One man's mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe's Galileo satellites going dark Key details about the failure of Europe's Galileo satellite system over the summer have started to emerge – and it's not pretty. While one key official has sought to blame a single individual for the system going dark, insiders warn that organizational chaos, excessive secrecy and some unusual self-regulation is as much to …
US DoD - the reason we don't want to release the hi-res GPS feed is because we've spent a lot of time and money getting it to work and we don't see why everyone else should get it for free
EU - Pah. It's just clocks and maths. How hard can it be ?
US - Be my guest.
"because we've spent a lot of time and money getting it to work"
It is, of course, perfectly possible that this statement is entirely true. Specifically, we don't know how many times the high-precision parts of the US system fell over in their early stages, because we didn't have access to them. But it is only clocks and maths, so I expect Europe will get there eventually, just like the US did.
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That's because the lone employee is probably an incompetent manager who has jumped from one project to another whilst always pinning the blame on whoever was closest to the cock-up rather than whoever was responsible for it.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causation
When has a simple answer for a complicated question ever worked?
You have no idea what to do next after leaving and if you think you do it can be shot down in 57 ways in the first five minutes.
But carry on, I guess learning the hard way will work if nothing else does.
>> in which no one wants to take the blame for problems caused by unnecessary organizational complexity
Hmm, that smells a lot like how the Brits do things as well... From recent memory..
Unified Credit Benefits, National Rail and Brexit itself.
Throwing stones and glasshouses?
In short, the UK is a classic British venture: a great idea with (some) talented people that has turned into a bureaucratic mess in which no one wants to take the blame for problems caused by unnecessary organizational complexity.
BETTER OFF OUT!
Sounds like we need UKxit by the same logic..
Discuss.
Yes, this is typical EU. But, all things considered, the fact that "typical Europe" now means "coming up with awesome shared projects and then fucking them up due to political bickering" is a massive improvement. I mean, "typical Europe" before the EU used to mean "war". Had been since literally forever. If it takes another hundred years to get a EU that really works, the process will still look pretty good in a history book.
I used to work in a related area where high accuracy, uptime and reliability are critical. Anything done on the live system had to be rehearsed on the test system first. It had to be done according to a written procedure which had been reviewed and approved beforehand. Part of the review was a risk assessment (i.e. ask "what could possibly go wrong?"). There also had to be a reversion procedure (i.e. "We screwed up; put it back the way it was").
We did have occasional outages, including one particularly embarrassing incident where "Do routine thing" was next to "Shut down the system" on a menu. But they were rare, and both management and engineering took justifiable pride in that.
One thing we would *NEVER* do is blame the engineer holding the mouse (short of actual malice). If they made a mistake, its because the system upstream of them enabled that mistake and set them up to fail. You don't shoot the engineer, you fix the system.
@Paul Johnson 1
In an ideal world I should be down voting you for stating the bleedin' obvious, but the reality is I have to upvote you for banging the drum for automation and repeatability.
I hope everyone here is scripting their changes - not just following a written procedure - although that in itself is better than doing it ad-hoc. If not you need to start asking yourself why not. Not working for ESA is not a valid reason.
"The EU is planning to create a new European Space Agency, called EUSA, which will largely be a renaming of the existing Global Navigation Satellite System agency. Yet another space entity, GSA, will become the EU Agency for the Space Program, and the EC will soon have a new director general position in charge of the “defense industry and space.” In short, there are a lot of political maneuverings and that is causing all kinds of other problems."
Really ????? WTF ? Why ? Why creating issues whereas a very good company, called ESA, had already so many successes ? Sure, this mishap is embarrassing, but everyone went there, I'm sure the US had some glitches as well, back in the time, but since it was new and military restricted, no-one got the message.
I'm baffled and sad. This is all gonna destroy what was done ...
As for ESA, I'm sure they'll figure out how to setup rollbacks processes for this. It is surely not simple.
Because, actually the ESA isn't an EU organisation. Not all EU countries are in the ESA, though the the EU as a whole contributes. Also there are three (I think) non-EU countries in the ESA.
It's explained accurately in this otherwise fictional account of Aliens visiting earth. "The Solar Alliance" by Ray McCarthy. The Aliens quickly figure out that the UN is mostly a talking shop. The ESA and EU take them longer to understand. A new Earth agency is setup by the countries with space launch facilities, or willing to make a major commitment, but who is REALLY running the Solar Alliance, with its HQ in Shannon Ireland, an Israeli Finance director and an ex KGB/SVR Russian in charge of Security?
No, amfM1, I don't think so. though I don't know how random the pseudo codes are, so in stego theory, yes, but that's only a downlink - so no mesh.
I think it (Galileo) primarily came from the fact that L1 was unreliable due SPOF, serious CIP required a backup, "A-GPS," where A should be as many things as possible. Why not build one's own!
And there will always remain a serious question mark over your statement outside of ...3P C&C, to which I just answer, really?
But far too complicated for them to understand :)
Wasn't the UK going to build and launch its own system as soon as we left? I suppose it's all Parliament's fault that that hasn't happened yet. Still arguing about whether the clocks should be set to 1953, 1940, or 1887.
Who uses Galileo GPS? Genuine question - I realise that the original GPS system was USA based and that this was to reduce reliance on the Yanks (don't Russia have their own system?), but I don't I have ever seen a GPS or smart phone that has a "Compatible with Galileo GPS!" type sticker on it.
The IT Crowd reference -
So it was fixed by switching it off and on again? Was it running on Vista....?
It's built into most GNSS chips as standard now. There are over 150 Android smartphones on the market which can receive Galileo (in addition to GPS and GLONASS) and it's been available on the iPhone since the X/8/8Plus were released in 2017.
There's no sticker, it's just baked into the chips by default, same as your handset being quad-band and being able to connect to networks using 2/3/4G in multiple countries, allowing for different regional spectrum allocations.
One of the great issues of any GPS system is you don't know exactly where anything is at any given time. You know were it was and you can predict where it is going to be but its only a very good guess. The satellites are being tracked but there is a delay between signal tracking them and getting the info into a computer half a continent away. The weather is going to delay signals in odd ways that usually allows compensation using different frequencies but only some times. The clocks are ticking away with some very high degree of accuracy yet subject to all the oddness that relativity in a gravity well has to offer. The ground stations are busy floating on land that is cruising in different directions at a few cm a year which was considered slow and stable until better GPS systems showed drift rate can vary over the months yet maintain a rock solid annual average. Yet in all that chaos, my phone still can display a map of where it is down to a few meters. I guess this problem demonstrated just how related the chaos of all guesses can be.
Can you imagine if the official response was "turn it off and on again", in the middle of an actual conflict, 15+ years down the road?
I'm going to hazard a guess that were this military only, it would cost 4 to 8 times more than it currently does, but at least the org chart would be a bit more vertical, if porky.
I think in the middle of an actual conflict 15 years hence, there would be no point in turning it back on again before you'd shot down the several dozen "interference satellites" in low orbit beaming noise on the relevant frequencies at several thousand times the GPS signal strength.
You know, I think a lot of people wanted to move from GPS to Galileo due to it being a lot less boggled down in politics and better accuracy. However neither Galileo going down or the spat between ESA and EU because of politics is really convincing any manufacturer to actually adopt Galileo rather than sticking with just GPS.
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