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Comment by nbevans | Hacker News Reader

They still haven't finished Galileo yet; with the project seemingly going backwards ever since the British were forced out. How will they deliver yet another moonshot project like this? They don't even possess reusable rocket technology yet to make such a LEO project economically viable.

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Galileo has been operational for a few years. Even customer mobile devices Support and use it.

Further more the British had a referendum and decided to leave on their own. Quite hard to call that force out. In fact it's impossible to expell a member state.

Operational? Yes. Reliable? No. It has had numerous outages in the last 4 years.

How do you explain several non-EU states being members of the Galileo programme - namely Switzerland and Norway? Hell, even China invested into it in 2003. And yet, the UK which invested almost a quarter of its funding is booted out on the basis of an unrelated political issue? It doesn't make sense. The British even offered to continue funding and investing into it. So "forced out" is an accurate description.

Switzerland and Norway negotiated special treaties to join Galileo.

The UK were in because of their EU membership. No one could have taken that from them besides they themselves.

And once you are out you get treated like any 3rd party state. If you want a special deal you better bring some time and be prepared to start fresh.

The desire "to get Brexit done" in a very tight timeframe, pushed by populist politicians, did not allow for that.

The whole deal of the EU is to make cooperation between countries easier and to act as a single voice.

The UK reaps what they sowed

I hate these takes. If the goal of the EU is to make European cooperation. Why then was the attitude 'Britain wants to leave, fine fuck them'. Like just because they didn't want to be in the EU anymore, now the EU is no longer about cooperation? All of sudden the EU acted more like a geopolitical opponent of Britain.

The idea that there was not enough time to negotiate is nonsense. This was the EU punishing Britain for leaving, its as simple as that. If the EU was really about European cooperation, then they should have wanted Britain to stay in the project.

ESA existed before the EU and cooperation on space goes back way before the EU. It was short sighted politics with the goal to inflict punishment on Britain and make sure nobody else leaves.

The UK was trying to negotiate a special agreement/treaty regarding Galileo. But the EU did not want to even consider it. Indeed even today the UK has not really given up on trying to be friends with the EU and continues to remain open to rejoining Galileo and Horizon programmes. Bizarrely, the latter of which, the EU seemingly had a moment of weakness during the negotiations by agreeing that the UK could remain members of Horizon - but then later had a change of heart and decided to break the agreement (international law?) in choosing to cut the UK out to this very day.

The EU is waiting for Britain to abide by the current treaty they signed (Northern Ireland etc) before proceeding to new areas.

which it has every right to do, considering this treaty is especially important to one of its member states (ireland).

> No. It has had numerous outages in the last 4 years.

That's just plain false. There was one major outage in 2019. Since then, nothing of note.

I think it has, when compared to GPS or even GLONASS.

https://insidegnss.com/galileo-logs-a-5-hour-timing-related-...

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/galileo-accident/

The second link is the major outage I'm talking about, yes.

The first one is indeed significant, but to call it an outage is a stretch. You're linking to some blogspam that is basically [copying the official statement](https://www.gsc-europa.eu/news/galileo-nominal-service-resto...). To link that without linking to the [follow-up explanation](https://www.gsc-europa.eu/news/further-information-on-the-ev...) is, well... Not exactly an okay move. In that follow-up, you'll read that only ill-configured receivers (that ignored satellite health) were affected.

Ah that would make sense! I wonder though, is my perception of Galileo as being less reliable accurate? Or are those issues normal for GPS too? My (probably ignorant) understanding was that the structure of the Galileo program made it inherently more brittle, considering how the first major outage went down.

> going backwards ever since the British were forced out.

It was already going badly for years before UK left. Galileo was scheduled to be finished in 2021, shortly after Brexit and around the same time UK parted from the project.

Yet, I can switch on my GPSr, use Galileo and get higher accuracy than GLONASS/GPS.

Is it really a moonshot project ?

ESA has plenty of experience in delivering projects like this e.g. Copernicus, Sentinel, EDRS.

The Sentinel satellites ARE the Copernicus program(me). Why are the EU spy sats, sorry, totally-not-spy-sats, so poor and so few compared to what the US has?

a) Copernicus program is bigger than just the satellites themselves.

b) What does a meaningless comparison with the US have to do with whether launching a bunch of extra satellites is considered a moonshot or not ?

It's up and running, and like any project like this it's then constantly updated and maintained so "finished" makes no sense

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