Finally! Unless last-minute problems, Thursday, Aug. 21 from a Soyuz rocket taking off from Kourou (French Guiana), taking the first two operational satellites of the Galileo navigation system that will allow Europeans to be independent of the Global Positioning System (GPS) American.
launched fifteen years ago, in 1999, despite six years of delay due to multiple setbacks, the European project happen. The constellation of twenty-two satellites of this program will be rolled out gradually by 2017 The first services will be available from the end of 2015 when a dozen will be in orbit.
As with all major European projects, costs were derived from EUR 3.3 billion to originally 5.5 billion to the current phase of deployment.
In 2013, the Commission European added a new tranche of EUR 7 billion to complete the deployment system and fund the first year of operation and maintenance until the end of the decade.
In total, 1998 2020, the European Union will have committed nearly $ 13 billion in public funds for its navigation programs – mainly Galileo, EGNOS but its predecessor, which entered service in 2009 to improve the accuracy of positioning American GPS.
BREAK THE MONOPOLY OF AMERICAN GPS
From the beginning, the program was on the wrong party. When, in 1999, Europe decided to break the American monopoly of navigation satellites, the project is …
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