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when you open Google Maps or use any application that requires location services, your phone is connecting at that very moment to a handful of positioning satellites that are orbiting our planet. We commonly refer to this type of technology as GPS, but chances are that of all the satellite constellations your phone connects to, some of them are European, and It is not technically “GPS”. In Spain, many of the times we access the phone’s location we do so through the Galileo satellite constellation, which has been operational for almost a decade. The European Union is strengthening this technology and shielding it from interference for a reason: technological sovereigntysomething that is beginning to appear more and more on the EU political agenda. What is Galileo, and why it is not the same as GPS. Galileo is the European Union’s global navigation satellite system (GNSS), funded by the European Commission and developed together with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the EU Agency for the Space Program (EUSPA). There are four operational global GNSS: GPS (United States), GLONASS (Russia), BeiDou (China) and Galileo, the only one under fully civilian control. According to the European Commission itself, its open service offers an accuracy of one meter, up to four times better than traditional GPS. What the user calls “GPS” on their mobile phone is, in reality, GNSS, that is, a cocktail of signals from several constellations that the chip in your phone combines to fix the position. Your mobile phone already navigates with Galileo, and for years. Galileo began initial services in 2016 and opened to the public shortly after. From 2022, according to EUSPA, all smartphones sold in the European single market are required to be compatible with Galileo. Today there are more than five billion users around the world that connect to this constellation, according to ESA dataand the main chip manufacturers (Qualcomm, Broadcom and MediaTek) integrate Galileo as standard. If you want to know which satellites your phone is currently using, there are applications that allow you to find out, such as GPSTest. Importance for the EU. Galileo does not replace GPSis like a complementary layer that provides a certain strategic autonomy that until recently did not exist in Europe. If we think about it, satellite positioning is today a critical service in sectors such as civil aviation, road transport, agriculture, telecommunications, the E-Call emergency system of cars, financial transactions, etc. The European Commission esteem that approximately 10% of the EU’s annual GDP already depends on satellite navigation, which explains why it has spent more than two decades building its own constellation. Service improvements. Galileo is being strengthened and modernized over time. In December last year, ESA and Arianespace Two Galileo satellites were launched for the first time on board the European rocket Ariane 6This is curious because several previous launches had been carried out with SpaceX’s Falcon 9. There are still four first-generation satellites pending launch, and this year they will begin to be deployed the Second Generation (G2)developed by Airbus Defense and Space and Thales Alenia Space, with fully digital payload, electric propulsion, better atomic clocks and inter-satellite links. In parallel, in July 2025 it entered into operation the OSNMA service (Open Service Navigation Message Authentication), which adds a digital signature to Galileo signals to detect attempts to spoofing (the sending of false signals) in a context in which there is increasing signal interference in conflict zones. In fact, Rodrigo da Costa, executive director of EUSPA, counted that Galileo has become the first GNSS in the world to offer global authentication of its open signals. And now what. What is coming are more satellites, more services and better precision. Galileo’s High Precision Service (HAS), free and available globally, now enables precision of the order of 20 centimeters with compatible receivers (not directly from our mobile). The Second Generation will reinforce robustness against interference and open the door to more demanding applications such as autonomous driving. Cover image | Xataka and ESA In Xataka | Who can do more, Google or seven small Dutch companies together? Europe is on the verge of discovering it