Europe's premier launch vehicle has been used for the first time to loft Galileo satellites; they were launched on an Ariane 5 rocket at 10:06 UTC (13:06) GMT from Kourou in French Guiana.

The mission has been successful as it was declared that the quartet was safely ejected from the upper stage of Ariane. As stated on BBC, controllers immediately made contact with the satellites and confirmed their solar panels were generating power and deployed.

The mission is said to bring in the in orbit constellation to 18 spacecraft, founded by the European Commission ESA is acting as a technical adviser and procurement agent on Galileo.

According to Horizon, there are lists of small issues that need to be addressed. However, it is still in the process that the security is in place in order to ensure that the system is properly protected when the service starts.

There are high hopes that Galileo will bring positive returns to member state economies in the form of new business to exploit better precision. The German UK consortium of OHB System of Bremen and Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) produced the latest spacecraft.

The director of navigation programmes at the European Space Agency Paul Verhoef stated that they are ready from a technical point of view and the performance is excellent.

Spacecrafts have always been launched in two batches but now they go up four at a time, Galileo is also believed to work along the US owned GPS and Russian Glonass systems. It is formally owned and funded by the European Commission and the EU is already investing billions in the sat-nav project. The next generation technology is said to have quicker and reliable fixes, the users will be able to locate their positions with a general error of one meter. The next contract is said to launch eight or more satellites.

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