Political divisions between the US and Europe may have emerged during the war in Iraq, but a transatlantic technological division is also emerging in global communications.
Next year, the European Space Agency, with funding from the European Commission, will launch the first step towards Galileo, Europe's civilian satellite navigation system. The European Geostationary Navigation and Overlay Service (Egnos) will augment signals from the American Global Positioning System (GPS) and the Russian Global Navigation Satellite System (Glonass).
GPS currently relies on signals transmitted from 28 US military satellites 20,000km above earth. The success of Egnos is vital in proving that Galileo's constellation of 30 satellites will be viable technically and economically. Galileo is due to be deployed in 2008. Until then, Egnos will improve the accuracy of GPS from 20 metres to two metres using four master control centres across Europe, including one at Gatwick.
Part of international plans for an integrated global network, Galileo will be interoperable with GPS and Glonass. But if you buy a satnav system for your car now, you won't be able to use it on the Galileo network.
When Galileo is fully deployed, the Americans will lose their monopoly in satellite navigation - a position they have enjoyed since the mid-1990s.
It was reported last year that the US administration was not happy about this European independence. The US deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, wrote to European defence ministers asking them to ditch Galileo.
"The Americans were not pleased," says Gilles Gantelet, transport spokesman at the European Commission. "GPS was developed for the military and they will lose their monopoly. And second, more importantly maybe, they consider there is a risk that some enemies could try to use Galileo. With GPS they dominate the sky, so during the war [in Iraq], they did what they wanted. The Iraqis were using GPS, but the Americans were able to jam it."
The US has curbed its resistance to Galileo amid assurances that system security would be of paramount importance. Yet until recently, the Americans may not have needed to pressure the Europeans into sticking with GPS - lack of funding could have done the job for them. But in March last year, the European Union agreed to a budget of €550m. The European Space Agency, dominated by France, will match this figure.
The planning and deployment period (1998-2008) is expected to cost €3.6bn. But would it not be simpler and cheaper to extend the GPS system?
Gantelet says control is a big issue. "If you always use your parents' car," he says, "maybe the day you need it, you won't be able to use it."
And apart from issues of sovereignty and strategy, commercial interests and building technical expertise in Europe are also important.
An independent study carried out by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2001 found that the economic impact of Galileo would yield €17.8bn from 2008 through to 2020. Urban traffic management, fleet management, position tracking, emergency services, theft protection and passenger information are just some examples of anticipated revenue streams.
Galileo will also offer an improved search and rescue capability and encrypted services to the police and other emergency services.
Such guarantees will never be made by GPS because its priority is the US military. In the run up to the war, for example, the German national motoring association warned that signals may be skewed so that Iraqi forces would be less likely to determine the position of US forces.
GPS works best in wide open spaces - buildings and other large obstacles can cut out the signal. But Egnos plans to get round this by using its Signal-in-Space through Internet service which enables satellite navigation through the internet. ESA, together with Spanish company, GMV Sistemas, is developing handheld guidance systems to guide blind pedestrians through busy city streets via a wireless internet connection.
The real key to Egnos's success, however, will be the 30 ranging and integrity monitoring stations (Rims) across Europe, which will take measurements of GPS satellites over Europe and send this data to a master control centre. The master control centre calculates GPS signal and positional accuracy and inaccuracies, ionospheric delay information and integrity signal (a measure of accuracy given to the corrections which are essential for safety critical applications). All the data is sent back to Egnos geostationary satellites which then broadcast it to users of Egnos. Users will have a guaranteed accuracy of 1-2 metres versus a non-guaranteed accuracy of 10-15metres for GPS on its own. This makes Egnos capabable of safer helicopter navigation during rescue operations in bad weather .
But the Americans may take some convincing that any other system will beat GPS. Ed Parsons, at the Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado - one of the control centres for GPS -remains circumspect: "You have to have something that is a 30% improvement on GPS. We're talking about things that move at a fair clip in aviation - we don't need that level of accuracy in aircraft at speed."
None the less, the Americans are working on their own Wide Area Augmentation System and modernising GPS. But who will win this particular race into space?
Glenn Gibbons, who runs the US-based Galileo's World website, says: "It's a little hard to compare the systems, because GPS has been fully operational since the mid-1990s. So, we won't know how Galileo's actual performance compares with GPS's until five or six years from now."
Even with such high stakes to play for, there's still a chance that the European project might not really take off next year. But if it does, whatever gets sent into space from Europe should make travel around the continent a lot safer.
