From Aviation Week

 

[excerpt]

 

Soyuz, Galileo Achieve Double First

Oct 21, 2011

By Amy Svitak

 

The first Soyuz rocket to blast off from the European spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, lofted the first pair of Galileo spacecraft into orbit on Oct. 21, creating the operational nucleus for Europe’s flagship navigation satellite constellation.

Perhaps it's a very doubtious idea ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12212525

The chief executive of one of Germany's leading space companies has lost his job because of the Wikileaks saga.

OHB-System's Berry Smutny was reported in a cable to have told US diplomats that Europe's Galileo satellite-navigation project was a "stupid idea".

Bremen-based OHB-System is part of the consortium that will build Galileo's first 14 operational spacecraft.

Berry Smutny was alleged to have told diplomats at a meeting in Berlin in October 2009 that Galileo, a flagship space programme of the EU, was a waste of taxpayers' money.

The cable, which was published by the Norwegian daily Aftenposten last Thursday, quoted the OHB-System chief as saying, "I think Galileo is a stupid idea that primarily serves French interests", and, in particular, French military interests.

Mr Smutny was further reported to say that Galileo was "doomed for failure" or would "have to undergo drastic scalebacks for survival".

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/business.../19galileo.html

BERLIN — The chief executive of the largest satellite company in Germany was suspended on Tuesday for telling American diplomats that the Galileo satellite project in Europe was redundant, cost-inefficient and designed to benefit French business interests, according to cables published by WikiLeaks.

Galileo, the seven-year-old program aimed at building a system of 30 orbiting civilian satellites for Europe by 2014, is “a stupid idea” that will only replicate what GPS satellites already provide, Mr. Smutny is said to have told the diplomats. He added that Galileo was “a waste of E.U. taxpayers’ money championed by French interests.”

“France is the evil empire stealing technology and Germany knows this,” Mr. Smutny told American diplomats, according to the WikiLeaks document published in Aftenposten. But, he said, Germany’s decentralized government was not willing to do much about it. French espionage of intellectual property rights is so bad, he told the diplomats, that the total damage done to the German economy is probably greater than that inflicted by China or Russia.