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WikiLeaks claims a space casualty

Controversial comments attributed to the CEO of a German satellite manufacturer have cost him his job. Late Monday the board of OHB-System announced it was removing Berry Smutny from the position of CEO, effective immediately. (The release says he is “suspended”, but the implication in the release and media reports, such as this Deutsche Welle article, is that the suspension is permanent.) Smutny’s dismissal is linked to comments he allegedly made to US diplomats in Germany revealed in a leaked cable obtained by WikiLeaks and published last week by the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.

And what did Smutny say that was so controversial? He was critical of Europe’s Galileo satellite navigation system in an October 2009 conversation with US officials, calling it a “a waste of EU tax payers money championed by French interests” and “a stupid idea that primarily serves French interests”. (He also claimed that an irony in German investment in Galileo, which could be used to improve the accuracy of missiles, is that some French missiles with nuclear warheads are aimed at Berlin.) What made the comments particularly controversial is that, a year ago, OHB-System, in cooperation with SSTL, won a contract to build the first 14 Galileo satellites. Smutny did say in the cable that he expected OHB to win a Galileo satellite order and, if so, the company would deliver on time and on budget, although he said there was a possibility the contract would be canceled if the overall costs grew to a level that “the EC can no longer stomach”.

When the cable was released last week, OHB-System issued a statement denying that Smutny made those comments and playing up the company’s “excellent relations” with French companies and institutions. However, in Monday’s statement, the OHB board “saw no alternative to this decision in order to effectively avert any further damage to the company on the part of customers, political representatives and the public at large.”

26 comments to WikiLeaks claims a space casualty

  • Anne Spudis

    Most impolitic of Mr. Smutny.

  • amightywind

    It is remarkable what an irritant the GPS has become to the world’s would be powers and how illusive development of a redundant capability is. Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao obsess on it, and why not? The same ubiquitous, seductive signal that allows their taxis to navigate city streets also reserves for the US military the ability to target any point on their territory with meter accuracy. At this point, GPS will be impossible to supplant. But I encourage our adversaries to spend their treasure to try.

  • German guy

    Being German myself I think it’s sad Smutny got supended. He just spoke out what everyone thinks already.
    Soon we will have GPS, Galileo, Glonass, Compass and some other systems I’m not yet aware of.

  • pathfinder_01

    amightwind, russia has a gps like system too……

  • Vladislaw

    “At this point, GPS will be impossible to supplant.”

    I don’t believe they are trying to supplant it, they want their military to also have the ability to target any point on our territory with pinpoint accuracy.

  • amightywind

    amightwind, russia has a gps like system too……

    Sure, they might get something running eventually. But in the meantime…

    http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2010/12/07/350611/proton-crash-set-back-for-russian-glonass-programme.html

    which is my point. Most people use GPS because it is useful and free. Russian users will use Glonass due to a Putin decree.

  • It is remarkable what an irritant the GPS has become to the world’s would be powers and how illusive development of a redundant capability is.

    Hrmm..? They hate us for our GPS? Leave it to you Windy to turn a German CEO’s firing into anti-international rhetorical paranoia.

    The lesson here? Be careful of what you say corporate/world leaders, WikiLeaks is watching!

  • amightywind

    I don’t believe they are trying to supplant it, they want their military to also have the ability to target any point on our territory with pinpoint accuracy.

    http://russianamericanbusiness.org/web_CURRENT/articles/642/1/Glonass-satellites:-wide-use-by-2012

    Its their business of course. However with policies like this it is no wonder they are having difficulty ascending to the WTO. America has 100,000 entrepreneurs developing wireless technology. Russia has Vladimir Putin.

  • you were interested in the impact of wikileaks on space

  • common sense

    @ pathfinder_01 wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 8:49 am

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLONASS

  • Major Tom

    “It is remarkable what an irritant the GPS has become to the world’s would be powers… At this point, GPS will be impossible to supplant. But I encourage our adversaries to spend their treasure to try.”

    US allies and adversaries are not trying to “supplant” GPS, especially not because it’s an “irritant”. They just don’t want to their military targeting to be dependent on a foreign signal that can be denied to them in a time of crisis. Of course, a second or third or fourth worldwide positioning signal is redundant and expends resources that could go elsewhere. But from the national security perspectives of these countries, there’s really no alternative to swallowing this expense.

    “Russian users will use Glonass due to a Putin decree.”

    Putin’s 2007 GLONASS decree was that a signal be made available for civilian use, over a decade after the system had gone into operation. It was a decree to the military to make the system available to civilians. It was _not_ a decree that Russian citizens had to use Glonass, especially since operation of that system has been intermittent.

    “America has 100,000 entrepreneurs developing wireless technology. Russia has Vladimir Putin.”

    Commercial, terrestrial wireless technology has nothing to do with the on-orbit satellite failures that GLONASS has experienced, the lack of budget for replacements since the fail of the Soviet Union, or the launch failure of the last three GLONASS satellites last December.

    FWIW…

  • Googaw

    Wow, an actual conversation on Space Politics about an actually useful space industry! The end of the world is near!

  • Das Boese

    It’s unfortunate that someone who should know better can’t let go of his paranoid delusions, but he certainly isn’t alone here in Germany, sadly. Not unlike the US, the current financial crisis in the EU seems to be seen as a signal for all the xenophobes, nationalists and other assorted nutbags to come out of the woodwork to profit from discontent with the EU and politics-as-usual.

    The comment about “french nuclear missiles aimed at Berlin” shows just how detached the man is from reality.

    What sets apart Galileo from all other satellite navigation systems is that it was conceived as a civilian system from the very beginning, not a military one that graciously grants access to civilian users. There are, of course gray areas and exceptions due to the diversity of politics and governments in the EU and I won’t rule out that military will be granted some special access or services, but the fact remains that they’ll be a customer of a service under civilian control.

    I’ll admit that I’m not entirely unbiased: My lectures in space operations (which I have sadly been forced to neglect somewhat) are held by the head of operations at the german GCC.

  • Robert G. Oler

    http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/opening-space-with-a-transorbital-railroad

    yet another goofy plan by Bob Zubrin..

    gee so many errors so little time

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/nasas-course-correction

    While Zubrins post is just strange…Jeff and Simberg have some good reasonable thoughts that merit debate. I would hope the entire article would be a blog post at some point.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Dave Salt

    Military applications are just one aspect. Civil air traffic control systems are becoming more and more reliant on them and the timing services they provide are now key to many major commercial activities.

    Given this situation, it’s hardly surprising that Europe and many other geo-political entities are planning GPS-like systems in order to guarantee these services. Having said that, the way that Europe has gone about developing Galileo has been an obvious mess and will be seen by many as a prime example as to why big government programmes are usually a bad idea.

  • amightywind

    What sets apart Galileo from all other satellite navigation systems is that it was conceived as a civilian system from the very beginning, not a military one that graciously grants access to civilian users.

    Yeah, conceived by enlightened eurocrats to be forced onto businesses, paid for with their own taxes, who were already getting GPS services for free. Nice of ‘em.

    http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/nasas-course-correction

    The ‘David Gurgen summary’ of the inept and sordid events of the last two years. How about this for a title: “NASA, Adrift in Deep Space.”

  • James T

    @ Robert

    What ideas did Jeff present in his article that “merit debate”? Don’t get me wrong, it was a good and read, but it was just a summary of the current political situation regarding the direction of America’s space policy/strategy. There weren’t any new ideas upon which debate could occur, just the facts of the situation. I don’t see why he would ever include it here as a blog post since all it would serve to do is “catch-up” people only recently getting interested in space politics.

  • Vladislaw

    Robert G. Oler wrote:

    http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/opening-space-with-a-transorbital-railroad

    yet another goofy plan by Bob Zubrin..

    gee so many errors so little time”

    I have to agree with your inital assesment. I started having problems with it as soon as I read the first part of the first sentence. *boldface mine*

    First, we could set up a small transorbital railroad office in NASA, and fund it to buy six heavy-lift launches (100 tonnes to low-Earth orbit) and six medium-lift launches (20 tonnes to low-Earth orbit) per year from the private launch industry, with heavy- and medium-lift launches occurring on alternating months. (A tonne is a metric ton — 1,000 kilograms, or about 2,200 pounds.) The transorbital railroad office would pay the launch companies $500 million for each heavy launch and $100 million for each medium launch, thus requiring a total program expenditure of $3.6 billion per year — roughly 70 percent of the cost of the space shuttle program.”

    Where is the track record for NASA doing something on this scale on budget and schedule successfully.

    Zubrin then goes on to suggest NASA should pay 100 million for a 20 tonnes launch, or about 22 standard tons. SpaceX charges 95 million for Falcon 9 heavy that will put up 35 tons or you could pay 100 million for 2 standard falcon 9’s and put up the 22 tons. SpaceX has suggested they could launch 125 – 140 tons for 300 million per launch. I wonder where he was getting numbers from?

    He then goes on to say:

    “NASA would then sell standardized compartments on these launches to both government and private customers at subsidized rates based on the weight of the cargo being shipped. For example, on the heavy-lift vehicle, the entire 100-tonne-capacity launch could be offered for sale at $10 million, or divided into 10-tonne compartments for $1 million, 1-tonne subcompartments for $100,000, and 100-kilogram slots for $10,000 each”

    Okay if you are launching a payload of 100 tonnes how can you sell 10 compartments of 10 tonnes? Isn’t a standard rule of thumb 1/3 of the payload is the container? This “dispenser” as he later on refers calls it?

    Then he lists current launch providers:

    “We don’t have to wait years to implement the transorbital railroad. We already have the capability to begin it right away, with twelve medium-lift launches per year using existing Atlas V, Delta IV, and Falcon 9 rockets.”

    I wonder why he includes the Falcon 9 but doesn’t use the proper payload size it could launch.

    I agree, it did have some goofy stuff in it. I can see what he is saying though, we use the buying power of Uncle Sam to do volume buying for the discount and pass that discount on the consumer.

    You could do this a lot simpler to just offer low interest loans for payload launches and then those space companies volume buy in as a single company representing all it’s members.

  • Vladislaw

    amightywind wrote:

    Yeah, conceived by enlightened eurocrats to be forced onto businesses, paid for with their own taxes, who were already getting GPS services for free. Nice of ‘em.”

    I agree with you windy, America just had the invisible space unicorns design, develop, build, launch and maintain our GPS. No American’s taxes went to pay for our GPS that is given away free.

  • Brian Swiderski

    Dave Salt: and will be seen by many as a prime example as to why big government programmes are usually a bad idea.

    Umm, GPS is a “big government program.” So is the internet. Galileo is ill-conceived in that it seeks to duplicate GPS rather than evolving beyond it. Modern Europe does many things well, but creativity in technology is not one of them.

  • Rhyolite

    Major Tom wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 1:53 pm

    “Of course, a second or third or fourth worldwide positioning signal is redundant and expends resources that could go elsewhere.”

    That is not actually true, at least for civilian users. First note that it is possible to build multi-system receivers. GPS/GOLNASS receivers are already on the market at the high end and advances in software defined radios will likely make GPS/GOLNAS/Galileo/Compass receivers widely available in a few years. Being able to receive signals from additional satellites improves the accuracy of the position fix and makes reciever less susceptible to blockage. Thus, from a civilian user perspective, the signals are (or will be soon) complimentary rather than redundant.

  • Robert G. Oler

    common sense wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 6:17 pm

    to bring the conversation forward…

    I read the comments you linked to as they were going up and then had a smile as I reread them.

    The problem with most space advocates (particularly the ones for whom HSF is not a job…the ones whose job it is mostly have an entitlement mentality) is that they have no sense of reality after Apollo.

    The Apollo political effort, not the program itself, but the politics behind it simultaneously define the effort (the Frontier mentality) and the magnitude (all out) and the reason for it (so the creatorless other people dont get there first…or we go to sleep under a “insert color here” Moon).

    Whittington on his blog beating up on Simberg (they seem to need a man hug worse then Rand and I do) says that Obama’s policies (sorry for the mishmash of prose here hard to lead into it)

    “Cancelling the return to the Moon was also hardly conservative either, as it smacks of retreat from space, ceding the high frontier to other countries”

    the problem is that Whittington (and most space advocates outside of the jobs world) are living in a world that existed maybe from the end of WW2 to about 1965 and really only for a very short time (maybe 5 years or so) is something the public believed…that space was the “high frontier”. not to mention the notion that other countries are trying to take it.

    But this is their world and as their world and reality have diverged more and more the explanations as to why their world should be the basis for politics and policy have gotten more and more extreme. And that is one reason why more and more space advocates (including the job holders) imagine that the rest of the American public should have no input into policy.

    The battle over “crewed or uncrewed” systems has ended in almost My every other areana…when there is a choice between sending a UAV or a piloted airplane guess which goes more and more. My hope for the next generation of space launch providers is that somehow they can escape Apollo.

    they can escape the goofy notions that Paul Hill has over in NASAspaceflight.com that the private launch providers need MOD…they dont. that we can escape the “bread and circus” mentality of one useless “spacefirst” after another…that we can escape the “frontier notion” of space…and instead start looking at space as something where what is done there for the most part has to pass the “how it affects life on Earth” test.

    That in any other environment is both the “profit test” and how “does it make the nation stronger” test.

    The irony of it is (to bring it to this thread) is that almost the sole reason the French want to do Galileo…is the European Union test. It doesnt take to long watching European TV to figure out (or be reminded of the fact) that the folks who are pushing European Union the hardest are the French.

    Galileo might be redundant in the world of GPS…almost every other nav signal is redundant in the world of GPS…but it is one of the symbols of nationhood….and it affects the nation.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Most of the comments here are quite strange.

    As I noted to “common sense” in my above post. Galileo has more to do with the politics of European Union then anything else.

    I’ve come up with a working theory in my almost one month in Africa…

    the battle between the past and the future is a battle between the forces that recognize the “power” in collective union and those that do not…it is almost the modern notion of “liberal” and “conservative”.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2011/01/hill-speaks-valuable-future-role-played-mod/

    at 14 dead astronauts and a shuttle stuck on the pad because somehow it got bad metal in the tank…you would think that these people would just shut up and go quietly into the good night.

    For Paul Hill to imagine that shuttle operations has anything to teach in a substantive fashion the USAF which operates enormously complex airplanes, spacecraft and you know the National Nuclear Deterrent (or at least two legs of it) not to mention the “specials” which go with it…is goofy.

    For Paul Hill to imagine that MOD has something to teach private launch folks who well manage to launch vehicles with 1/10th the folks the shuttle does…is equally goofy.

    and then there is the language

    “MOD is committed to “bullet proof” technical support to the operational programs”

    or

    ““To always be aware that suddenly and unexpectedly we may find ourselves in a role where our performance has ultimate consequences.”

    or the continued use of the word “ruthlessly”.

    worked so well during Columbia’s last mission.

    these folks have no clue of real engineering. The US Navy runs nuclear attack and boomer subs in an environment far more dangerous and far more unforgiving the spaceflight…and does it with 20 somethings.

    and they dont use excuses like “we didnt mean to do it”.

    Ruthless. get a life

    Robert G. Oler

  • common sense

    @ Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 19th, 2011 at 3:58 am

    “the folks who are pushing European Union the hardest are the French”

    Well here is a reason to why: WW-II. Now the Germans are pushing and trying their part. The Germans got somehow diverted in their mission because of the reunification. Not an easy task to reconnect two countries 50 years later. Maybe the Koreans could take a look at that – a different story though. The British have somehow excluded themselves from the European Union effort because of their “special” relationship with the US. But things are changing on that front too. They had (still do?) a program for joint aircraft carrier forces with the French. If you think politics in the US are complicated because of the many states then you should try Europe. They don’t really know where they are going but they are trying. The eventual result of all this will be a world with Europe, with or without Russia, the US with or without the UK, Asia mostly dominated by China, and Africa. A lot of problems will most likely stem from Africa which seems to be a place where unity does not mean much – probably because of the actions of the West and now China. The key will be to see how Europe handles Turkey for example. Turks seem to live in both worlds: Western and Eastern and it is a laboratory so to speak we ought to pay attention to. They may be key to appeasement with Muslim nations in Europe. Malaysia may be key in Asia. Etc. Slightly off-topic sorry ;)

    Can HSF be somehow a part of it? Yes it can and it is what Bolden, I suspect, was trying to do in the Middle-East. However, it will take time to go around all the petty absurdity that resulted from his trip/comments. The political discourse in the US today is absolutely insane not to say plain idiotic. Suffice to look at HSF here to have a good feel for how narrow-minded a lot of people are.

    Oh well…

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