First of all, that article is highly speculative in itself, and the author who has read it in The Business weekly and appearantly did little digging for info himself.
It’s interesting to notice that such a suggestive article completely negates the technical options of disabling a sattelite network like GPS/GLONASS/Galileo. There will be some 30 geostationary sattelites, which means they are in far too high orbit to be able to hit cheaply. Something like the ASM-135 (that ASAT missile which was tested from the F-15) can’t reach it by far, you need far bigger rockets/missiles for that. Also, a rough ‘scattergun’ weapon (like a bucket of nails put in the exact counter-orbit to that of the target sattelite) won’t be a good idea, because that geostationary orbit is pretty crowded with sattelites. You might hit one of your own GPS sats…
Also, since the whole Galileo set will consist of some 30 sattelites, you will need a large number of kill vehicles to knock them all, or at least a considerable number of them, out. Indeed it would be possible to make a kill vehicle homing in on the sat’s signal, but as the sats are spread apart you’ll need several launches to really knock them out. I don’t think the US has the capability to do that, nor will get that ability in the forseeable future. Never mind the fact that there are a few diplomatic loopholes as well.
As for Dis’ disagreement 😀 with the EuroGPS: i’m sorry, but monopolising certain certain technical items like GPS is nonsense. The US has been bitching for years that Europe lacks a decent defense C4I infrastructure, yet now Europe should be denied a key part of a decent defense C4I infrastructure? Nonsense. The whole issue with GPS is (or at least was, back in the days Galileo was concieved – (in the late 1400s that was 😉 ) ) the fact that the signal was ment to be ‘monopolised’ by the US military in case the Pentagon deemed that necessary. Of course reality has until now overtaken that fact (with full-spec GPS commercially available to almost anyone), but anyone knows how fast Europeans are when it comes to fielding their technical toys.
It would be interesting if Galileo could be used to revive Iridium… now that would create a number of jobs, and would definately give ESA a headstart until Africa launches it’s own navsat system :diablo:
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