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Galileo's Fate

Will Military Interest Save Europe's Beleagured Navigation System?

By Manfred Dworschak

The European Union's transport ministers are meeting to decide the future of the Galileo navigation system this week. The stalled system was originally intended for purely civilian purposes, but now the military is getting interested, given the satellites' importance in modern warfare.

Pity the poor devil who finds himself in the path of a "Taurus" remote-controlled missile. These new European-made cruise missiles have a range of 350 kilometers (218 miles) and are exceedingly precicise -- capable of hitting a target as small as a house at that range.

This only possible because the missiles are able to seek their targets with the aid of GPS satellite navigation. The popular navigation technology, commonly used by drivers to find specific street addresses, also makes it possible to deliver bombs just as precisely to targets like bridges and underground bunkers. But the guidance mechanism is even more accurate in military technology, because the military has reserved particularly precise locating signals for itself.

At a price of just under €1 million apiece, arms producer EADS has high hopes for turning a handsome profit with its "Taurus" missiles. But the company is required to obtain US approval for each and every sale. The US Army, which operates the GPS satellites, has supremacy over all military GPS receivers on earth, including those installed in "Taurus" missiles.

It therefore comes as no surprise that the European arms industry has such high hopes for a satellite navigation system that does not rely on the Americans. The Galileo system, touted as the better GPS for years, is perfectly suited to European purposes, with its 30 satellites serving as domestically-controlled guidance systems with unmatched precision. Galileo, EADS CEO Thomas Enders said recently, must also be made available to the military, partly to improve export sales.

Enders is certainly not the only one to have discovered Galileo's military value. "There will be military users," European Union Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot announced a few weeks ago. The German government is also shifting its position on the system. Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee, a Social Democrat, says that he can imagine Galileo being used by the military "within the scope of normal applications," pointing out that military trucks are also permitted to use highways built with public funds.

All New Weapons Systems Have Satellite Technology

This position is new. For years, the Galileo strategists insisted that the European satellite navigation system would be used purely for civilian purposes -- unlike GPS, which was originally developed for the US military. Nevertheless, the United States eyed the preparations for Galileo with a certain amount of suspicion from the start. Interests within the EU also diverged. Great Britain, for example, is considered a clear opponent of the military use of the technology, while France is not. Defining Galileo as a civilian system for Europe was the only way to convince all parties involved to agree to the project in the first place.

But, as it appears, the old constraints are no longer quite so strict. This comes as no surprise to weapons experts, who have seen a sea change take place in their field within only a few years. "Almost all new weapons systems are now equipped with satellite technology," says Bernd Eissfeller, a professor of navigation at the Bundeswehr University in Munich.

Tanks, bombs and missiles are not the only devices that now depend on precise navigation signals from space. Satellite navigation is also used to guide the unmanned reconnaissance planes, known as drones, in enemy territory from a safe distance, and soldiers are also now carrying handheld navigation devices to guide them in unknown terrain. At the same time the equipment transmits their positions to headquarters, allowing commanders to monitor the movements of their troops in real time.

This has serious consequences for the industry. Advanced weapons technology without satellite receivers is as hard to sell today as a rotary dial telephone. And because navigation is becoming more and more precise, the military's dependency on the orbiting transmitters will only grow, as will the fear of being denied access one day. It is no coincidence that any power seeking global importance wants its own navigation satellites. Russia doubled its budget for its GLONASS navigation system, neglected until recently, and plans to increase the number of satellites in the system from eight to 18. China, for its part, is in a great hurry to launch its own satellite fleet, which it calls Compass, into space. The Chinese satellites apparently contain components made by Swiss firm Temex, which also supplies Galileo with the extremely accurate atomic clocks used in the latest generation of navigation satellites.

With all the new competition, Galileo could very well end up finishing last. The launch, initially planned for 2008, will now probably not take place until 2012 at the earliest. The delay was caused by the need to present Galileo as a project intended for purely commercial purposes. The intention was that the project would pay for itself, with planners promising billions in profits. The beneficiaries would be a consortium of European companies, which, in return, promised to build 26 satellites and assume two-thirds of the startup costs.

This was bound to fail. With Galileo, just as with GPS, the base signal is freely available. Money can only be made with particularly precise and secured services. Glossy brochures explain the system's benefits for business -- for freight forwarding companies, for example, which can use the system to guide their truck fleets around the world more or less down to the last centimeter, or for crop-dusting planes, that can use it to spray pesticides over farmland in the straightest of lines. Galileo even makes it possible to land commercial jets via remote control. Unlike GPS, the quality of the signals used for such purposes is guaranteed, and customers are notified immediately if there is a problem.