B: Applications

Public Private Perplexity

High up in one corner of a trophy hall in the castle of the Bavarian royal dynasty in Berchtesgaden, Germany, hangs a poignant scene of inextricable conflict and death: the heads of two mighty stags, their antlers locked in combat.

Our tour guide translated the story behind this tableau. On October 14, 1735, a hunting party from the castle discovered the pair of struggling animals. Unable to separate the entangled antlers and with one deer’s neck already broken, the hunters had to shoot the other stag.

High up in one corner of a trophy hall in the castle of the Bavarian royal dynasty in Berchtesgaden, Germany, hangs a poignant scene of inextricable conflict and death: the heads of two mighty stags, their antlers locked in combat.

Our tour guide translated the story behind this tableau. On October 14, 1735, a hunting party from the castle discovered the pair of struggling animals. Unable to separate the entangled antlers and with one deer’s neck already broken, the hunters had to shoot the other stag.

A quiet murmur fell over the tour group, a post-conference excursion of delegates from the Munich Satellite Navigation Conference, as we reflected on the brute intransigence of nature. Then a voice spoke up from the back of the crowd: “That’s what happens when you have a PPP.”

Public Private Partnership or PPP, the now-notorious solution to a temporary impasse in Europe’s Galileo program. How quickly shibboleth can turn into epithet.

The laughter that followed the delegate’s wry comparison of death throes and thwarted politics drew strength from the discussions we had heard in the three previous days.

Prolonged negotiations have broken down between public patrons of Galileo and the private consortium seeking to complete and operate the European GNSS. The two sides have not come to terms over several major elements of risk-sharing associated with the program. The consortium has failed to incorporate a Galileo Operating Company (GOC), which would manage the system infrastructure as a profit-seeking venture under the oversight of the European GNSS Supervisory Authority (GSA).

“The negotiations are far more difficult than anyone anticipated,” Matthias Ruete, director general of energy and transport for the European Commission (EC), told his Munich summit audience.

Added Pedro Pedreira, executive director of the GSA, an EC entity that took over public sector responsibilities for Galileo at the beginning of the year, “The consortium is not able to present its own [unified] terms, let alone negotiate those terms.”

For their part representatives of the private consortium, while complaining that engineering changes and an elusive business model derived from the Galileo infrastructure were complicating the situation, acknowledged the new stalemate and their own internal disunity.

As this issue of Inside GNSS went to press, the problem was on its way to the council of European transport ministers meeting on March 22.

In its nearly 14 years of evolution, Europe’s GNSS program has met many such obstacles and, ultimately, always found a way through or around them. But never, as Ruete commented to me, have the challenges needed to be dealt with at such a high level.

And perhaps never with such urgency in the context of a global surge in GNSS expansion and modernization. China’s proposed new Compass system, the U.S. GPS III initiative, and restoration of Russia’s GLONASS are all scheduled (perhaps wishfully) to take place before or about the same time as Galileo is now expected to reach full operational capability around 2010–12.

PPP, a solution in the political environment of 1999, has now created a larger problem than the one it solved. Consequently, the public sector has a large responsibility for ensuring that it brings sufficient resources to resolve the current situation.

For years many in Europe have started referring to PPP as meaning, “Public Pays Private,” referring to the practical necessity for public subsidy — overt or covert — of an infrastructure that will ultimately pay for itself in the tax revenues generated by user equipment, services, and applications and not solely from revenues derived directly from the system itself.

For their part, the individual companies comprising the consortium need to resist the temptation of short-term competitive maneuvers or opportunistic national interests and reach an accord with the GSA.

Otherwise, without a two-sided exercise of self-discipline, it won’t matter which of these entangled entities gets its neck broken and which gets shot.

gl**@********ss.com

GNSS Marketplace

I like the marketplace.

I really do.

I love the energy, the innovation, the diversity, the pricing mechanism of demand curves, the buyer-seller feedback loops, the promotional hoopla, the whole deal.

I like the marketplace.

I really do.

I love the energy, the innovation, the diversity, the pricing mechanism of demand curves, the buyer-seller feedback loops, the promotional hoopla, the whole deal.

In the rather remote town where I live, we have a Saturday Market that’s more than 30 years old. Every week a bunch of home-grown entrepreneurs set up their booths with pottery, tie-dyed shirts, fresh blueberries, metal sculptures, Guatemalan tamales, jewelry, everything imaginable. There’s colorful banners waving and musicians playing and aging hippies dancing.

And — just to let you know how far we are outside not merely the D.C. Beltway but outside the whole North American Free Trade Agreement zone — all the products sold in the market must be grown or made by the people selling them.

Of course, the market can’t do everything.

It apparently can’t produce enough bird flu vaccine to protect a nation or distribute enough food in the right place to prevent hunger in the midst of plenty. And one thing many people wouldn’t have expected the market to do was produce a multitude of global navigation satellite systems.

But it has, with GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and perhaps even Beidou waiting in the wings.

And thank goodness for the marketplace, because it’s apparently going to take not merely a village, but a world to raise up a new generation of robust, modernized GNSS.

Fortunately, we have redundant programs, not merely redundant satellites. If one GNSS is delayed or changes its plan, another one is there to keep the parade moving forward. So, when Galileo sets itself hurdles, such as agreeing on not merely a concession contract but a business model as well, there’s GPS with its simple taxpayer-driven approach to keep things moving. And when GPS loses its way amid the engineering changes and chain-of-command silos of the military-industrial complex, there’s GLONASS speeding up its schedule in a race to the future.

Hopefully, by the time GLONASS encounters its next economic or technical or political challenge, Galileo and GPS will be back on track.

Yes, we definitely are in another “two-steps-forward-one-step-back” phase of GNSS development.

In an industrious and cooperative surge of activity, we have seen three sets of draft specifications reach fruition in the last few weeks: publication of a joint recommendation for design of new civil signals on GPS and Galileo, the Galileo Interface Control Document, and the GPS L1C interface specification.

Although further discussion and revisions are inevitable, these anxiously awaited items will provide guidance to GNSS product designers and encouragement to users.

Meanwhile, however, we once again have to wonder: what’s going on — or, more to the point, not going on — with the GPS program? In a short span of time, we’ve seen new delays in the first launch of a GPS Block IIF satellite (originally planned for 2005), a possible yearlong delay in GPS III, and a missed deadline for awarding an important contract on modernized user equipment for the Department of Defense (DoD) community.

Those developments underscore the need for implementing a recommendation in the Defense Science Board Task Force on GPS report: coordinate DoD responsibilities for GPS by designating a single focal point within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Currently, as with many other defense programs, the GPS program has three separate decision-making channels for acquisition, budget, and command. What in a well-managed organization might serve as supporting columns for a common endeavor have turned into self-contained silos sheltering processes, personnel, and purposes that become laws unto themselves. These parallel, non-convergent functions are producing asynchronous, discontinuous results.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald England has reportedly kicked the Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Executive Committee meeting schedule into high gear; perhaps he’s the man to do the same for the PNT program itself.

gl**@********ss.com