Europe's eight-company, five-nation satellite-navigation consortium, Galileo was concocted as a public-private partnership by the European Union in 2002. The aim was to construct a rival to the American built Global Positioning System (GPS) that was originally developed for the US armed forces but is now available for free use worldwide.GPS is now in everyday use from aviation to private vehicles with sales of GPS equipment exceeding twenty billion dollars a year with about 5 of that being non-civilian use.
As an alternative to America's GPS Galileo was supposed to be accurate to within one metre rather than three. Funding for the project was to be recouped by offering a free GPS-like service, but charge for higher accuracy and other special features.
European fears that America could at a whim turn off their GPS system have diminished since Russia and China have launched their own systems, offering increasingly capable alternatives to GPS and modifications made by the US to their GPS system now allows then to offer similar accuracy to that planned by Galileo.
Original scheduled to be operational by 2010 only one of the planned 30 satellites has so far been launched, the official estimated completion date is now 2012 with most analysts saying it will not be ready until 2014. The project was originally costed at $3.4 and is already some $2 billion over budget.
Transport ministers from the EU's 27 member countries are now due to meet to consider Galileo's fate.They have three options: to set new deadlines for the consortium and pour in more money; to make it a fully public-sector initiative and foot the bill; or to shut it down.Which would you vote for?
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