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The UK enthusiastically backed the idea of a closed shop, where non EU entities would not be allowed to work on this project. The idea was to limit competition

• makomk 6y ago
  This is entirely EU internal politics, from what I can tell - the UK has nothing to do with it. One of the author's earlier posts has some discussion about it: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/state-of-galileo-and-accident/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/state-of-galileo-and-accid... To cut a long story short, the satellites themselves and probably also the physical ground station infrastructure are provided by the ESA, which is not actually an EU institution and has non-EU members. Ther ground operations, however, are contracted out by the EU to various companies spread across the core EU states. The EU wants to take over European space activities for the same reasons they want everything else in Europe to fall under their control, so they're probably not on the best of terms with the ESA right now. I think there was also more political wrangling and changes of control that weren't covered in that post. Possibly, what you're thinking of is the EU deciding that the UK won't have access to Galileo military positioning after leaving and pointing to the fact that the UK didn't want other non-EU states to have access to it as justification. Which of course they can do - it's just possibly a little counterproductive, given that the UK is still the big military power in the region due to the lack of willingness for anyone else to take that on.