Galileo, Europe’s much delayed and costly satellite-navigation project, takes a major step forward on Thursday.

The first contracts are being awarded to the companies that will start to build the operational network.

The European Commission will purchase spacecraft, rockets and system management in deals totalling more than half a billion euros.

Galileo is intended as an EU version of the US Global Positioning System (GPS), but with significant improvements.

Its more advanced technology should give users quicker, more reliable fixes, and enable them to locate their positions with an error of one metre compared with the current GPS error of several metres.

European Commission vice-president with responsibility for transport, Antonio Tajani, is expected to announce the winners of the contracts in a media conference in Brussels at about midday.

One recipient is already known because it was the only bidder for the tendered work.

Arianespace of France will be asked to launch the satellites that will be at the heart of the system.

It will send up spacecraft in batches of two initially, on Russian-built Soyuz rockets that will fly out of Sinnamary in French Guiana.

Who will be asked to build the spacecraft themselves has been a topic of intense speculation. The BBC understands a batch of at least 8 satellites will be ordered from a consortium led by OHB System of Germany.

Its major partner is Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL).

This UK company will integrate the complex payloads on the spacecraft, including the atomic clocks that underpin Galileo’s precise timing and location signals.

It appears no satellites are being ordered at this stage from Europe’s biggest space company, EADS Astrium, which has helped develop much of the technology and know-how for the sat-nav system.

The companies that bid to provide system support, to essentially oversee the whole project and make it happen, were Thales Alenia Space (Italy) and Logica (The Netherlands).
Galileo should have been operational by now but the project has run into myriad technical, commercial and political obstacles, including early objections from the Americans who thought a rival system to GPS might be used to attack its armed forces.

The venture came very close to being abandoned in 2007 when the public-private development-and-business model set up to build and run the system collapsed.

To keep Galileo alive, EU member-states had to agree to fund the entire project from the public purse. What should have cost European taxpayers no more than 1.8bn euros will now probably cost them in excess of 5bn euros.

The EU’s continued commitment to the project despite severe budgetary and management failings is based on the belief that huge returns to the European economy will accrue from the investment.

Already, GPS is said to have spawned global markets that are worth several tens of billions of euros annually.

The new European constellation is expected to deepen and extend those markets as sat-nav functionality becomes ubiquitous in consumer devices such as mobile phones.

If the contracted companies deliver on their commitments, Galileo – at least an interim version of it – should be operating by the end of 2013.

Original Source – BBC