What did the European satellite navigation system Galileo do for us Europeans on the ground?
For car drivers, for bicycle navigation and for joggers who record their running routes, the bottom line is in one word: nothing.
You can easily turn it off, no one notices.
Now the EU is devoting itself to another huge infrastructure project: The issue "plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives, in the growth of our economy, for our security and for our geopolitical weight," says EU Commissioner Thierry Breton.
So billions should be spent.
We hear the half-sentence on the radio and know immediately what he's talking about: it's about the motorway expansion that's stagnating everywhere and the dilapidated bridges all over Europe.
But at home we read what Breton says: the EU wants to invest billions in a satellite network.
What for?
"For rural areas," says a CSU deputy.
She has probably never heard of the latency problems on a radio link of more than 70,000 kilometers.
Maybe you can let fiber optic cables hang down from the satellites to the chimneys to make it work.