EURO-​​GPS: READY FOR ORBIT?

It’s a fair bet that satel­lite nav­i­ga­tion won’t be at the top of the agenda when President Bush meets with European lead­ers in Ireland next week for the annual sum­mit between the United States and the European Union. But, in the long run, a little-​​known agree­ment to allow New World and Old World satel­lites to play nice with each other could prove to be the sum­mit item that has the great­est impact on aver­age peo­ple world­wide.
For years, dri­vers have found their way home, and bombs have found their way to tar­gets, because of the global posi­tion­ing sys­tem, or GPS. The array of 27 American satel­lites gives receivers on the ground an accu­rate sense of where they are on the globe. Since the late ‘90s, Europeans have been work­ing on their answer to GPS, called Galileo.
At first, the sys­tem was sup­posed to be a GPS com­peti­tor. But now, after years of wran­gling, the United States and Europe have agreed to coop­er­ate. That could mean more widely avail­able track­ing sys­tems — ones that work in just about every urban canyon, office park and hik­ing trail across the globe.
“Odds are, you’ll get stronger recep­tion, and more reli­able ser­vices,” said Ralph Braibanti, who directs the State Department’s space and advanced tech­nol­ogy office, and who nego­ti­ated the agree­ment for the U.S. side.
But it will take more diplo­matic finagling to make the pro­gram work. Galileo’s 30-​​satellite net­work is sched­uled to come online in about 2008. Several peo­ple close to the project said they would be shocked if the dead­line holds. Most of the financ­ing for Galileo — about 2.5 bil­lion euros, or $3 bil­lion — is sup­posed to come from a public-​​private part­ner­ship. But European bureau­crats haven’t yet set­tled on a pri­vate part­ner. And it’s murky how that busi­ness will actu­ally make money from the ven­ture.
My Wired News arti­cle has details.

June 18th, 2004 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.