Europe successfully launched two satellites into space on Friday, a step which aims to put its beleaguered Galileo satnav programme back on track. The two satellites were launched from French Guiana on a Soyuz rocket.

According to the team of experts associated with the mission, successful placement of the two satellites into earth’s orbit will bring the number of satellites in the constellation to 10 — a third of the way to a network of 30 platforms.

The two satellites aboard Soyuz blasted off at 23:08 local time (02:08 GMT), with the spacecraft due to separate from the rocket’s upper-stage three-and-a-half hours after that.

Galileo is a project of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. The project was specifically designed to complement the American Global Positioning System (GPS).

According to sources, the dedicated services based on the European network will not be made available until at least 14 operational satellites are in orbit. The signals from every new addition of the satellite in the orbit can be exploited by receiving devices with compatible chipsets.

Javier Benedicto, Galileo programme manager at the European Space Agency, said, “There are a number of chipsets that have been developed and are in the market deployed in smartphones and navigation equipment for cars, for instance”.

Those chipsets are already capable to combine the Galileo signals with the GPS signals, said Benedicto. The completion cost of the project to develop path to a ‘European GPS’ is to be some €7bn by 2020.

Didier Faivre, director of navigation at ESA, said the delivery cadence agreed in 2013 was being maintained.