‘Hello. Is that the European Union? This is Earth.’ It’s a conversation that could have happened at any time in recent years, but if the EU’s planned global satellite system ever actually takes off it might yet become reality.
The plans for ‘Project Galileo’ were dreamt up in the late 1990s. They are intended as a rival to the Global Positioning System satellites, or GPS, used by almost all of today’s satnav devices. GPS worked well — but it was owned by the United States. This did not please Jacques Chirac, then French president, who thought a rival satnav project would make a fine grand projet.
Lift-off for Galileo has taken a while, with hopes for a speedy launch repeatedly thwarted. For a decade, as anyone with a passing knowledge of the EU’s track record for delivering projects might have guessed, the costs have rocketed. Indeed, they started doing so long before the project could.
Along with death and taxes, one of the saddest inevitabilities of life has become the demand by the EU for increased funding.
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