The last time I looked seriously at Galileo, the EU's GPS vanity project, was in April 2008 when I was disputing the commission's then latest claim - that €3.4 billion of our money would be enough to get the system up and running. The figure, like the system, was pure moonshine, I wrote. That €3.4 billion was nowhere near enough to get the full constellation launched and operational ...

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And the Airbus 400M .....
Socialist engineering at its best

The Galileo project, like most such projects are not vanity projects but projects to bolster the community spirit, and above all, to tie EU members in a knot which they will difficult to untie. For Eu10bn that is cheap. In fact the greater the cost with no success, the more difficult it is to withdraw from it. Therefore failure to targets is the one of the main objectives of the project.

If we assume that this is the strategy, then the Galileo project and others like it, will not finish till there is another project that can replace it.

We are not talking at cross purposes if I say it is ALSO very much a vanity project. It goes without saying that the primary purpose in more integration and to enhance the "European" sense of identity.

Tell Sid.....(SID) sudden ionospheric disturbance.

More SANTANDER anyone?

I sometimes wonder if they are just taking the piss. Cook up ever more convoluted and expensive projects because they can while secretly wondering, nay praying, for someone at the top of member nations to grow a spine and bring a project or two to a badly needed halt.

RAENORTH wrote: We are not talking at cross purposes if I say it is ALSO very much a vanity project. It goes without saying that the primary purpose in more integration and to enhance the "European" sense of identity.

Agreed.

The European Space Agency has control over a budget half the size of NASA's & has yet to put a human in space, apart from buying tickets on the shuttle.

The $10 million X-Prize was enough to produce Spaceship One & Virgin Galactic & $1000 m (£650 m) would produce a commercial fleet of orbital spaceships. This could be achieved with 3 years worth of our contribution to ESA but of course the purpose of Britain's space funding isn't anything to do with producing anything in space but to pay government workers & their allies.