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  Galileo's Fate: Will Military Interest Save Europe's Beleagured Navigation System?

Galileo's Fate Will Military Interest Save Europe's Beleagured Navigation System?

By Manfred Dworschak

Part 3: Europe Needs its Own Satellites

A combination of GPS and Galileo would have its attractions for the United States. It would guarantee a tremendous technological advantage that would also extend to urban areas. The enemy would only have access to the publicly accessible signal, which is far less accurate and not protected against interference. What is more, special ground-based transmitters can also render it unusable within a certain range.

On the other hand, Galileo represents the loss of an important monopoly for the United States, which currently has complete control over the more precise, non-public GPS signal. The signal is encoded, so that access is only provided to those given the correct codes. Until now, US allies have generally been provided with codes valid for one year at a time.

But that could soon change. The Americans are developing a technology known as OTAR (Over-the-Air Rekeying) which will enable them to manipulate individual military GPS receivers using wireless signals. This would make it possible to change the codes of the devices at any time during operation. Certain groups of receivers -- even entire countries -- could be locked out with a few keystrokes.

But this control over codes will lose some of its value once Galileo is up and running, placing Europeans in a position to grant access to their own system. It isn't exactly comforting to the United States that other countries have expressed interest in participating in Galileo's development, including South Korea, India and Ukraine, and even China and Saudi Arabia.

Building a Fail-Safe Global System

Navigation technology, almost unnoticed until now, has become a commodity that is eyed suspiciously as long as it belongs to someone else. Suddenly control, access and exclusion become hot-button issues.

The civilian, publicly accessible part of GPS still belongs to the realm of the common good and global consensus. It's likely to remain that way, because the global economy is already so heavily dependent on the positioning satellites. The satellites are even critical to telecommunications. Wireless networks, for example, are kept in synch by using the precise GPS time signal.

This is why experts are convinced that the United States will never shut down its public GPS. It has not done so over the course of 12 years and many wars, and for good reason: Shutting down GPS would also disable the US economy. In other words, unless the apocalypse is around the corner, GPS is here to stay.

But it is precisely this nightmare scenario that is still used as the main argument in favor of Galileo. Supporters say that Europe needs its own satellites because GPS cannot be relied on in the long term. But this argument becomes even less credible with each new squadron of satellites soon to orbit the earth.

"Technically speaking, building receivers that can understand the signals coming from all positioning satellites isn't a problem," says navigation expert Eissfeller. Once that happens, a small receiver box will be all it will take to pick up signals from GLONASS, Compass, GPS, Galileo and whatever other systems may exist one day. And it will be a fail-proof global system, because signals will always be coming from one satellite or another.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

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