In view of the definitive exit from the European Union, the United Kingdom is trying to reorganize its satellite navigation and positioning system. It is an important service at the basis of many tools we use every day, starting with smartphones, and indispensable in emergency situations: after Brexit, the British may have some difficulties in using one.
Once the Brexit transition period has ended, the UK will no longer be able to join the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) which allows the use of part of the satellite positioning services in the EU: it is the so-called Galileo system, which moreover, in the past the British government had participated in financing with 1.2 billion pounds (about 1.3 billion euros). The UK has decided to invest 500 million pounds (around 550 million euros) in the private space company OneWeb, long criticized by experts and gone bankrupt last March due to lack of funding, to try to compensate, but it is not clear. whether the solution chosen by the British government is a real solution.
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Galileo has existed since 2003 thanks to the collaboration between the European Union and the European Space Agency (ESA). The system includes 30 satellites – 26 in orbit and 4 in reserve – and makes EU countries less dependent on the US GPS system. It is a strategic resource not only because it allows you to have a backup (and more accurate) system in the event of GPS malfunctions, but also because it offers some services for the transmission of data and information in encrypted form, useful for the security services of different countries.
With the signing of the Withdrawal Agreement, approved in December 2019 by the British Parliament and then also by the European Parliament, the United Kingdom has entered a transition period – which will last until 31 December 2020 – in which it will enjoy the benefits of a member state but without taking part in decision-making processes. Since the previous negotiations, the European Union had made it clear that after Brexit the United Kingdom could no longer be part of Galileo: although the system is managed by ESA, it is the European Commission that provides the money and decides how it is spent.
The Commission's lawyers have decided that the management of Galileo cannot be shared with countries outside the Union, for security reasons; a specific section of the project, called the Public Regulated Service (PRS), allows national authorities to transmit messages in an ultra-protected form, and is considered very important and sensitive for the strategic autonomy of the EU.
The decision to exclude the UK angered David Davis, the British secretary in charge of Brexit of Theresa May's government, who had sarcastically demanded back the £ 1 billion the government invested in the Galileo system and explained that the UK would set up its own satellite positioning system. In 2018 May announced its intention to finance an exclusively British system, with an investment between 3 billion and 5 billion pounds, but the decision was then shelved precisely because of the very high costs.
His successor Boris Johnson then decided to buy a part of the space company OneWeb, with an investment of 500 million pounds (about 550 million euros, so much less money than May's plan). However, not everyone believes that OneWeb is able to create an alternative to Galileo.
A government-commissioned report warns that disrupting the UK's access to a complete system like Galileo could cause disruption of military and commercial applications, vulnerability in telecommunications and compromise much more, from the distribution of energy across the national grid. railway signals, the stock market and access to ATMs. The problems may arise especially in the case of temporary malfunctions of the US GPS.
The choice to buy OneWeb was much discussed especially by industry experts; in fact, the company has satellites in low orbit, different from those of Galileo. In addition to representing a problem due to their light pollution, it seems that at the moment there is no evidence that such satellites are able to guarantee the level of precision required by navigation services.
The UK space agency (UKSA) argues that further investments are needed to complete OneWeb's constellation of satellites and that there are many technical and operational hurdles to overcome. Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy expert at the University of Leicester, said in an interview with the Guardian: “The point is, we bought the wrong satellites.”
The original OneWeb project, prior to the bankruptcy, was in fact to use satellites to deliver high-speed Internet to all over the world from space. To achieve this goal, smaller satellites are used than those used to provide navigation services, and which are located in a rather low earth orbit: they circulate at an altitude of 1,200 kilometers, compared to about 20,000 for Galileo and other systems in use.
The UK government hoped to be able to convert OneWeb's satellites back to a function other than that for which they were built and launched, but retrofitting them to provide navigation services seems practically impossible: when the satellites are in low orbit, they spin very fast. and provide inaccurate data.
According to experts, not even moving them higher would solve the problem: they are also too small to be adapted to the functions performed by those of Galileo. Bowen explains: “What happened is that OneWeb's talented lobbyists convinced the government that they could completely redesign some of the satellites. We want to apply a technology never tested to a mega constellation of satellites designed to do something else “.
OneWeb went bankrupt in March when its largest investor, the Japanese conglomerate Softbank Group, decided not to further finance the company. The British government then took over at the end of June, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak – the equivalent of our Economy Minister – signed the agreement to buy OneWeb shares and take advantage of its satellites to develop the new satellite navigation plan, in a consortium on par with the Indian telecommunications group Bharti, the third largest mobile phone group in the world.
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Before closing the purchase, however, the government had not consulted its most experienced scientific advisor, Patrick Vallance, or even the Ministry of Defense. Sam Beckett, secretary of the department for business, energy and industrial strategy, had raised his objections to the purchase of OneWeb, recalling the concerns of the British space agency. Despite the objection, Secretary of State for Enterprise, Energy and Industrial Strategy Alok Sharma had forced the decision to buy the company.
To try to clarify how things went, Darren Jones, a Labor MP and chairman of the Parliamentary Commission for Industrial Strategy, has launched a parliamentary investigation into the purchase of OneWeb and the government's conduct. In the meantime, it is unclear how the UK government will manage positioning systems across the country if it appears to be permanently out of the European Union in three months.
