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More trouble for Galileo as Mrs Dunwoody attacks

One of the most formidable and well respected members of British Parliament, Gwyneth Dunwoody has attacked plans by the European Commission to fund Galileo, the European version of GPS.

The Commission is stepping in to fund the initial phases of the programme as a plan to obtain funding from potential commercial operators of the system failed.

Even if funding is found to launch the system the question as to what the eventual business model looks like is still unanswered, unlike GPS there is not Dept of Defence to write the cheques if all else fails, and the day to day running of the system will need to be funded.

From my time in Government, I remember nobody wanted to end up in front of Mrs Dunwoody, you can understand why !!

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

4 replies on “More trouble for Galileo as Mrs Dunwoody attacks”

“What taxpayers in the United Kingdom and other European countries really need and want is better railways and roads, not giant signature projects in the sky,” said committee chairwoman Gwyneth Dunwoody. Well Mrs. Wooddunny: what if this signature project were to increase the life of such road infrastructure through technologies that limit car speed and breaking distances, reduce accidebts and road wear and ultimately reduce maintenance and therefore costs. Short-sighted twaddle. Hope she lives to regret this.

Galileo is an excellent project and the strategic significance should not be underestimated. As GPS boffins know only to well selective availability can be turned ON as well as OFF. Where would that leave all the tracking systems then? We all marvel at GPS and as a society we are becoming increasing reliant on a single system even though our governments have no control over it! Thank goodness our mariners are still taught celestial navigation and dead reckoning. Having an alternative system for Europe makes a lot of sense and would provide redundancy for the GPS system. The alternatives would be to go back to days of Decca and Loran C with their inherent limitations, should the GPS system fail for whatever reason.

Mrs Dunwoody instead of talking about new roads etc you should be looking at transportation miles and more efficient methods of transport for goods and people.

Mrs Dunwoody on this one you are plain wrong!

Perhaps Mrs. Dunwoody is more in favor of massive construction companies who frequently run over-budget and passed deadlines to rebuild infrastructure — over actually solving problem related to limiting the need to run such massive projects in the future?

One never can tell who’s siding with who these days.

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