There’s an old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee. Well, what do you call a Navigational Positioning Satellite designed by a committee? Galileo.
“At a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, EU ministers reached a deal to provide funding for the launch of Galileo, the multi-billion Euro navigation satellite system intended to rival the US Global Positioning System (GPS), thereby removing the last obstacle in the way of the project.”
Ah yes, the ‘last obstacle’ being a blank cheque for the mind-boggling amount of taxpayers money that they are going to throw at this thing. The report estimates the cost at a laughable 3.6 billion €uros but who are they trying to kid? It’ll cost more than that to supply the EU ministers with a set of custom-made luxury ‘space slippers’ for when they attend the ceremonial launch.
Or, rather, when they don’t because if this thing ever actually makes it into space then my name is Buzz Lightyear. Just like that other grand EU project the Eurofighter the damned thing will be lucky if it ever emerges from the assembly line. The Eurofighter has had public money hosed it at for lord knows how long, it was obsolete 2 years ago and it hasn’t even been built yet!
The exhausted European taxpayer would have had to have forked out far less money if the EU had simply ordered a squadron of F-16s (as HM Government was advised to do by the Ministry of Defence). But, oh no, we don’t want that. We have to have a ‘European’ combat aircraft to express our distinct ‘European’ identity. Looks like they got it.
So, cue another round of horse-trading, bickering and monumental waste as each part of the Galileo project is apportioned out according to who makes the most noise. The French will build the electrics, the Italians will build the housing, the Belgians will make the navigation system, the Germans will make the rocket boosters, the Spanish will make the launch platform, the Austrians will make the sandwiches and Sweden will provide the environmental protestors.
And you can guess, I mean you just know that none of the bits will fit together, the rest of the bits won’t work and all the bits will be behind schedule, ludicrously over-budget and held up by strike action. And, naturally, nobody will wish to complain because to do will cause a diplomatic incident and the launch site will be located in the country that agrees not to vote against French agricultural subsidies (and guaranteed to be the one furthest away from the Equator – Finland probably).
The Galileo project will, again, graphically illustrate everything that is wrong with the EU. The Soviets managed to get into space because they had a command economy where a Kommisar for Space simply ordered that a satellite be built and it was duly built. Mind you, they had to work with a wooden crate, a leaky old battery and a tube of glue but, by golly, they did it. But there will no such bullish positivity for Galileo, proving that the EU is riven with all the drawbacks of a totalitarian state and none of the advantages.
This whole debacle could have been avoided if they’d simply taken up the American offer of buying bandwidth on America’s own GPS system. It would certainly have saved a mint. But, no, the EU has to have its own satellite system so it can cock a snoot at those imperialist ‘Yanquees’ and get on with doing lots of, er, ‘European’ things in space. Besides, the European taxpayers have got far more money than they need.
There is some small chink of light at the end of this particular worm-hole, though. The US government has expressed concern that should Galileo become operational it could be used by terrorist cells to plan attacks on the US. Now, personally, I think that the Americans, the Russians, the Indians, the Israelis, the Australians, the Japanese and just about everybody else will have functioning colonies on Mars before that happens, but, in the event that it does, the US just might find itself in a position where they have to shoot the bloody thing out of the sky (chortle, snigger, stuff handkerchief in mouth). What a tragedy!!
