PMN1Anybody interested in size and lots of big ships together should try and visit Ras Tanura, one of the main Saudi oil export terminals someday, it’s very impressive.
Just make sure you have permission to be sightseeing…..
🙂
PMN1Bang goes another chunk of the projected profits from Galileo
http://p216.ezboard.com/fwarships1discussionboardsfrm18.showAddReplyScreenFromWeb?topicID=5148.topic
China Starts To Build Own Satellite Navigation System
Beijing, China (SPX) Nov 03, 2006
China announced Thursday plans to build a satellite navigation system that will include up to 35 satellites and be working in the Asian region by 2008, state press said. The system, called “Beidou”, will include five geostationary earth orbit satellites and 30 medium earth orbit satellites, Xinhua news agency said.
Navigation services open to commercial customers will provide users with positioning accuracy within 10 meters (33 feet), velocity accuracy within 0.2 meters per second and timing accuracy within 50 nanoseconds, the report said.
No details on the costs of the system were reported.
It was also not clear how the Chinese system would rival the American global positioning satellite system or the EU’s Galileo satellite navigational system which is expected to be built with Chinese participation.
China would launch two “Compass” navigation satellites next year as part of the Beidou project, Xinhua said.
The system is expected to cover China and parts of neighbouring countries by 2008, before being expanded into a global network of satellites, it said.
Aerospace experts said the existing three-satellite Compass navigation system has played an important role in offering efficient navigation and positioning services for sectors including survey, telecommunications, transportation, meteorology, forest fire prevention, disaster forecast and public security.
Beidou navigation and position system is being developed by CAST, which is made up of one backup satellite (the third Beidou satellite) and another two Beidou-1 operation satellites providing all time satellite navigation information. This is the first generation of self-developed satellite navigation and position system.
It is a regional navigation system that provides services for road traffic, rail transport, offshore operation and other fields and will give a active impetus to our national economic construction.
Beidou navigation and position system integrates advantages of traditional astronomy navigation and position and ground radio navigation and position, equal to an air radio navigation station, which can decide users, latitude, longitude and altitude positions at any time and all places.
At present, only a few of countries can develop satellite navigation system independently. Beidou navigation and position system has all of basic capabilities as well as some innovations in its position performance.
This system will be mainly applied in national economic construction, providing high performance navigation and position services for our traffic, meteorology, petroleum, ocean, forest-fire prevention, hazard forecast, telecommunication, public security and other special industries, which has a vast application prospect.
The system is currently operating in a normal and good condition.
Source: Xinhua News Agency
PMN1Yep, Swan Hunter just wasn’t up to the job of managing the LSD(A) program and it was a disaster both for Swan Hunter and for the RFA. At the very most they should have been subcontracted by BAE to assemble the boats with BAE managing things, even that would have been high risk.
There is a post on Warships1 saying Jaap Kroese has thrown in the towel and put the mothballed Swan Hunter shipyard up for sale. He is asking for £2 million for the land plus the scrap value of the machinery and equipment. The most likely outcome is that the yard will be bought by a developer and become a housing estate.
PMN1I once went to a IMarE lecture where a former chairman of British ship builders argued very strongly that the politicised nature of government management of that body played a key role in the demise of the whole industry as prders were fed to shipyards in constituencies important to MP’s rather than the yards that may have had a future, and sadly his arguments had the ring of truth.
You have just got to look at the two Bay class LPD(A) ‘awarded’ to Swan Hunter to see that…..
PMN1One of the things that is frequently mentioned in books by one of the RN’s former naval architects (David K Brown) is the backward nature of UK yards both pre WW2 and pre WW1.
The Liberty ship construction and the Hog Islanders both needed new shipyards to be built for the full benefit of the program to be felt although the British forerunner to the Liberty ships was built at a traditional yard by traditional methods IIRC.
If someone had come along pre 1914 with the standard pre-fab construction method, what kind of opposition would he face from the existing UK shipyards regarding changes in ‘thats the way we’ve always done it’.
PMN1Going slightly away form the main subject but…
The need to replace MV’s had a big impact on what RN naval ships could be built or converted during WW1.
Is pre-fabrication as with the WW2 Liberty ships possible at the start of WW1 (the Hog Islanders were a possible example) and if so could it have eased the pressure on UK yards enough for additional naval ship construction or conversion?
PMN1I think Rumsfeld will go down in history right there next to MacNamara as SecsDef who weren’t as smart as they thought they were. Rumsfeld seems to have repeated “transformation” to himself so many times he started to believe it which lead him to believe it would be okay to going into Iraq SERIOUSLY undermanned without much thought for the aftermath.
When I say con artists, I’m not so much thinking Rumsfeld, more Ahmed Chalabi and the others of the so called ‘Iraqi government in exile’ who suggested everything would turn out just fine.
Does anyone know where ol’ good Ahmed and the government in exile were at the end of Gulf War One when George Senior was getting a lot of stick for not removing Saddam then?
With damm good reason its turned out, given a choice of of freedom and religious slaughter, the Sunni/Shia/Kurds have decided religious slaughter is the preferred option with Shia/Sunni slaughter. Shia/Shia slaughter, Sunni/Sunni slaughter and the Kurds watching from a distance with Turkey, Syria and Iran licking their lips.
🙁
PMN1The US is pouring $10 billion plus a month into Iraq. What is Europe doing? (No doubt you’ll complain that it’s for the war. Well no sh!t Sherlock that’s part of the effort.)
You have got to admit though, you’re not getting much of a return or are likely to to get much of a return on that investment, something dear old tony has worked out but continues to put a brave face on, with eyes to the US after dinner speech market (got to pay the mortgage on that over-priced bunch of rooms he bought previously).
The US administration has been ‘had’ by a bunch of con artists who figured they could play on the administrations use of an allah sent opportunity to get power in Iraq.
PMN1Talking of the Chinese economy, an interesting article from today’s Telegraph.
China has 15 years or so to strike rich before lack of babies brings the boom to a shuddering halt. The one-child policy adopted in the 1970s has left the country with a demographic headache that surpasses anything faced in Europe, even the low-birth trio of Germany, Italy, and Spain.
Extrapolated charts of perpetual Chinese growth are pie in the sky. The country will doubtless shake up the world for a few more years with 10pc annual growth but it will hit the first buffers as soon as 2010 when the percentage of working-age people peaks at 72.2pc. Thereafter, the ageing burden will gradually take the fizz out of the economy.
The Chinese are fully aware of the demographic trap that awaits them, which is why the savings rate is near 50pc of GDP. There will be some 400m Chinese aged over 60 by the middle of the century with scant healthcare to look after them, so they are funnelling yuan as fast as they can into gold bars and Shanghai condos.
The state’s pension scheme, the National Social Security Fund, has some catching up to do with just $30bn in the kitty so far. The NSSF will need an investment miracle to square its books in time, but bringing in BlackRock and State Street to manage funds is at least a start.
The Chinese must be looking enviously at India. Teaming with vibrant youth, the subcontinent has another 30 year to go before the ratio of workers to dependants hits the top of the cycle. Unfortunately, 40pc of them are illiterate. Nearly half of India’s children leave school before the age of 10 and most of the other half lack the minimum skills to function in the cyber economy. Whether India can seize its chance before demographics plays it curse, depends on schools.
PMN1http://www.thespacereview.com/article/107/1
What’s the frequency, Jacques?
by Taylor Dinerman
Monday, March 1, 2004
The European Space Agency and the EU have decided to build a satellite navigation system, similar to the US Navstar/GPS system, called Galileo. Publicly, they claimed that they were doing so because they distrusted the US, and feared that the Pentagon might somehow disrupt the GPS signal. They also claimed that they needed to build this system in order to protect Europe’s independence from the US. Their plan, as it now stands, is to launch two test satellites that will begin transmitting, on frequencies allocated to the Europeans by the International Telecommunications Union, in 2006. In 2008, they hope to begin launching the first of 30 operational navigation satellites.
The just announced agreement between the European Union and the US concerning the frequencies to be used by Galileo has been portrayed as a win-win solution. In fact, it is an almost total victory for the Bush administration and a serious defeat for France’s long-term effort to create a European military organization rival to NATO. Other European states, especially the smaller ones, had no desire to drive yet another nail into the coffin of US-European friendship. Few governments in Europe wish to surrender their long-standing ties to America in order to propitiate France’s dream of European hegemony.
American military forces depend on GPS in almost every aspect of their military operations. GPS timing signals are used by almost every communications system in the Pentagon’s inventory. Just a few years ago, France was counting on the so-called “frequency overlay,” to force the US to either jam its own GPS signal in order to deny its use to an enemy or to have to ask permission from a European Commission body in order to conduct military operations anywhere in the world. The frequency overlay would have given the French a sort of a veto over US national security policy.
At first, the US hoped to persuade the Europeans not to build Galileo, but the French were able to make enough of a stink about US interference so as to convince the other European governments to go along. They also agreed to have most of the work for the system done outside France, even while paying the lion’s share of the cost. In typical French fashion, they are willing to surrender their own taxpayers’ and workers’ interests in order to inflict what they hope will be harm on US hyperpuissance.
After the US realized that the Galileo system would probably be built, the Bush administration decided to concentrate on reducing the harm that Galileo could do to GPS. After many long and tough negotiating sessions, the EU agreed to move the quasi-military coded Publicly Regulated Service (PRS) signal to a place on the radio band where it would not interfere with the US plans for a new military signal, called M Code, that will be broadcast by the GPS -3 constellation, to be launched by the US by the end of this decade or thereabouts.
The rest of the agreements have now fallen into place and, in exchange for an essentially meaningless US agreement not to demand a veto over Galileo operations, the Europeans have given in to the US on all major issues. The EU has agreed to move the common signal, which is comparable to the open GPS one used by hikers, truck drivers and the public at large.
This is an unalloyed triumph for the Bush Administration and for Colin Powell’s State Department. It shows that sometimes, America’s diplomats are capable of being just as hard-line and as tough as her military. It is to be hoped that this example will be emulated by others in the department, whose reputation for ferociously defending America’s global interests is not quite as stellar as the one the Bureau of Oceans, Environment, and Science has now acquired.
Galileo will probably now go ahead, though the French may lose their enthusiasm for funding it. The idea that European private enterprise will make a legitimate capitalistic investment in the system was never really in the cards. Today, the Europeans are trying to get nations such as China, Israel, and Brazil to join them in building Galileo while, at the same time, promising never to allow these partners access to the militarily useful signals. Over time, it could become a useful adjunct to GPS. If the public signal can be refined to a one-meter accuracy, then it could become an extremely valuable tool for subsistence farmers in the developing world. Of course, this would require the development of simple electronic receiver/mapper/calculators for precision agriculture but, given the demand and the potential of such devices, they will surely be designed and built over the next few years.
In the end, GPS and Galileo could make a serious contribution to the struggle against world hunger, and that would be far more important than France’s effort to inflict some minor harm on America’s global power. Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see how, or if, the Pentagon budgeteers will capitalize on this State Department success by accelerating the development of GPS 3.
PMN1http://www.thespacereview.com/article/643/1
Will China compel the development of GPS 4?
by Taylor Dinerman
Monday, June 19, 2006
According to an article in last week’s Space News, the Europeans and the US are disturbed by China’s planned Compass military satellite navigation system. The Chinese are going to try to do to both America’s GPS 3 and Europe’s Galileo systems what the Europeans, under French leadership, tried to do to the US. Europe originally planned to neutralize the military advantage of the US system by putting their signal on a frequency so close to the US M-code one that any attempt to jam their signal would interfere with the US system’s operation: a neat trick that was aimed at giving France a de facto veto over all US military operations. The rest of Europe didn’t care to follow France into a conflict of this kind with the US so they forced France to swallow an agreement on this (See “What’s the frequency, Jacques?”, The Space Review, March 1, 2004)
The Chinese are not part of anything like ESA or the EU and are thus not subject to any of the pressures that led France to “be reasonable”. It will be quite a while before the Europeans fully sort out the implications of this for their system, but it is obvious that China has used its role in Galileo to gain both knowledge and expertise in military satellite navigation technology from Europe and is now going to make good use of those lessons. The Europeans, who claimed that they could separate the civil from the military aspects of this technology and only share the non-offensive parts with China, are left with egg on their face.
China’s existing Beidou navigation network is a clumsy system based on three satellites, (two operational and one reserve) in geosynchronous orbit, launched between 2000 and 2003. Its military uses have been limited, but it is suspected that they include providing guidance for the ICBMs China has aimed at US targets. Above all, this system has given China hands-on operational experience with satellite navigation hardware. Combined with the sophisticated science and engineering data they have been able to obtain from Europe, they are now in a position to begin work on their own military satellite navigation system. Australia, the US, Japan, and India can thank the good folks at ESA and the EU for the subsequent increased instability—or worse—in the region.
The proposed Compass system will not be operational for a long time to come, so the US has time to adjust its own plans to prevent the Chinese system from having the ability to harm US military operations. This will mean that the current GPS 3 program will have to be curtailed or modified beyond recognition. The generation after next of GPS satellites will have to include much more robust methods for overcoming or avoiding enemy interference. These could include not only such tried-and-true concepts as frequency hopping and pseudo-random burst transmissions, but also space-to-Earth laser communications with navigation information embedded in ordinary military communications.
In the long term this could create some interesting opportunities for the Transformational Satellite (T-Sat) communications program to work with the designers of the future GPS system. Navigation and communication systems complement one another nicely, something the Chinese have already figured out since the Beidou system has a limited communications capability. The US may have to rethink the whole of its future, post-2020 military space architecture.
Since future military space operations will likely take place throughout the Earth-Moon system, any future navigation system will have to cover this area. Some satellites in such a system will have to be placed beyond the Moon’s orbit, while others will be in cislunar space. Such a system will also have the opportunity to take advantage of the naturally occurring navigation signals given off by the sixteen pulsars that can be received in our part of the galaxy.
In his 1993 speech presenting the Nobel Prize for Physics to Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor, Carl Nordling of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explained that a pulsar “continuously emits a radio signal in two beams that sweep across space, resembling the beam from a lighthouse.” He goes on to explain that “its frequency is very stable, fully comparable with that of atomic clocks.”
Since these clocks, and similar devices such as active and passive hydrogen masers, are the core operational elements of any modern satellite navigation system, it would seem that using pulsars in any future space or terrestrial navigation system is too good an idea to pass up. It will be interesting to see if anyone can come up with a way to jam these signals, but as adjuncts to a future large-scale navigation system they will be invaluable.
For the US the best solution would be to limit the GPS 3 program to three or four satellites and proceed directly to a “GPS 3.5” and then to GPS 4. By building a system with an ever-higher-quality signal and with ever-increasing robustness and applicability, the US will not only stay in the forefront of satellite and space-based navigation technology, but will prevent either the Europeans or the Chinese from gaining military navigation, timing, and positioning capability that comes close to matching our own.
PMN1http://www.thespacereview.com/article/685/1
China and Galileo, continued
by Taylor Dinerman
Monday, August 21, 2006
The article last month on Galileo and the Chinese (“Galileo gets a Chinese overlay”, The Space Review, July 31, 2006) has certainly struck some raw nerves. The effort that the Europeans have so far put into Galileo has produced mostly headaches and bad blood. Other European programs that could be truly useful, such as Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES), are being starved of funds while Galileo is subject to skepticism within Europe and hostility outside the EU.
For the Chinese, Galileo is no longer a partner, but instead more of a competitor.
Ryan Caron’s letter (“Letter: Galileo and Compass”, The Space Review, August 7, 2006) was one of the more moderate replies. Unfortunately, he makes a number of claims about the article that are questionable. For example, the public signals that Galileo will provide will not be fully interoperable with GPS. As Caron explains elsewhere in his letter the revenue model for Galileo is “not as strong as it once was,” which is a polite way of putting it. In fact, the consortium will have to put as many signals as they can behind encrypted walls in order to generate anywhere near the cash flow they need to make this a profitable venture. By the time they finish extracting the maximum they can from their system there will be precious little “free service” to share.
For the Chinese, Galileo is no longer a partner, but instead more of a competitor. They extracted as much as they reasonably could have out of their relationship with the Europeans over this and now have decided to strike out on their own. Whether they build a full-scale worldwide system or just a regional one may not be relevant to those who are trying to figure out a way to make the European system profitable. The Asian market for ultra-precise positioning services was, and may still be, their greatest source of revenue. However, if the nations over there introduce nationally-controlled differential GPS systems, they may find they can dispense with Galileo’s services. Some of the smaller states may also find that buying a backup differential Compass system may be a prudent investment, both technically and politically.
China may build an initial version of Compass for regional use while developing a future global system. China’s strategic interests in Africa would indicate that in the future they will want to try and dominate the shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean. By around the year 2020, if China’s appetite for raw materials continues to grow as fast as it has over the past ten years, it will naturally want to be able to project power at least as far west as the coast of Mozambique. Interestingly, this is the furthest point reached by China’s great exploration fleets of the 15th century.
Twenty or thirty years from now China’s strategic priorities will probably have changed, but , as with America’s GPS, the usefulness of a nationally-controlled satellite navigation system will remain. Compass may also serve as a platform for purposes beyond navigation, such as detecting nuclear explosions or for electronic or signal intelligence. Some experts believe that the Compass satellites will have so much extra power onboard, they could be used as space-based jammers. The targets might include GPS and Galileo signals, or even those from Russia’s GLONASS. Aside from its reconnaissance satellites, Compass could be China’s most important military space asset in fifteen or twenty years.
China was invited into Galileo partly as a way to snub the US and partly because the Europeans seem to believe that the more “international” a project is the better chance it has of not being canceled. France’s Hermes spaceplane project, for example, was unable to get off the drawing board because the other European states refused to finance it. While other worthy European space efforts such as Aurora and GMES are still alive, compared to Galileo, they are in deep financial trouble. Today, internationalizing a program is no guarantee of success.
While Caron may be right that China has purchased relatively old-fashioned atomic rubidium clocks for the early versions of Compass, there is no reason to believe that they will not want to improve their system by buying or building hydrogen masers. It is hard to know just how advanced China’s space technology is at this point. They have undoubtedly mastered the basics and have access to enough sophisticated technology to keep up their current position, but will they be able to improve their relative standing? To put it another way, suppose that, today. the US is ten years ahead of China in overall space technology. Ten years from now will China have caught up to where the US is now, or will they be only five years or less behind where America will be in 2016?
This is the question those who want to reform the US export control system have to keep asking themselves: will the changes they suggest make it harder of easier for the US to maintain its lead? The facts of economic life would tend to support those who want to reform the ITAR system; after all, the more profitable the US space industry is the more incentive and wherewithal they will have to invest in future products that, in turn, will maintain the nation’s technological edge. The more time and effort the industry has to spend on compliance and on legal issues, the less they will have to spend on research and development. Yet a balance must be maintained, because if the industry makes it too easy for China or other potential adversaries to gain access to militarily-relevant technologies, then the pressure for more restriction will intensify.
Capitalist competition is undoubtedly a good way to insure that the public gets a chance to procure the best goods and services at the lowest prices. When it comes to satellite navigation positioning and timing systems, though, the competition can hardly be described as capitalistic. In fact, it’s not socialist or mercantilist either: the current situation is all about military advantage and prestige. For Galileo it’s more about European prestige, and in the case of Compass it’s more about China’s desire for military advantage. From their points of view both are legitimate desires, but to be honest, any commercial advantages gained either by Europe or China will likely be more in the nature of taxes or tolls than a profit gained from selling something that the public actually wants to buy.
PMN1http://www.thespacereview.com/article/668/1
Galileo gets a Chinese overlay
by Taylor Dinerman
Monday, July 31, 2006
Galileo originated as a “Euro-nationalist” response to the success of America’s GPS. As the program developed, some in Europe sought to use it as a way to limit and control US military power. This was the heart of the transatlantic “frequency overlay” dispute that ended with the EU backing down. The Europeans had registered certain frequencies with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), that were dangerously close to the ones the US planned to use for the future military GPS 3 signal. They were hoping that the Pentagon would have to accept that the use of this signal would be regulated by a joint US-EU committee in which the EU, particularly France, would have a veto power over US satellite navigation warfare. In essence, the European goal was to insure that if the US went to war against the will of the EU, it would do so without the advantages that its GPS system has given it.
Today, the Chinese are attempting to do to the Galileo system the same thing that Europe tried, and failed, to do to the US. China has registered with the ITU its intent to use frequencies that are as close to Galileo’s as Galileo’s were planned to be to GPS 3. The speculation is that this is the Chinese response to the European refusal to allow China into the charmed circle of senior Galileo management.
China was brought into the program as a distinctly junior partner. This may have been done as an anti-American gesture, or it may have been that some European leaders truly thought that they could use China’s membership in Galileo to gain some sort of privileged commercial position in the Middle Kingdom’s huge and expanding market. In any case, China’s contribution to the program was never going to be a policymaking one.
For the Chinese the goals were simple: launch as may Galileo satellites on their Long March boosters as possible and, above all, gain technological and scientific insight into what it takes to build an independent, up-to-date, space-based positioning, navigation, timing system. The Beidou system that they now have is clumsy and, while it may have a role in guiding long-range missiles, it lacks the multipurpose military utility of GPS, Russia’s GLONASS, or, perhaps eventually, Galileo. Now that the Europeans have decided that China cannot be promoted to full membership in their program, China has no good reason to continue to accept a minor role.
For Europe, the question is how will they react to China’s latest move. Can they put pressure on China the same way the US did to them over their overlay ploy? They do not have a formal military alliance with China, and their commercial clout is limited. They would find it difficult to offer to lift the post-Tiananmen ban on sales of military equipment in spite of the decision a few years ago to “in principal” resume arms sales. In theory they could threaten to sell weapons to Taiwan. Taipei would certainly be happy to buy more submarines from Germany, France, or Sweden. If the Europeans can credibly threaten this, it may be the only card they really have.
The deal the Chinese have apparently signed with a Swiss company to buy hydrogen maser atomic clocks for their new Compass system is not something that the European Union has a lot of control over. In spite of the fact that such devices are, in effect, guidance systems for long-range nuclear missiles, they do no appear on any international list of military or dual-use items. This loophole is another example of just how weak the Wassenaar Ageement on arms and technology exports really is. The old Cocom had real teeth and could be fairly easily modified to incorporate new items. Today, those who want to reform the US ITAR (International Trade in Arms Regulations) will once again find it more difficult to argue their case because of such sales. Over the long term such transactions do more to weaken the position of the World Trade Organization and other multinational institutions. Inside the US there is a growing feeling that since these types of institutions and agreements serve only to make the world a more dangerous and deadly place, they should be scrapped.
For Europe, Galileo may yet turn into a technological triumph, but the odds are getting longer. The Chinese may use the frequency overlay issue to gain leverage over EU policy worldwide. The Europeans may find that China’s supposed rise to great power status is coming at their expense as well as that of the US.
PMN1US scientists crack secret codes for EU satellite system
By David Rennie in Brussels
(Filed: 11/07/2006)
Secret codes used by the forthcoming European satellite navigation system, Galileo, have been cracked by American scientists, casting doubt on European Union promises that the £2.3 billion project will pay for itself through commercial fees.
Prof Mark Psiaki of Cornell University said that by using a dish on a laboratory roof his team had worked out how to crack codes on data being beamed down by a prototype satellite orbiting Earth.
This has potentially devastating consequences for the European Union which wants to charge high-tech firms “licence fees” to access that same data, before they can make and sell compatible navigation devices to the public.
Cornell’s success in deducing the codes just by watching the skies means that future users of Galileo will not have to ask the EU for the codes and may be able to refuse to pay the EU for them, Prof Psiaki said.
Galileo was set up as a European rival to America’s military-controlled GPS system, whose signals are free for use worldwide.
Galileo’s founders boasted that it would be more accurate than GPS and so people would want to pay to use it.
Galileo is intended to pay for itself by offering several services, from a basic signal for use by the public to highly encrypted signals for governments and armed forces. The EU plans to charge fees to companies making Galileo-compatible navigation devices and commercial users wanting more accurate data, such as shipping lines or road charging schemes.
The European Commission said last night that Cornell’s success in cracking codes for the prototype was irrelevant, as final codes for the Galileo system would not only be different, but would be made available by the EU.
But Prof Psiaki said: “Any manufacturer can now figure out the open source access codes for themselves.”
Galileo, due to be operational by 2010, is a joint venture between the European Commission, the European Space Agency and private investors including, controversially, an arm of the Chinese state.
PMN1http://www.space-careers.com/news9.html
3: CHINA THREATENING TO BUILD OWN NAVSAT SYSTEM IN WAKE OF GALILEO EXCLUSION
According to European government and industry officials, China has declared its intention to build its own global satellite navigation system and to place its military signal atop frequencies currently reserved for Europe’s encrypted Galileo satellite navigation service, and maybe even the U.S. GPS military signal. China has invested millions in becoming a shareholder in the Galileo program and has signed a partnership agreement with Europe, however the agreement will expire at the end of the year when the Galileo Joint Undertaking (GJU), the organization that currently manages the development phase of the program, ceases to exist. GJU will be replaced by a new, Europe-only governing body named the Galileo Supervisory Authority, which will also be Galileo’s owner. At present, no non-European governments will be allowed to participate in the new organization as it is set to manage the encrypted, government-only Public Regulated Service (PRS). It is expected that GJU will refund the 5 million euro deposit, minus a portion for incurred expenses, which China invested for an ownership stake in Galileo. China had hoped to participate in the Galileo program in part to complement their own regional navigation system, Beidou, and to share in the new system’s revenues. The country has also agreed to supply the search-and-rescue payload on the first four Galileo test satellites, set to launch in 2008. However, China has recently begun preparing for the launch of its own global system, Compass, which would also include 24 satellites and use the same frequencies as Galileo’s PRS. European government officials believe China has proved its desire to build a satellite navigation system in its attempts to purchase atomic clocks in Europe; no companies have confirmed or denied the purchases. [Space News 06/12/06]
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