
“if it’s that important then why don’t we need a back up!”
The cost?
The difficulty for the US of denying all GPS capability to the rest of the world without damaging themselves and their allies?
October 17th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
When I’ve written about this, I’m not sure anyone thinks the US would really switch it off entirely - and the US I think may even have said it won’t. On the other hand, the system was fuzzed for a good bit of its life, and it’s much easier to imagine the US military deciding that it’s in the interest of national security to fuzz it back up some under some circumstances. In any event, the argument that there is this huge market of goods and services now resting on a military system seems to me to have some merit. I wonder if the workable compromise would be for GPS to open up to allow satellites launched by other nations to join the system - one world-wide system, but with pieces contributed by different countries around the world. Like the Internet. Why not? A lot of scientists want the greater accuracy more satellites would bestow, and as we become more reliant on GNSs so will civilians.
wg