After much hand-wringing and negotiation, the EU has finally agreed on a framework to go ahead with the ‘Galileo’ program, a $5 billion satellite navigation system which it says will give it “strategic independence” from the US.Friday in Brussels ministers announced that work on the system, which is designed to rival the US-owned Global Positioning System (GPS), will finally begin after five years of delay. The announcement caught some off guard because many had assumed the project was dead on arrival. According to the ministers, the system will be operational by 2013.
The decision is important for a few reasons. The fact that GPS, which is the only satellite navigation system now available to consumers, businesses, militaries or governments, is controlled by the US government meant that the US can deny other country’s access to it at any time. As the world’s militaries have become more and more reliant upon global positioning, the potential problems of this system being owned and run by the US military have become glaringly obvious.
