Galileo at the trough of EU taxpayer money

[DanS]

Originally posted by Ecthy
The EU needs its own system in case the Chinese shoot down your GPS satellites.

EU companies were trying to horn in on the GPS device market, and what better way than to lock out the Amis from the market by having the system blessed by EU governments? Further, EU governments could require EU entities to use the system and to pay for the services.

EU governments went along with the understanding that the consortium that would benefit would pay for it. But now the consortium wants EU taxpayers to pay for it as well. And by the way, now it costs 3x as much as originally stated.

It's good work if you can get it.

[Barnabas]

Asher was right

=lol

[Ecthy]

The thing with the EU is there's too many different interests colliding plus the lack of a central institution. This has partly already been solved and it could be argued that, depending on the model you use, similar conflicts exist in the US also. Overall however we're still too decentral.

It's not a matter of know how but the politics behind it. Noone could honestly think that Europe is technically inferior.

[dannubis]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


I'm pretty sure we use a lot more precision munitions than you do.

Looks at Iraq...

Laughs in your face...

[Kuciwalker]

Are you an idiot or just pretending?

[dannubis]

What a witty comeback

Come on, say something intelligent for a change...

[Patroklos]

Why is when backwards countries/regions do something the US accomplished 10 times better over a decade ago they fasley consider with besting or even being on par with us?

[Tattila the Hun]

You're mixing us with the chinese. We're trying to improve on the thing.

[Kuciwalker]

Of course you can improve on it. Anyone with the ability to launch it could launch a better version with the basic advances that have occured.

[Patroklos]

You're mixing us with the chinese.

With them its even worse, they launch a warship with a phased array air search radar 26 years after we did it first (and it sucks compared to that first one), and all of a sudden "China is taking over the seas!"

Is this European version going to be free as well?

[BeBMan]

If you guys want to pull a MOBIUS you have to add more smilies

[Dry]

Originally posted by Oerdin
The GPS receiver simply locates two different satellites and then triangulates it's position. The Two satellites are the two known positions and your's is the third unknown position. It's just a triangle and simple trig.

Almost correct, but not 100%, I think.
The sattelites are not geostationary, so they need to send their position.
Each sattelite sends thus basically 2 data: time (clock) and position.
The receiver compute it's own distance to the sattelite based on time delta.
So, for each sattelite, the receiver only knows he's so far away from given point, or 'on a sphere so far away from point X'.
Intersection of 2 spheres is a circle.
If you assume you're on the surface on the earth, (= 3rd sphere) you got 2 intersection points (Intersection of a cersle and a sphere = 2 points), so you need a 3rd sattelite.

And a 4th if you're not on earth's surface.

[BlackCat]

Re: Galileo at the trough of EU taxpayer money

Originally posted by DanS
Was I naive in expecting something a little bit more than a tech jobs program with Galileo? Wasn't this system supposed to be commercial and profitable? Could someone tell me again why the EU is spending $4 billion to build this system?

Just out of curiosity - who paid for the american GPS system ?

Anyway, the american system is old and obsolete so it actually makes sense to build a new system.

Politically, well, if the europeans had been the first to lauch such a system with full control, would you yanks have been satisfied with such or would you have spent a large amount of tax money to build a parallel system ?

[Kuciwalker]

GPS is far from obsolete.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
GPS is far from obsolete.

Obsolete as in old tech.