US aerospace giant Boeing made it pretty clear last week that it would be interested in making some megabucks by building some of the European Union's Galileo satellites - those at the heart of Europe's putative 3.4 billion-Euro global positioning network.

That is ironic indeed, given the reason Galileo exists in the first place: to combat American dominance and control of the satellite positioning market. Why 'control'? Because the satellites in the GPS constellation have a function called...