Will we ever get to see Galileo at work?

The Galileo programme was already under discussion when we were both at the European Space Agency (ESA) in the early 1990s. Today, apart from tonnes of papers and reports, all that has been produced is a small experimental satellite that was launched mainly to occupy the frequency spectrum assigned to the system. When the network will see the light of day is anybody’s guess today.

What is clearer is that Europe seems to have a learning difficulty when it comes to doing this kind of project.

Galileo is a public-private partnership. The member states have provided €1.5 billion for the development phase. The private sector was supposed to finance up to at least twice as much for the construction, deployment and operation of the 30-satellite constellation. But this is a risky enterprise and the private sector has grown up in the European space field under a system that in effect mitigates risk. The main mechanism in the research and development phase is ESA’s juste retour policy (a member state that spends a euro in ESA sees its industry get that euro in contracts). In the operations phase, completed space systems were in the past simply given away by ESA, notably to Eutelsat and Eumetsat. Never did the private sector step in if a project ran into trouble. The project instead failed, as with the Hermes shuttle, or became an irrelevancy, as witnessed by the Olympus large-satellite project.

Now, as the commercial viability of Galileo leaves the pages of a business plan to arrive as an issue on the boardroom agenda, trouble is arriving and the squabbling has started over a commercial return. In other words, the consortium members, far from acting as a business, are behaving as if they were still expecting juste retour in the R&D phase. No more telling testimony can be given for the fragmentation that the juste retour system implies or the tentativeness of a system of European space governance that leaves the squabbling to continue. The spectre of another Eurotunnel imbroglio beckons. But this was clearly foreseeable in Galileo’s formative phase and was indeed presaged by squabbling between member states over the split of industrial work. And yet, the open-ended consortium solution for Galileo invited entropy by erecting a monument to vested interest above management imperatives.

Programmes involving new technologies and aimed at providing new services in a competitive commercial world must be conducted with the greatest possible speed. Failing that, they run the risk of being overtaken by competitors before they reach the market.

There are countless examples of projects that failed because their promoters took their time and chose to ignore the threat of competition. One was the Iridium satellite system designed by Motorola to provide mobile communications across the world. Before it sold the first telephone call, the market had been confiscated by the terrestrial GSM network which had spread at surprising speed. Billions of dollars went down the drain.

For Galileo, some might think it is already too late. The competitors are well on their way, the first one being the American GPS with its third generation. That system will continue to be free for anybody to use in a similar manner to today.

And who knows if an alternative terrestrial system based on the ubiquitous GSM network will not suddenly appear in the meantime? Galileo would then suffer the same fate as Iridium. Delay in such circumstances, then, provides good reason to squabble - commercial returns may be thin indeed.

Galileo is nevertheless a fine concept and Europe deserves to have its own positioning system for strategic reasons. Europe has also not been overtaken yet. Galileo has a future, if two preconditions are now set and observed. First, the political willpower has to be found to impose an industrial structure for Galileo that can respond adequately to threats and opportunities. Second, public money must underwrite the project to completion but tie exploitation revenue to the incentive to proceed henceforth at full speed. In this respect, the Commission in its reported budgetary planning seems to be facing up to the short-term implications of the present impasse. That is prudent, but no substitute for a real solution.

• Pierre Bartholomé and Kevin Madders are partners in the independent telecommunications and space consultancy Systemics Network International.

The Galileo programme was already under discussion when we were both at the European Space Agency (ESA) in the early 1990s. Today, apart from tonnes of papers and reports, all that has been produced is a small experimental satellite that was launched mainly to occupy the frequency spectrum assigned to the system. When the network will see the light of day is anybody’s guess today.