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Bremen (dpa) - After the defeat in the tender for the new generation of Galileo navigation satellites, the Bremen space company OHB wants to use the employees for other projects if possible.
“We now have to reduce our costs and we also have a surplus of staff in the relevant departments,” said CEO Marco Fuchs of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (Friday).
"But I am confident that we can deploy many employees in other projects."
According to the report, around 120 of the company's 3,000 or so employees are currently working on the Galileo project.
How it will go on with them is therefore still open.
The European Space Agency ESA informed OHB on behalf of the EU Commission that OHB Systems AG's offer was unsuccessful.
Instead, the Franco-German Airbus group and the Italian-French Thales Alenia Space were awarded the contract, as the EU Commission announced in Brussels.
"That we are now leaving the project is a major failure," said Fuchs.
He admitted that his own mistakes may have played a role.
“Maybe we've become a little too self-confident and comfortable, I can't rule that out.
But at the moment we're still at the very beginning of the analysis.
In future, OHB will focus on doing business with private commercial providers.
"This process will now accelerate," said Fuchs of the newspaper.
"Of course we would have liked to have won Galileo, but the opportunities in commercial business are now there - and we will take advantage of them."
This includes, for example, the construction of huge constellations of internet satellites.
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OHB
Communication from the EU Commission
OHB press release on the launch of the GMS-T satellite