As you may already know European Union has been relying on USA’s GPS satellites for positioning for many many years. They want to break this dependency with their own set of positioning satellites, called Galileo.

European Comission just awarded contracts to build the first 14 satellites to a German company, which will send them to space using Russian Soyuz rockets. If everything goes to plan Galileo could be operational as soon as 2014.

Galileo project started back in 1999.

Last year, the European Court of Auditors criticised the Galileo project as ill-prepared and badly managed.

The commission said some services would be available by early 2014, including the “open service,” which will be freely available to the public in Europe, just as the US GPS system is.

Also available early will be the search and rescue service.

Source