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Faced with the definitive exit from the European Union, the United Kingdom is trying to reorganize its satellite navigation and positioning system. It is an important service at the base of many tools we use every day, starting with smartphones, and indispensable in emergency situations: after Brexit, the British may have some difficulty using one.
After the end of the Brexit transition period, the UK will no longer be able to join the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) which allows the use of part of the satellite positioning services in the EU: it is the so-called Galileo system, Furthermore, in the past the British government had participated in the financing with 1,200 million pounds (about 1,300 million euros). The UK has decided to invest 500 million pounds (about 550 million euros) in the private space company OneWeb, long criticized by experts and bankrupt last March for lack of funding, to try to compensate, but it is not clear . if the solution chosen by the British government is a real solution.
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Galileo has existed since 2003 thanks to the collaboration between the European Union and the European Space Agency (ESA). The system includes 30 satellites, 26 in orbit and 4 in reserve, and makes EU countries less dependent on the US GPS system. It is a strategic resource not only because it allows to have a back-up (and more accurate) system in case of GPS malfunction, but also because it offers some services for the transmission of data and information in encrypted form, useful for the security services of different countries.
With the signature of Withdrawal agreement, approved in December 2019 by the British Parliament and then also by the European Parliament, the United Kingdom has entered a transition period – which will last until December 31, 2020 – in which it will enjoy the benefits of a member state but without participating in the decision-making processes. Since previous negotiations, the European Union had made it clear that after Brexit the United Kingdom could no longer be part of Galileo: although the system is managed by ESA, it is the European Commission that provides the money and decides how it is spent.
The Commission’s lawyers have decided that the Galileo management cannot be shared with countries outside the Union for security reasons; A specific section of the project, called the Regulated Public Service (PRS), allows national authorities to transmit messages in an ultra-protected way, and is considered very important and sensitive for the strategic autonomy of the EU.
The decision to exclude the UK angered David Davis, the British government secretary in charge of Brexit for Theresa May’s government, who had sarcastically demanded the return of the £ 1 billion that the government invested in the Galileo system, explaining that the UK would. established its own satellite positioning system. In 2018, May announced her intention to fund a uniquely British scheme, with an investment of between £ 3 and 5 billion, but the decision was later shelved due to sky-high costs.
His successor Boris Johnson then decided to buy part of the space company OneWeb, with an investment of 500 million pounds (about 550 million euros, much less money than May’s plan). However, not everyone believes that OneWeb is capable of creating an alternative to Galileo.
A government-commissioned report warns that disrupting the UK’s access to a complete system like Galileo could cause the disruption of military and commercial applications, vulnerability in telecommunications and compromising much more, from power distribution across the national grid. . to railway signaling, the stock market and access to ATMs. Problems could arise especially in the case of temporary US GPS failures.
The decision to buy OneWeb was highly debated especially by industry experts; in fact, the company has satellites in low orbit, different from Galileo’s. In addition to being a problem due to its light pollution, it seems that at the moment there is no evidence that these satellites are capable of guaranteeing the level of precision required by navigation services.
The UK space agency (UKSA) maintains that further investment is needed to complete the OneWeb satellite constellation and that there are many technical and operational hurdles to overcome. Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy expert at the University of Leicester, said in an interview with the guardian: “The point is that we bought the wrong satellites.”
OneWeb’s original project, before bankruptcy, was in fact to use satellites to deliver high-speed internet around the world from space. To achieve this, satellites smaller than those used to provide navigation services are used, and they are in a fairly low Earth orbit: they circulate at an altitude of 1,200 kilometers, compared to about 20,000 for Galileo and other systems to use. .
The British government hoped to be able to convert OneWeb satellites back to a different function than they were built and launched, but adapting them to provide navigation services seems practically impossible: when the satellites are in low orbit, they rotate very fast. and provide inaccurate data.
According to experts, not even moving them higher would solve the problem: they are also too small to adapt to the functions that Galileo’s perform. Bowen explains: “What happened is that OneWeb’s talented lobbyists convinced the government that they could completely redesign some of the satellites. We want to apply a technology never before tested to a mega constellation of satellites designed to do something else.
OneWeb went bankrupt in March when its biggest investor, the Japanese conglomerate Softbank Group, decided not to continue financing the company. The British government took power at the end of June, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Finance Minister Rishi Sunak, equivalent to our Finance Minister, signed the agreement to buy shares of OneWeb and take advantage of its advantages. satellites to develop the new satellite navigation plan, in a consortium on par with the Indian telecommunications group Bharti, the third largest mobile phone group in the world.
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However, before finalizing the purchase, the government had not consulted its most experienced scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, or even the Ministry of Defense. Sam Beckett, secretary of the department of commercial, energy and industrial strategy, had raised his objections to the purchase of OneWeb, recalling the concerns of the British space agency. Despite the objection, the Secretary of State for Enterprise, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Alok Sharma, had forced the decision to buy the company.
To try to clarify how things turned out, Darren Jones, a Labor MP and chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Industrial Strategy, has launched a parliamentary inquiry into the OneWeb purchase and the government’s conduct. Meanwhile, it is unclear how the UK government will manage positioning systems across the country if it appears to be leaving the European Union for good in three months.
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