Galileo : US - EC negotiations outputs.

Toulouse, the 27th of February



Galileo : US - EC negotiations outputs.

After 3 years of difficult negotiation, an important step has been reached
the 25th of February 2004. Brussels and Washington agree on the principle of
the interoperability between the US military navigation satellite system GPS
and the EU civil navigation satellite system Galileo.



Galileo will be independent but the two systems should be compatible. This
means that all the civil users in the world will be able to use the two
systems easily, with only one receiver. It should be fully transparent for
the users. .../...



Read the full article on http://www.polestar-corporate.com/

Ian Stirling wrote:
Pole Star wrote:
Toulouse, the 27th of February


snip
Galileo will be independent but the two systems should be compatible. This
means that all the civil users in the world will be able to use the two
systems easily, with only one receiver. It should be fully transparent for
the users. .../...

To expand a bit, the recievers will need to be designed to do this.
There are only 32 possible GPS codes, and only 31 (?) of those can
be used. (IIRC there are about 28 operating GPS satellites, with a
nominal 24 bird constellation).

The two systems can share the front end of the reciever easily.
Most of the decoding will be totally different.
I note that GPS/Glonass chipsets are available.

Anyways, what is meant by comaptible here is that one can jam one
positioning system without jamming the other. Oddly enouugh, US
insisted on this to be the case (appart from trying very hard to
convince EU not to go with Galileo in the first place).

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

Sander Vesik wrote:

Anyways, what is meant by comaptible here is that one can jam one
positioning system without jamming the other. Oddly enouugh, US
insisted on this to be the case (appart from trying very hard to
convince EU not to go with Galileo in the first place).

So they can jam Galilieo, but still use military-only GPS?


--
Peter Fairbrother

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. |

Henry Spencer wrote:


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.

As things are going, US military seems to be the only party with
any serious longterm interest in GPS, given that both China and
India are buying into Galileo. I would be very suprised (unless there
are major Galileo delays) if any new non-military GPS based development
was hapenning.

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

(Henry Spencer) writes:

In article ,
Dr. O dr.o@xxxxx wrote:

...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 anyone, anywhere, builds a batch of Galileo-guided cruise missiles which
end up killing American soldiers while a large consortium of Europeans are
still arguing about whether to pull the plug, the consequences would be
almost unimaginably bad.

Whether they would be better or worse than having the United States Air Force
decide to implement a non-consensual shutdown of Galileo is debatable, but
I'd really prefer there be a third option put in place before the hardware
is put in place.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *

"John Schilling" wrote in message
...
(Henry Spencer) writes:

In article ,
Dr. O dr.o@xxxxx wrote:

...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 anyone, anywhere, builds a batch of Galileo-guided cruise missiles
which
end up killing American soldiers while a large consortium of Europeans are
still arguing about whether to pull the plug, the consequences would be
almost unimaginably bad.

Whether they would be better or worse than having the United States Air
Force
decide to implement a non-consensual shutdown of Galileo is debatable, but
I'd really prefer there be a third option put in place before the hardware
is put in place.

Exactly my thoughts. The potential political outfall of Galileo being used
by adversaries of the U.S. in an armed conflict will only result in the
Euros themselves pulling the plug on Galileo instead of someone else (the
U.S.) doing it for them. Now what use is it to spend billions of dollars
just to be able to say 'I want to pull the plug, I don't want anyone else to
do it for me'? That seems ludicrous to me. I've been argueing this for a
long time but, as always, no one is listening to me.

In short, it means the Galileo system cannot be relied upon for autonomous
navigation (in airplanes or cars) and is therefore all but useless.

John Schilling wrote:

If anyone, anywhere, builds a batch of Galileo-guided cruise missiles which
end up killing American soldiers while a large consortium of Europeans are
still arguing about whether to pull the plug, the consequences would be
almost unimaginably bad.

Bad for the soldiers, sure. They would probably be very ****ed off at the
consortium. But the US military does not have a God-given right to control
all sat-based location systems.

I don't think that is the scenario either. They want to keep their own
military location abilities, while jamming everyone else's. And that - well,
that they have even less right to do.


Battlefield and even wide-area jamming of GPS/Galileo is cheap and easy to
do. So I don't think there would be any huge international political
fallout.


--
Peter Fairbrother

Henry Spencer wrote:

IIf 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.

Is this not likely to happen eventually? What would be the value of maintaining
GPS once Galileo is operating? Unless the EAE wants to keep the option of
someday making Galileo, uh, un-available...

In article ,
John Schilling wrote:
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 anyone, anywhere, builds a batch of Galileo-guided cruise missiles which
end up killing American soldiers while a large consortium of Europeans are
still arguing about whether to pull the plug, the consequences would be
almost unimaginably bad.

The situation is unlikely to occur unless it's deliberately contrived. If
there is enough warning of trouble for consortium action to be seriously
discussed, then there should be enough warning to deploy jammers.

Global shutdowns or accuracy/precision degradations are simply a poor way
to deal with such threats. Military forces, American in particular, are
going to have to get used to the idea that if they want to mess up
navigation for the bad guys, they have to do it with jamming. There are
increasingly too many good guys depending on accurate, precise navigation
for it to be reasonable to mess things up for everyone worldwide in hopes
that it will inconvenience the bad guys.

(Actually, this is just a return to normal. The idea that the US military
could achieve and maintain monopoly control over precise navigation was a
brief and unrealistic aberration.)
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |