And Yet It Moves
‘Eppur si muove’ or so Galileo Galilei is rumoured to have said of the Earth shortly after his recantation at the hands of the Roman Inquisition in 1663 over his blasphemous Copernican claims that the Earth revolved around the Sun.
Much like Galileo, the modern day EU space project which bears his name continues to move steadily towards realisation, with the Commission and their accountants moving heaven and earth to keep their dream aloft.
The Galileo programme formally began as far back as February 1999 when the Commission first presented plans for its initial creation. However, who can say for how long before this point the elites in the backrooms and expensive restaurants throughout Europe had nursed their egotistical desires?
Until recently, Galileo appeared to have somewhat stalled. The Westminster Parliament was making noises suggesting that it might not provide its backing, and general EU funds had seemingly dried up. Yet, having invested so much time and effort wallowing in their own vanity, the EU Commission were unlikely to throw the towel in over the small issue of funding the estimated extra €2.4bn Galileo apparently requires – a cost which without doubt will dramatically rise as times passes.
To negotiate around this minor financial inconvenience, the EU’s accountants have managed to allocate the necessary funds by means of a transfer of surplus from the Common Agricultural Policy, thus staving off calls for the whole project to be scrapped for the time being at least. To the clinking of champagne flutes much self-congratulation and backslapping probably ensued.
EurActive reports that only the Spanish objected and voted against these proposals at yesterday’s Council of Ministers meeting - not because they disagreed with the project in principle, but because they wanted a guarantee that their country could host one of Galileo’s ground support centres.
Despite hours of the usual pointless negotiations which accompany all these occasions, the Spanish representative didn’t receive the assurance he desired and so voted ‘no’. Unsurprisingly, as with all things EU, voting ‘no’ made absolutely no different whatsoever, a reality which you might have thought by now these people would have grasped.
Our EU leaders and Commission will always return to an issue for which they have previously been denied because they see ‘no’ in effect as a deferred ‘yes’ - the end result of which often leads the EU Commission to create a route around such rather annoying obstacles and therefore allow the EU Project to march on regardless. With this in mind it would appear the Galileo programme will continue onwards, wasting yet more of our money and without any consultation of the electorate over the process. How unfortunately predictable.
Your Comments:
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The EU Space Program summarize the uselessness of EU bureaucrats all by itself. Indeed a field were Europe had a reasonnable chance of scoring world premieres, we instead have am ambitionless space program controlled by bureaucrats. Yet they will all claim that ESA is ‘the future’ when at the same time, China, India and even Japan are spending more money on space and are able to send a man in space by themselves.
Galileo could have been achieved years ago with a Franco-British cooperation akin to the one made for Concorde or the Jaguar planes, but instead we decided to give it some European coating and we are now paying the price of this mistake.
