EU launches satellite to rival American GPS

EU launches satellite to rival GPS

Staff and agencies
Wednesday December 28, 2005

A rocket carrying the Giove-A satellite blasts off in Kazakhstan
A rocket carrying the Giove-A satellite blasts off in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Photograph: European Space Agency/Getty


The first satellite in the European Union's largest ever space programme successfully launched this morning from Kazakhstan.

A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying Giove A, the first of 30 navigation satellites in the £2.4bn Galileo project, took off on schedule at 11.19am (0519GMT).

Nearly four hours later, Giove A (Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element) detached from the Soyuz without complications and began to transmit a signal to scientists at the European Space Agency in Paris and its manufacturers at Surrey University's Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL).

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"Those were a tense few minutes while we waited for the first signals back," said Max Meerman, SSTL's director of research. "When it came through, there were a lot of cheers and shaking of hands. We will start to point it towards earth and deploy the solar panels to power it."

The Galileo programme will provide Europe with its own satellite positioning system and break the monopoly of the current GPS satellites which are run by the US military. Although GPS is free and ubiquitous, it is optimised for America and the accuracy of the system can drift by more than 10 metres. Galileo is designed to be accurate to within one metre.

The US military can switch off the signal at will. Last year, the US president, George Bush, ordered plans for temporarily disabling GPS satellites during national crises to prevent terrorists from using the navigational technology.

Galileo will be a key element in business and government policy decisions in the coming years. The highly accurate tracking system means road charging could be automated, air traffic monitored with unprecedented precision and goods tracked to people's doors. With mobile phones due to include satellite-positioning receivers, emergency calls will be traced to within a metre. If industry embraces Galileo, experts have said it could drive a multibillion euro market.

After today's success, a second satellite named Giove B will be launched in spring. Two more satellites will be launched in 2008 to complete the testing phase, which requires at least four satellites in orbit to guarantee an exact position and time anywhere on earth.

Giove A, a wardrobe-sized box of electronics programmed to circle the earth twice daily, also features a tribute to a young aerospace engineer who worked on the project and was killed in last year's Boxing Day tsunami.

Tom Fairbairn, 25, a member of the satellite's structural design team, was on holiday in Khao Lak in Thailand with his parents when the tsunami struck. He is remembered on a plaque attached to the side of the satellite.

Although the European Space Agency is forbidden from taking part in military projects, officials accept that, once the signals are being broadcast, the defence industry will undoubtedly take advantage of them and develop devices that can operate with both GPS and Galileo. According to plans, eight Galileo satellites will be launched into orbit at a time. There they will form three rings around the Earth, with the full cluster of 30 due to be in place and working by 2010.

Giove A, which was built in a record two years and three months by SSTL, is crucial to Galileo's success. The satellite must be in orbit and transmitting useful positioning signals by July 2006 to meet a deadline set by the International Telecommunications Union.

If the deadline passes and no Galileo signals are being broadcast from space, the European Space Agency will lose permission to use the frequencies and the project will be knocked back to the drawing board. With more than €130m (£89m) invested, the British government will not be keen to witness a missed deadline.