The European Space Agency's Galileo navigation satellite network programme looks to be back on track with the resumption last week of vacuum testing of its GIOVE-B (Galileo In-orbit Validation Element) test satellite. GIOVE-B failed vacuum testing last September and cost the programme a year it was due for launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan last December, a year after the successful deployment of GIOVE-A. The spacecraft, built by Thales Alenia Space, is the second of up to three test satellites for what will ultimately be a 26-satellite network.

If GIOVE-B suffers another delay ESA has contracted UK company Surrey Satellite Technology to build the GIOVE-A2, which is to be ready for launch in the first half of 2008.

GIOVE-B's first launch delay had threatened the timetable for the ESA-developed, European Commission-funded Galileo system. However, the collapse of talks with the industrial Galileo Operating Company (GOC) consortium for a private/public partnership for the constellation's deployment has made the GIOVE-B test failure irrelevant. Now fully publicly funded, Galileo's first four in-orbit validation satellites are expected to be launched in 2009 followed by the remainder of the constellation from 2010.

Thales was part of the GOC consortium. Now GOC's partners are no longer working together, Thales and its other Finmeccanica joint venture - ground systems specialist Telespazio - which together form the Space Alliance, will bid for the construction of the programme's 30 spacecraft and surface elements, four of which are spares.

The spacecraft launches will be on a combination of Arianespace Soyuz and Ariane 5 rockets. The programme's timetable may enable all the launches to be from ESA's equatorial French Guiana spaceport. The Samara Space Center-built Soyuz craft are usually launched from Baikonur, but Soyuz launches from French Guiana will begin in 2009.

If EADS Astrium also makes a bid, with its traditional partners, for the 30 satellites and ground elements, then the two competing industrial teams will reflect the two original consortia that competed for the programme's concession contract to manage its deployment and operation and whose merger was forced by national political interference.




Source: Flight International