Galileo PRS lockout
After Brexit, Britain — a major financial and engineering contributor to Galileo — was barred from the encrypted Public Regulated Service. The UK has since spent close to £100M studying its own sovereign GNSS replacement.
A working catalogue entry, kept current. Each paragraph is drawn from the publicly documented record.
Following the failure of formal negotiations in mid-2018, the European Commission confirms that the United Kingdom — having voted in 2016 to leave the EU — will be barred from Galileo's encrypted Public Regulated Service after Brexit, despite the UK having contributed close to £1.4 billion to the programme and built core ground-segment hardware.
London responds by spending close to £100 million on a feasibility study for an indigenous sovereign GNSS, ultimately abandoned in 2020 in favour of a £400-million stake in OneWeb and other alternatives. The political memory in Westminster is durable: cooperation in space, when the political weather turns, is not insurance — it is exposure.
Each entry is publicly documented. Have a correction or a stronger source? Send it to the editorial team via the contact form.
