The British government plans to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in its own satellite navigation system so that it will not be dependent on other systems such as GPS or the European Galileo after Brexit. In this context, the government bought 20 percent of the satellite company OneWeb. Around half a billion pounds of tax dollars are said to have flowed. The investment should save OneWeb from the bankruptcy triggered by the Corona crisis. However, experts sharply criticize the investment, as the Guardian reports.
“Basically, you have to start by buying the wrong satellites,” said Bleddyn Bowen of the University of Leicester. There he deals with space travel in connection with politics. “OneWeb is basically working on the same idea as Elon Musk’s Starlink: a mega-constellation of satellites in orbit close to the earth that provides people on the ground with internet.
Lobby work
“What happened is that OneWeb’s very talented lobbyists convinced the government that some of the satellites could be completely redesigned to add navigation to them,” Bowen added. “It combines unconfirmed technology with a mega-constellation designed to do something completely different. It’s a technical and economic gamble. ”
A GPS alternative is about secure, encrypted signals that are accurate to the centimeter. “I don’t know if this can work with satellites as small as OneWeb’s,” Bowen said.
Also, all competing systems would be in a much higher orbit than OneWeb’s satellites.
“Makes no sense”
Analyst Giles Thorne is also skeptical about the decision. “It doesn’t make sense to me,” he says. He suspects that there is a “nationalist agenda” behind the decision, since OneWeb is formally a British company.
The British government did not respond directly to the criticism and simply stated that it was in the process of developing a new national space strategy.
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