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 |  | European Transport Ministers Refuse to Endorse Galileo
By Peter B. de Selding
Spacenews.com Staff Writer
posted: 11:05 am ET
22 December 2000
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PONTE VEDRA, Fla —- In a surprise move, European transport ministers on Dec
PONTE VEDRA, Fla. -- In a surprise move, European transport ministers on Dec. 22 refused to endorse the Galileo satellite-navigation system.
In a confusing decision made at 4 a.m., after several ministers had already left the Brussels, Belgium, meeting, the ministers instead called for further work detailing the management of the program and the eventual role the private sector would play in its financing. European Union governments are expected to review the program again at a meeting in March in Stockholm, Sweden.
The move threw into doubt the support given to Galileo on Dec. 20 by the European Space Agency, most of whose governments are also members of the European Union. ESA governments then had agreed to spend 50 million euros [$45 million] immediately on Galileo, with another 500 million euros to come in late in 2001 to begin actual construction of the system. But ESA governments had said their approval was conditioned on the European Union agreeing to financing an identical amount of the program.
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ESA spokesman Franco Bonacina said ESA and European Union officials would meet in January to determine the program's status and to see whether preliminary work could be started before the European Union's March meeting in Stockholm.
"The governments still seem to support the program, and we would like to see if there is some way we can start work without losing three months," Bonacina said Dec. 22.
Galileo is a 30-satellite system intended to be in service in 2008 and to complement the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS). Its total costs have been estimated at 3.5 billion euros, with at least some of that money to come from the private sector through revenues generated from Galileo commercial services. Other Galileo services would be free, just like GPS is today.
The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, had asked the transport ministers to signal clearly whether Galileo should proceed. That did not happen Dec. 22.
Gilles Gantelet, a spokesman for the commission's transport directorate, said several nations had imposed too many conditions on their approval for Galileo to be acceptable to the commission and to the other nations backing the project.
"It's as if the U.S. Congress had approved the Apollo moon program only after NASA had named all the astronauts and given a precise date for the first lunar landing," Gantelet said in a Dec. 22 interview. "You don't start a program that way. We wanted a political approval of the program, plus an initial funding authority, and we did not get that. But we still think support for Galileo is there, it's just going to take more time than we hoped to get it wrapped up."
One industry official involved in Galileo said it was the British, German and Dutch governments that had expressed the most hesitation about Galileo.
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