serendipityoucity

I watched the following 2 video clips that tell the story of Europe’s Galileo (wikipedia) perfect reference in time and space GPS satellites.  The videos are CNN documentary clips, not stupendous reporting but interesting.

I found the fear of infrastructure dependency on a foreign country in particular the US military to be interesting followed by the complexities of brokering deals among many nation states in the EU.  At the moment Europe depends on US GPS where the resolution went from 100m to sub meter.  Sub meter resolution is only available to the military and probably some private companies.  The US military has a monopoly on this technology and should it wish it can cut some nations off, isolate the system to US users only or change the level of resolution.  Once many European corporations began creating tools that rely on GPS, and once the public became hooked on them, they began to push to construct Galileo.

"Galileo is Europe’s ambitious satellite navigation project, designed to rival the American GPS and invigorate the European transport and communications infrastructure. It started as an exciting forward-looking scheme but before long descended into diplomatic maneuvering and destructive inter-European wrangling. Galileo is a yarn worthy of it’s controversial namesake."

Part 1:
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2008/07/30/untold.stories.galileo.bk.a.cnn?iref=videosearch

Part 2:
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2008/07/30/untold.stories.galileo.bk.b.cnn?iref=videosearch

via: CAGList