Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton made a remarkable entrance in his first closing speech at the European Space Policy Conference on Wednesday 22 January, not hesitating to criticise the way representatives of the space sector are working within the Galileo programme.
“I am glad because I am just at the end of a two-day process. All my colleagues, all the Commissioners have congratulated you, saying how important you are [...] So that now I can say why I am not too happy. Of course, in order to make progress together...”, the new commissioner began in front of several hundred representatives of the space sector.
Thus, during his speech, the Commissioner dwelt at length on the issue of governance, a subject in which he is an expert, having been a professor at Harvard precisely on the subject, by addressing the incident that disrupted Galileo’s services in July 2019 for almost a week (see EUROPE 12296/19, 12299/29).
“Some things that I understood and discovered are just not acceptable or are not acceptable anymore. If we want to be successful, we have to invent a new way to work together, the Commission, national agencies, ESA (the European Space Agency), GSA (the EU agency in charge of Galileo and Egnos operations), and industries”, he said.
“I don't want to go back to the issue we had in July. I'm starting to understand what happened. I am not yet 100% sure of the responsibilities, but I'm going to find out... And then, my job won’t be to punish anyone, but to propose and build together a new governance so that this does not happen again”, he continued, specifying that his goal was to achieve “zero defects”.
Interviewed by EUROPE, Jan Wörner, ESA Director General, sought to play down the summer 2019 incident, recalling that it is normal to have “human errors” when launching a new system. “If I give you 100 tasks, you will make at least one or two mistakes, even if you are very focused. This is why we must try [...] to compensate, even for human errors.... And this is something we also need to see in governance”.
“For governance, the foundation is there”, says Paul Verhoef, Director of Navigation at ESA and, therefore, of the development of Galileo, sounded out by EUROPE. However, he agreed that there was a need to define more precisely the tasks of each individual, acknowledging that there had been some “panic” at the time of the July 2019 technical incident. “We saw that we lacked the precision to know who was doing what”.
Last November, several MEPs on the Industry, Research and Energy Committee asked the European Commission a series of questions about the results of the board of inquiry set up following the summer incident that disrupted Galileo’s services. The Commission’s report took a hard look at the governance of Galileo and made a series of recommendations to remedy the situation (see EUROPE 12370/2). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)