In article ,
Dr. O dr.o@xxxxx wrote:
I'm totally confused what Galileo's added value is going to be with all
these 'agreements'.

The "agreements" are squabbles over details; disregard them.

The added value of Galileo, when you come right down to the bottom line,
is that it is a positioning system which gives people other than the US
military a voice in its operations. The Europeans are very enthusiastic
about navsat applications like civil air navigation... but they don't want
to put their whole air-transport system at the mercy of foreign military
bureaucrats. If they're going to make major use of it, they want a say in
how it is run, whether its accuracy is degraded in emergencies, etc.

And the Pentagon has been adamant that although everyone is welcome to use
GPS, they and only they make all the decisions about it, and nobody else
(not even US civilian users) gets a vote when push comes to shove.

This does not sit well with the Europeans, who have repeated experience of
the US saying "you can count on us to provide that, no need to build your
own", and then, when Europeans wanted to do something the US didn't quite
approve of, the US saying "uh, well, we didn't really mean it". (That's
why the Ariane launchers exist. It's also why the British and French
nuclear arsenals exist.)

...But with these
agreements I'm not really sure if Galileo will operate (with the same
precision) in the event of a military conflict somewhere.

It is more likely to do so than GPS, because its decision-making process
is not dominated by one nation's soldiers. There may be localized jamming
of it in the combat zone, but there's rather less likely to be a global
shutdown or degradation of accuracy and/or precision, simply because it's
run by a large consortium that will be slow to make such decisions except
in an obvious dire emergency. This is, on the whole, a good thing.

If not, then the
whole system is, in my opinion, a complete waste of time, money and effort,
simply duplicatiing GPS.

See above. But yes, it is largely a duplication. The US could save a lot
of time, money, and effort if it joined the Galileo consortium and closed
down GPS. Vice-versa doesn't work, because there is no GPS consortium and
no way to join it.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |