IEEE Spectrum January, 2008 - 37

loser: gEopoSitioNiNg

No payoff
for galileo
NavigatioN
system
europe's answer to gps isn't worth it
By William Sweet

48

NA * iEEE SpEctrum * JANuAry 2008

system is five years behind schedule and, in terms of public funding,
at least a couple of billion euros over
budget.
Galileo's boosters often described
the system's commercial promise in
extravagant terms, taking in even
seasoned and tech-savvy journalists
like T.R. Reid, the author of a history
of the microchip. In another book,
The United States of Europe (Penguin,
2004), Reid said that Galileo's more
accurate locational signals would
"trump the American effort." Due to
be fully operational by 2008, Galileo
would have "a four-year monopoly
on the improved technology before
Americans can catch up," making
the €4 billion system a profit center
for the EU.
That enticing vision and the
rationale for developing Galileo
have since fallen into complete disrepute. The original plan was to
launch four test satellites by about
now and, in the period from 2006 to
2010, place 26 more 700-kilogram
solar-powered satellites in three
orbital planes at an altitude of 23 222

kilometers. The EU and ESA were to
share the costs of the four test satellites. The private sector would cover
two-thirds of the costs of the remaining satellites, and total system costs
would be less than €4 billion.
But by the middle of last year,
it was apparent that Galileo would
become fully operational at least
four or five years behind schedule
and that system costs would exceed
€5 billion, with the private sector
making little or no contribution.
Galileo's proponents said that
its premium signals would provide
positioning accuracy of 1 meter or
better, greatly improving on the performance of GPS, whose accuracy
was well above 5 meters on average at the beginning of this decade.
But as early as 2004, average GPS
accuracy improved to within 3 to
5 meters, and by 2012-2013 it is sure
to be 3 meters or better.
There remains the question of
signal access. Originally, the United
States reserved the right to limit
GPS accuracy for military reasons.
But in May 2000, well before the
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Bryan chriStie deSign

S

uppose somebody
offered you a free
lunch at the best restaurant in Paris, Chez
Gaston, complete with
your favorite wine, a €500 bottle
of Château La Mondotte SaintEmilion. Would it really make sense
for you to say no thanks, and then
spend millions of dollars to open
your own French restaurant in
New York, with the stated intention of taking away Gaston's business within five years?
This, in effect, is what Europe
has been doing in the field of
geopositioning, a rapidly growing
multibillion-dollar business that
soon will dominate all aspects of
transportation and navigation and is
sure to play a growing role in widely
disparate activities from commercial
fishing to emergency services.
The idea of a European geopositioning system similar to the U.S.
Global Positioning System (GPS) and
Russia's Global Navigation Satellite
System (GLONASS) originated a
decade ago, when teams of engineers from France, Germany, Italy,
and the United Kingdom developed
a joint concept for an independent
set of satellites that would provide
superior accuracy and not be vulnerable to military cutoff. In March
2002, the European Union (EU) and
the European Space Agency (ESA)
agreed to proceed with the project,
named Galileo, which they visualized as a public-private partnership
that ultimately would pay for itself
by providing premium paid services
with encoded signals. Today the
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum January, 2008
