In 2018, British companies discovered that they could no longer get contract work to develop some of the most sensitive parts of the EU’s flagship space project. Hailed as Europe’s answer to the American Global Positioning System (GPS) and expected to launch fully in 2020, the EU’s Galileo global navigation satellite system (GNSS) became the latest victim of Britain’s vote to leave the EU.
The UK responded by declaring its intention to seek its own ‘sovereign’ alternative to Galileo. This resulted in a feasibility study that began in late 2018 and was due to be released in March 2020, at a cost of £92m. The Financial Times reported in early March that an internal review at the Cabinet Office had delayed the release of this feasibility study until the autumn, citing concerns over the projected spiralling costs of the programme and doubts over whether Britain has the actual capacity to pull such a project off.
The decision to ‘build our own’ was born of the political vanity of the May Government in 2018, due in no small part to the then Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson’s desire to make this a front page news story. It was an announcement made in the heat of the moment in 2018, when the top decision-makers did not really understand what it was they were advocating – in particular its cost, scale, development time, and complexity.
