Agreement on Location of Galileo Facilities

The future Galileo Concessionaire has agreed the locations of the various facilities under its responsibility that are required for the successful deployment of the Galileo Programme.

According to this Agreement the Headquarters of the Galileo Concessionaire will be located in Toulouse, France. The Operations Company will be located in London, United Kingdom. The two Control Centres (Constellation and Mission) will be located in Germany and Italy as well as the two Performance Evaluation Centres supporting the concessionaire headquarters.

Spain will host facilities that include redundancy for the Control Centres, and are related to Galileo safety critical applications.

Furthermore, a new consortium of German companies will join the team, adding core competencies to the Concessionaire.

Following the budgetary consensus reached last month, this land mark agreement, achieved with the assistance of Mr. Van Miert, the EC appointed mediator, clears the way for the efficient implementation of the Galileo Programme supporting a commercial and best value for money approach to the Galileo Public Private Partnership.

The agreement truly reflects the European dimension of the Galileo program and signifies a major step forward. It paves the way for the creation of all the benefits expected from this truly European initiative: the generation of employment opportunities and innovation in the high technology industry segments across Europe.

The concession partners will now pursue the necessary steps to finalise concession contract with the GJU.