> the EU project that the UK helped design before losing access to due to Brexit
how can you lose access if you already paid for it? who negotiated this? i assume a politician. a business person would have either asked for a cash payment or sued.
how can you lose access if you already paid for it? who negotiated this? i assume a politician. a business person would have either asked for a cash payment or sued.
Of course I'd prefer that Britain stay a strong part of the project, but I think that about our involvement in all of the EU's projects we used to be a key part of, not just Galileo. That's a big part of why I didn't want to leave the EU, but I lost that argument and we're leaving, and that's fine. It was a democratic decision and I'm content to abide by it.
What's disappointing is the bile and fury from so many Brexiteers about having to accept the painful but inevitable consequences of that. To them I say buck up, this is the path you chose. There's no point whining about it now.
What has changed is that as we are no longer members of the EU, we will no longer appoint a justice on the ECJ panel of judges, or have any of our people working there and representing our interests, outside our role as external claimants.
So the ECJ makes it judgement and the US for example has to abide? Please.
However a lot of our interim agreements with the EU will be based on continuing intra-EU agreements we are currently party to and those will be adjudicated by the ECJ even though we won't be a member, because they are based in EU treaties and law.
So, could we have negotiated an ongoing part of Galileo? Yes, probably, but it would have involved a longer negotiating period and a number of compromises and continuing engagement with EU institutions. None of these were calls the government were prepared to make. Instead, they didn't even ask and just walked away from the project.
Needless to say, this is just a microcosm of the many things you have to accept if you take an absolutist stance on EU engagement.
Think of the EU like a gym. Only because the gym bought a treadmill with your membership fees from last year, does not mean you get to keep access to that treadmill once you decide to terminate your gym membership.
> The company, which originally intended to offer affordable internet services to the remotest parts of the planet, has 74 satellites in orbit and plans for several hundred more. OneWeb also has a significant advantage in that it has priority on broadcast spectrum over SpaceX’s Starlink, a rival low-earth satellite internet service, people close to the subject said.
In April, OneWeb approached the UK government for a £500m loan as part of a wider $2.2bn financing from private investors. However, the government has decided on an equity investment to preserve its influence. The company is regulated by the UK’s Ofcom, but its management is largely American. Its satellites are also manufactured in Florida in a joint venture with Airbus. It has promised to repatriate manufacturing to the UK.
The government’s potential participation in a OneWeb bid has been the focus of fierce opposition in some parts of the space industry, which had hoped to win positions on a Galileo-style navigation project. Critics have dismissed the low-earth technology as unproven and fraught with risk.
However, a deciding factor appears to have been support from US defence officials who have told the government they do not want the UK to develop a replica of the GPS system. A low-earth navigation service would complement the US system and offer extra resilience to US allies, say several parties close to the subject.
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so yeah, as always, it's actually more complicated than it seems.
this is why i usually tend to steer far away from the guardian or other general purpose newspapers, they never offer the full picture.
Presumably a choice to invest in a private company would go through parliamentary debate, or have public study papers. Can anyone link them?
- previous reference to investing £18m in March 2019 (Chris Skidmore, under Theresa May, mentions ESA; before the "cut all ties to Europe" moment)
- same page https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2019-03-19/debates/E3F... references £92m for a "domestic alternative to Galileo", not specifically linked to oneweb
- Vicky Ford mentions them in the context of "my local company Teledyne e2v is working in Leeds, where it is making the highly engineered filters, switches and converters that are critical technology for the OneWeb group of satellites" https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2018-01-15/debates/634...
- brief namecheck from Ed Vaizey
I suspect the actual "tender" process will be resistant to FOIA under grounds of "commercial confidentiality".
And because there are a lot of others firms doing work which is more obviously different and potentially valuable.
And because the net loss to those businesses working on Galileo in the UK will likely be higher than the net gain from this idea.
And because Johnson has a despicable record of wasting public money on useless projects which inevitably raise questions about where the money actually went. (See also cable car, garden bridge, test and trace app, etc.)
Apart from that - sure, why not?
> OneWeb filed for bankruptcy in March in the US, where most of its operations are located, after failing to secure new funding.
If the alternatives are to either build another medium orbit navigation constellation (it would be the fifth!) or to try and build something different and then trade access to that to the US for guaranteed GPS access, then that makes sense.
If they just built a GPS/Galileo/Glonass/Beidou clone then they'd have nothing of strategic interest to trade access to (and it would be horrifically expensive).
A regional solution like NavIC or QZSS would also not be of use to trade and wouldn't provide service over the whole operational footprint of the Royal Navy.
On the other hand, since the US military does not have a low earth orbit GNSS system (nobody does), it becomes tradeable for privileged GPS access. The same way that the UK can genuinely trade the US access to a small number of specialist military assets that the US either does not have or has a shortage of but cannot trade on total force capacity (since obviously the UK military is vastly smaller).
Post Brexit and after we leave the HRC - I think that might be possible.
A bill of attainder is where parliament just declares you guilty and its of to the Tower with you.
The UK has decided that it won't pay towards that any more and will subsequently lose access to the non-public parts. Which seems pretty reasonable?