We are not “broke as a nation” (not more than just about anyone else anyhow) and do not “need help funding” our space activities. OTOH, we have a strong interest in persuading several billion in Ireland and Denmark and Morocco and Indonesia and China and Japan and so on, that we are a nation filled to the brim with people with great technical ability, andthat we are eager to work with similar people from Ireland and Denmark, etc. to build a beautiful future world of peace and plenty and equality and high tech adventures for all; and that those nasty tales of waterboarding captives and keeping prisoners without trials and obliterating small towns in the hopes of bumping out middle-rank terrorists have all been serious overstated. After all, we hope to hammer out trade agreements in future years with Ireland et al, we want their votes on our side in the UN, we may want them to return fugitive bankers in the not so distant future.

Think Soft Power, in other words. Of course, this is foreign policy and international relations rather than space, but the US space program is fairly visible and fairly cheap, and it isn’t as if the country has anything better to use astronauts on for the next fifty years, so …. Bingo. We need and love our international partners! Let us work together on a better world!

And yes, DoD will go along, particularly after troop strength and procurement budgets start taking $50 B/year hits in a couple of years. Soft power is better than nothing at all.

Unfortunately, there aren’t a whole lot of tools to

The point is probably not to fix the U.S. GPS, which, as you state, obviously doesn’t need fixing.

The point is probably to put a stake in the heart of Galileo, so there is no strong competitor to the U.S. GPS. As long as the Galileo program is weak, it’s a good opportunity to overcome European distaste for the military nature of the U.S. GPS and encourage/force the Europeans to work to U.S. global positioning standards.

But given the disastrous NPOESS experience of combining USAF, NOAA, and European polar weather satellite requirements in a single system, the U.S. government needs to plan very carefully, both technically and organizationally. We don’t need another critical space system crippled by well-intended mergers leading to massive overruns and schedule slips.

FWIW…