Graham wrote:
EGGNOG would be better.
:) Not yet the season!
On the other hand if you look at it from the UK Gov. point of view, it would provide demand for the engineering skills and services within the UK, and so most of the money paid would come back in taxes. Well, that’ll be the theory, anyway. The reality is they’ll buy something off the shelf from the USA, so the money would just go there instead!
Peter wrote:
A replacement for EGNOS alone would not cost very much. But would still be a silly price to pay for the purely procedural stunt of “we now have our own SBAS signal so we can use it for what we like”
So getting an SBAS payload added to a geo satellite, getting it built and launched. Adding a second satellite for redundancy, adding sufficient ground monitoring stations and multiple computer centers with uplinks is going to be sensible or cost effective. I think not. Probably run in the Billions and be 10 years out.
Not far off. EGNOS did cost 1.1 billion to implement, up from an initial estimate of 300m.
The US WAAS apparently cost $50 million to operate (see wikipedia article on WAAS). Looks like the £30k offer for the UK weren’t that much of a bargain after all…
EGNOS did cost 1.1 billion to implement
Not sure that is applicable. EU funded projects get everybody to jump onboard, and everybody wants a slice of the cake. Grants are handed out to collaborative projects preferentially regardless of synergy. The result is a huge waste of money. The whole EGNOS+Galileo thing was a “prestige” money pit, and Galileo remains there. If a project is done in one country it costs a lot less. OTOH the UK’s record in govt managed tech projects is poor…
If WAAS costs $50M/year to run that sounds reasonable.
I can’t remember where I saw the £30M figure – probably on the internet 
Googling doesn’t dig up anything.
How much did the 2 UK aircraft carriers + aircraft cost? How much do the cost to run?
What financial gain will the UK get from a war with China?
Spending money on projects which do not produce a financial return is wasting money. That some returns in taxes still leaves it a waste of both investment money and engineering skill.
Cobalt wrote:
Looks like the £30k offer for the UK weren’t that much of a bargain after all…
This discussion – and others elsewhere – actually show that the price offered by Gallileo to the UK was just about perfectly chosen. As a vendor you exactly want to hit the price where it is just not economically better for the potential buyer to build the service by themselves.
It is a normal business transaction/ negotiation in the end, not a political game – at least on the side of the vendor.
The UK is doing its own SBAS
It was posted here.
But why? The UK receives EGNOS so they don’t need their own SBAS.
Unless … Brussels has instructed EGNOS to discard corrections from UK monitoring stations!! That’s actually quite possible politically, since it would prevent the UK getting the EGNOS signal post-brexit.
If this is really true, it is absolutely staggering. Well, maybe not, since Brussels has withdrawn “authorisation” to the UK for the “safety of life” aspect of the EGNOS signal, it would be logical for them to also not broadcast any corrections useful to the UK on that signal.
However, France has some monitoring station in northern France, so EGNOS should continue to work well enough.
It will “mess up” the vast installed base of EGNOS GPS receivers – but only in the UK, and probably undetectably
At least the UK approach is pretty cheap, and vastly cheaper than doing their own orbiting constellation.
EDIT: this actually makes sense. The UK CAA felt obliged to de-publish LPV approaches (regardless of technical reasons) and this relatively cheap fix – the cost of renting a transponder on a satellite – enables it to self-certify the “safety of life” (SOL) status just by paying some consultancy (run by ex CAA i.e. ex RAF people) say 100k, for a due diligence document, and then we can have LPV again. The positioning will continue to use the US NAVSTAR system just like everybody is using anyway (Galileo is basically dead).
