Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times
The few satellites launched so far for the European Union's Galileo navigation system, which faces a budget test this week, are tracked in Fucino, Italy.
FUCINO, Italy — With lofty dreams of European unity increasingly grounded by economic woe and the weight of narrow national interests, an array of computer screens here in central Italy blinks with faint signs that — far away in space, at least — Europe’s often quarreling nations can still sometimes find common cause.
Ringed by snow-covered mountains on a plateau east of Rome, the Fucino Space Center stands guard over the European Union’s flagship joint project: a satellite navigation system that is years behind schedule, many times over its original budget and unlikely to start operating for at least another year.
Europe’s future commitment to the project, known as Galileo and designed to create a new, improved and European-controlled version of America’s Global Positioning System, is to be decided in Brussels on Thursday and Friday, when European leaders will try for a second time, after talks failed in November, to hash out a long-term budget for the 27-nation bloc.
With recession and austerity clouding much of the Continent, they will argue over where the ax should fall on a European Union budget for 2014 to 2020, which would total nearly $1.35 trillion as drafted. An over-budget satellite navigation system that is years from full completion, largely a duplicate of an American system already widely used in Europe and unlikely ever to generate much revenue would seem to be in the budget cutters’ cross hairs.
But Galileo’s backers are confident, so much so that they are asking for $8 billion beyond the more than $4 billion already spent. For Galileo promises perhaps the one thing that still seems able to overcome European leaders’ devotion to austerity: economic and technological independence from the United States.
“It is like a car going on a highway — it is very difficult to stop,” said Lucio Magliozzi, chief operating officer of Telespazio. The Italian-French company manages the Fucino control center, which is tracking the handful of Galileo navigation satellites launched by Europe so far.
Galileo, also known as the European Global Navigation Satellite System, has already burned through more than three times the original budget target and has only 4 of the 30 planned satellites in orbit. Even so, the troubled program highlights how, through sheer force of will and a judicious sharing of economic spoils, the European Union can at times push ahead with objectives it defines as “strategic.”
Space “has a strategic importance for the independence of Europe, for employment and for competitiveness,” Antonio Tajani, vice president of the European Commission, the union’s policy-making arm, said in a recent speech. Mr. Tajani, who is also the commission’s senior official responsible for space projects, added, “This is why we need a European space policy that is even more ambitious.”
The budget talks are expected to be dominated by the competing demands of countries, like France, that want to maintain heavy spending on farm subsidies and those in poorer regions that want to avoid cuts to so-called cohesion funds designed to narrow economic gaps on the Continent.
This leaves items like research vulnerable to deep cuts. Research is heavily favored by Britain and some other countries as a lever for Europe to be competitive in the future but is less immediately tied to the economic fortunes of individual states.
One project that could get hit is a satellite observation system known as Copernicus, or Global Monitoring for Environment and Security. Europe’s efforts to monitor earth from space suffered a big blow last year when its biggest satellite, an eight-ton device called Envisat, suddenly stopped working. The Copernicus program has its own satellites and is now mostly operational but has struggled to get a clear funding commitment in the next long-term union budget.
Europe “is like someone who buys a car but has no money for petrol,” Diego Canga Fano, a senior European Commission official in the department responsible for industry, said at a space conference in Brussels last week, referring to uncertainty over money for the Copernicus project. “The car is useless. We are a bit in this situation.”
Galileo has fared better, gathering a powerful group of backers in Brussels and among industrial and political interests in key member states. They include France, Germany and even Britain, which is usually a leading voice for deep cuts and was once a strong critic of the navigation program.
