A "Grand Projet''

The French, who tend to lead European aerospace undertakings, have a great love for ``grand projets.'' These tend to mean huge and expensive schemes, ill thought-out and with doubtful value that are intended mainly to rival American ones. A good example is the planned Galileo navigational satellite system designed to compete with the GPS. In the strange opinion of President Chirac of France, Europe will be doomed to ``vassal status'' if it does not have its own system. With the absurdly optimistic price tag of £2 billion–more likely to be 10 or 20 times that if it is ever completed–it will rely largely on private investment. But according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, there will never be enough private money to make it feasible.

chattering, foolish and vain

The reason is simple. The GPS system is popular with hikers and motorists and is free of charge. It works perfectly well with an accuracy of about 20 metres, so why would anyone want to replace it with a new one? The best managed projects go ahead only after a ``risk analysis'', which tries to predict everything that can go wrong. The worst ones, like the Galileo system (or Britain's rail privatisation), assume, without question, that everything will go right: that there will be no delays, no problems with engineering, with politics or with magagement. The managers of these bad projects–if indeed anyone is in overall charge of them–take it for granted that there will be adequate funding, no cost over-runs and no technical disasters. Their wishes must come true. It is inconceivable that they should not, because are they not wonderful people who are bound to do everything perfectly? But if there is a disaster, then they will hold an secret enquiry, like they did after the Beagle 2 disaster, in which investors and scientists are kept in the dark about what went wrong and nobody knows whom to blame. Then they will press ahead with another ill-conceived scheme without learning anything from the first. These bad managers remind me of the monkey folk in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, who are ``chattering, foolish and vain . . . They never do what they set out to do . . . They have no memory . . . They carry a branch all day, meaning to do great things with it, and then they snap it in two.'' More seriously, the Galileo system seems a fearsome waste of money. How much of that £2 billion (or should I say £40 billion?) could be better spent on something useful, like further exploring the universe? Galileo could be highly dangerous. Having many new large satellites in low Earth orbit increases the risk of debris in space in the event of explosions and collisions, making space travel more hazardous for all us. Moreover in the event of war, GPS will be shut down by the American military. But Galileo would probably never be shut down–probably because no one would know how to shut it down–allowing enemies to use it to attack us. It is a good rule that when politicians seek private funding for a ``grand projet'' it is wise to keep one's wallet firmly closed. This is just such a case. Adrian Berry is Consulting Editor (Science) of the Daily Telegraph..