Europe’s Plan for GPS

With lofty dreams of European unity increasingly grounded by economic woe and the weight of narrow national interests, an array of computer screens in central Italy blinks with faint signs that — far away in space, at least — Europe’s often quarreling nations can still sometimes find common cause, reports Andrew Higgins in Thursday’s New York Times.
Ringed by snow-covered mountains on a plateau east of Rome, the Fucino Space Center stands guard over the European Union’s flagship joint project: a satellite navigation system that is years behind schedule, many times over its original budget and unlikely to start operating for at least another year.

With recession and austerity clouding much of the Continent, the leaders will argue over where the ax should fall in a European Union budget for 2014 to 2020 that would total nearly $1.35 trillion as drafted. An over-budget satellite navigation system that is years from completion, largely a duplicate of an American system already widely used in Europe and unlikely ever to generate much revenue would seem to be in the budget cutters’ cross hairs.
But Galileo’s backers are confident, so much so that they are asking for $8 billion beyond the more than $4 billion already spent. For Galileo promises perhaps the one thing that still seems able to overcome European leaders’ devotion to austerity: economic and technological independence from the United States.