Tuesday, March 26, 2002
A recent CNN article claims the new Galileo system will make economic sense, but as usual, fails to provide any details. Galileo is supposed to be a European competitor to GPS, which is already free to anyone who wants to use it. How, pray tell, will Galileo compete with free, and how many private investors will really sign up for this thing?
My opinion is that this is a public works program, and yet another example of European governments attempting to engineer a healthy economy. It doesn't take a research grant to figure out that everyone working on this project will be European.
If this were simply a way for Europe to have a more active space program, I would have few problems with it. NASA has become downright complacent (and wasteful) since the end of the cold war, and could do with a bit of healthy international competition. However, this is just throwing money into a well. At the very least, build something which DOESN'T already exist. This is on par with sending a robot probe to mars which does the exact same thing as a US probe just so that they could say they have a European probe circling mars.
My opinion is that this is a public works program, and yet another example of European governments attempting to engineer a healthy economy. It doesn't take a research grant to figure out that everyone working on this project will be European.
If this were simply a way for Europe to have a more active space program, I would have few problems with it. NASA has become downright complacent (and wasteful) since the end of the cold war, and could do with a bit of healthy international competition. However, this is just throwing money into a well. At the very least, build something which DOESN'T already exist. This is on par with sending a robot probe to mars which does the exact same thing as a US probe just so that they could say they have a European probe circling mars.
