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In the presence of the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, Elżbieta Bieńkowska, the contract was signed today in Brussels, at the headquarters of the European Commission, by Carlo des Dorides, Executive Director of the GSA, by Giuseppe Lenzo and Simon Plum, respectively CEO and COO of Spaceopal.
The contract will run for ten years, with a value of up to EUR 1.5 billion.
Spaceopal will assume responsibility for managing the Galileo satellite system and its performance: in particular, the operations and control of the system, its security, logistics and maintenance of the systems and infrastructure, the user support services.
The GSOp contract extends the scope of activities that Spaceopal has carried out for the Galileo programme since 2010, and includes the overall responsibility for the system's operations and its global maintenance.
The company will carry out these activities through the two Galileo Control Centres in Fucino (at Telespazio's "Piero Fanti" Space Centre in the L'Aquila province) and Oberpfaffenhofen (at the DLR site near Munich), as well as the GNSS Service Centre (Madrid) and a network of sites and stations distributed around the globe and connected by the Galileo Data Distribution network.
Spaceopal leads an industrial team that includes the participation of Telespazio and DLR-GfR, Vitrociset Belgium, SES Techcom, T-Systems, INECO, CNES, INRIM and TASF, ESOC.
Giuseppe Lenzo, CEO of Spaceopal, said: “Spaceopal is honoured and proud to have been selected by the European GNSS Agency as the Galileo System Operator for the next decade. Together with our partners of DLR and Telespazio, and the members of our core team, we have submitted a very reliable and highly competitive proposal, gathering many of the best available competence and capabilities across Europe. It is a privilege to be in the position to continue to support the deployment of the first European Space infrastructure, Galileo, and to contribute to the development of Galileo Services for European and international users“.
In addition to the planned activities in the Operations field, Spaceopal will provide a fundamental contribution to the development of the Galileo services through a GNSS Competence Cluster, which leverages the experience of its shareholders Telespazio and DLR-GfR and the other GSOp industrial partners, and through an international ecosystem of entities heavily engaged in application development, made up of institutes, Research Agencies, leading companies and SMEs (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, Austro Control, BavAIRia, Catapult, Cesah, Deutschen Zentrums für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), ERF, Fraunhofer IIS, Globant, Hexagon, Hexagon Geospatial, IABG, IBM, IFEN, IFSTTAR, Indra, ITS Hessen, KSAT, NSL, Qascom, Scisys, Septentrio, Sogei, SUR, Thales Avionics).