Europe’s International Galileo GPS Project
Dec 2/13: FOC 1 & 2. The first Full Operational Capability Galileo satellite has completed thermal vacuum testing at ESA’s ESTEC Test Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. Thermal–vacuum testing on the 2nd Galileo FOC model will begin early in 2014, and the 2 are scheduled to launch together in mid-2014 to join the existing 4 IOV satellites in orbit. Sources: ESA, “ESA’s new breed of Galileo endures weeks of simulated space”.
Galileo
This snippet from “Defense Industry Daily” is a timely reminder of this ongoing bottomless pit into which taxpayers’ money is being poured.
In the spring of 2005 “Navigation News” published a letter of mine headed “Galileo Warning”. Briefly this asked what was the purpose of this project, scheduled to cost £3 billion but more likely £10 billion, to duplicate GPS, given us free by the USA? Giving China a 20% stake could only mean the true purpose of Galileo was to provide battlefield weapons with satellite navigation independently from GPS. This would drive a wedge between the USA and the EU at a military level.
As I rather suspected at the time the Chinese, having acquired the technology, developed their own satellite navigation system “Compass” now up and running.
Galileo was due to be operational by 2007. By 2011 billions more money was needed and public funds had to be raided. In the Commons Gwyneth Dunwoody referred to Galileo as not just a “flying pig” but “a herd of flying pigs with diamond eyes and golden trotters”!
So there we are; another pointless, useless “folie de grandeur” by our unelected, unaccountable, immune from prosecution, true rulers.
We the voters will never be able to change this alien government. Our only salvation is to get out of it if we can.
B&A