It's a typical European private/public faff. The real reason that Galileo started is that it is politically embarrassing to rely on the US military for a key piece of infrastructure, especially now that GPS has developed into a system that can be denied to quite small geographic areas without affecting the rest. It's not as if it's unthinkable that EU and US would fall out to such an extent that this became a factor.
But it's impossible to sell a major project on that basis to all the European states, so it had to be set up as a commercial entity. That's clearly nonsense, as has become clear now the time has come to pass the collecting tin around.
Add to that the sheer impossibility of running a project of this nature as a consortium of nation states, and you end up with far too many impossible things to believe before breakfast.
If the EU had been honest from the outset about the reasons why Galileo was wanted, then the project would either have been killed or created as a sort of mini-Inmarsat - one company with one bank account, one set of managers and one task - and would have worked. Personally, I think that would have been well worth the investment: it's not as if the EU doesn't need to learn how do to this, if it's going to be an actor on equal terms with the other global power groups. I also think it would have been politically impossible, the way things are.
As it is, it's... the word that springs to mind is not one that would please Danny if it appeared here. But it is, well and truly.