The European Technology Platforms with the related Joint Technological Initiatives – the most important industry-led initiatives based on R&D priorities for technology sustainable development – cover strategic fields of broad and regional interests. Among these strategic industrial fields, the satellite industry has become a very important sector with a significant impact on the technological, social, economic and environmental aspects. Satellite communications have brought many benefits to society and citizens, in Europe and worldwide.
The space industry makes a vital contribution to the renewed Lisbon agenda for ‘jobs and growth’ and to the i2010 strategy for the European Information Society. Satellite can help build new markets – i.e. audiovisual and media new markets – and applications. Digital TV for example has already been broadcast over pan-European satellite systems for several years, with hundreds of digital TV programmes provided to European consumers. This sector contributes also to the ‘energy and climate change’ and ‘social welfare’ Lisbon objectives with initiatives, such as the wide footprints of satellites that help humanitarian organisations to respond to emergencies or disasters, wherever they occur. Satellite coverage may also be the only way to provide broadband connectivity to very remote areas, in the EU or globally, as shown by the recently announced EU Strategy for Africa. In this context the role of the European Space Agency has developed the strong vision for the space sector. Particularly, Galileo and GMES initiatives demonstrate the multilevel commitment to the space industry [9] [10] [11]. ISI (Integral Satcom Initiative) European Technology Platform [12] was launched in 2006 and was established to bring together for the first time in a unified, industry-led forum all the research and technology aspects related to satellite communications, including mobile, broadband, and broadcasting applications. The purpose is to foster and develop the entire industrial sector, maximise the value of European research and technology development, and contribute to EU and ESA policies [13]. Studies are undertaken to analyse the introduction of new IPS2 and related business models into markets and to assess their impact. Among the impact assessment studies of new technologies for manufacturing roadmaps, aerospace industry demand has been analysed as one of manufacturing sectors examined, in terms of R&D needs within the FP6 Leadership SSA project [14] [15]. This study showed that aerospace sector’s demand for new industrial response paradigms and new business models, together with the need to communicate everywhere and within a range of very different contexts. In recent years, many studies, at European, national and local levels, have been carried out with particular reference to the use of the Galileo system. These studies aim to contribute to the development of value-added services and applications to fully exploit all possible potential of this system into markets. This development of services and applications aims to fulfil market expectations with the development of next generation IPS2 featuring high value services. In particular, the following ones are the four Galileo services: • The Open Service (OS) that provides position and timing performance; it is competitive with other GNSS systems. • The Safety-of-Life Service (SoL) that improves the open service performance through the provision of timely warnings to the user when it fails to meet certain margins of accuracy (integrity). • The Commercial Service (CS) that provides access to two additional signals, to allow for a higher data throughput rate and to enable users to improve accuracy. • The Public Regulated Service (PRS) that provides position and timing to specific users requiring a high continuity of service, with controlled access. This new scenario for the space sector requires innovative approaches to fully exploiting the high-value features of satellites, considering not only technological or economic/financial aspects, but also social and
environmental issues. To this purpose the approach – proposed in the paper – considers a wide range of criteria to analyse the full potential of the new enabling technology. This paper reports on the methodology – developed and applied in an evaluation study – for Galileo system to become the enabling technology for new IPS2 of the space sector.