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A Civilian GPS System (oneday!)

GPS designed in the 1970s by the US Department of Defence, is still the only fully functional Global Positioning System. While its original purpose was strictly military, a less accurate level of GPS has been freely available for worldwide civilian use since the constellation reached full operational capability in 1995.
Ever since the late 1990s, Europe started discussing the idea of creating and operating its own satnav system, “Galileo”.
Galileo, was conceived as a civilian system. One of the main arguments in its favour is that it will give Europeans independent and guaranteed access to a service currently provided by a foreign power. The risk that especially in times of war, the US might decide to jam certain GPS signals and therefore compromise the integrity of civil applications is thought to be low.
Yet, even if Europeans could be certain the America’s GPS signals would never be interfered with, “have two suppliers of satellite navigation data would be tremendously valuable from an operational point of view” says Engel (a US based satellite industry analyst) it means that you could do things like automatically landing airliners using satellite navigation data. If you were to utterly rely on satellite navigation, you just cannot depend on a single supplier. No matter how benign the US Department of Defence is, you simply cannot trust absolute life-and death responsibilities to a single source.”
Then there’s the commercial argument in favour of Galileo. The EC is convinced that, even if the current €3.4bn price tag translates into further cost overruns (as many fear will happen) EU member states still stand to benefit from a global market estimated to be worth over €10bn annually by 2015.

Feb 2009

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