At the first meeting of the steering group on Thursday 9 February, Internal Market and Industry Commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska met representatives of the major space industries, the director general of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the head of the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) to assess the situation with regard to the malfunction of some atomic clocks affecting a number of satellites in the Galileo programme.
In January, ESA Director General Jan Wörner told journalists that several atomic clocks on board Galileo satellites had failed for reasons that remained to be determined (see EUROPE 11706). The timing of this announcement could scarcely have been worse as the European Commission had just, in December 2016, announced the launch of initial services (see EUROPE 11689).
The commissioner wanted, therefore, to meet several industry representatives, including the chief executives of HBO, Airbus Space System and SSTL. She also wanted to meet institutional players: the head of the CNES, Jean-Yves Le Gall, and ESA Director General Jan Wörner. The purpose of the meeting was to take stock of the clock “failures”. “The commissioner had not been hearing the same story about the clocks from industry” as from the ESA, a source has told EUROPE. It was for that reason that she was keen to discuss the issue with those involved to review the situation.
Informal meeting before the formal meeting. According to the above-mentioned source, Wörner held an impromptu meeting with industry representatives so that they were all on the same page before seeing the commissioner.
The Galileo programme is one of the flagship programmes of the European space strategy presented last October (see EUROPE 11655), the ultimate goal of which is to compete with the American GPS programme and to give Europe independence in satellite navigation. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)