This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
China

Bolden Wants Congress To Change Law On U.S./China Space Cooperation

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 24, 2016
Filed under , ,
Bolden Wants Congress To Change Law On U.S./China Space Cooperation

NASA Chief: Congress Should Revise US-China Space Cooperation Law, VOA
“Responding to questions Monday at an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute on Capitol Hill, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the U.S. should pursue such a relationship with China in human space exploration. “We were in an incredible Cold War with the Soviets at the time we flew Apollo-Soyuz; it was because leaders in both nations felt it was time,” he said. “That represented a great use of soft power, if you will. Look where we are today. I think we will get there [with China]. And I think it is necessary.” Current law prohibits NASA from engaging with its Chinese counterparts on such projects. But Bolden, who will travel to Beijing later this year, says Congress should consider revising the law.”
Previous China posts

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

14 responses to “Bolden Wants Congress To Change Law On U.S./China Space Cooperation”

  1. Daniel Woodard says:
    0
    0

    I agree with Bolden. Improving communication and collaboration with China in a nonmilitary scientific endeavor like the ISS would help to build understanding and reduce world tensions. However blaming all our troubles on devious foreigners is more popular politically.

    • Jonna31 says:
      0
      0

      With all due respect, while it’s hard not to appreciate the sentiment, the reality is starkly different.

      The ISS has done nothing to reduce tensions with Russia or promoted understanding, in either the 2.5 year old Ukraine crisis, or the Georgia crisis before it. They’ve gouged us on Soyuz seats, even though the US subsiding the Russian space program for years was the only reason they had a program to gouge us with. They’ve threatened the RD-180 supply before we cut it off ourselves.

      This should not be surprising. On the list of things important to countries, space isn’t anywhere near the top for the US or Russia, and that’s the honest truth. Neither would refrain from an action because it would harm ISS cooperation. The same would be true of any country. In the end, the Space, for all it’s benefits, is as discretionary an investment as a country can make, and it will always be behind security, geopolitics, social welfare and so forth.

      If its failed to build understanding and reduce tensions with Russia, which has designed new ICBMs and INF Treaty breaking intermediate range missiles as the ISS was being built, how is it supposed to do that with China, which is even more revisionist than Russia is?

      Let us not forget China’s record. They get allowed into various circles, such as the WTO, under the presumption that their involvement would make them a “invested stakeholder”, in some attempt to get them to plain a part in maintaining the existing international order, instead of upending it.

      But therein lies the problem. The mondern Chinese state’s core philosophy is that history made the wrong judgement in that China did not get to play the leading role in defining the world as we know. Everything from stealing and emulating western IP to international treaty bait and switches to the nine dashed line, gets back to the fact that China feels historically wronged and is setting out to correct that. Take the WTO for instance… Russia worked for 20 years to get in, after 20 years of halfway-there reforms and were basically mecy ruled a few years back. China was let in when it had made no reforms to speak of, under the agreement that it would in coming years. And they didn’t. Not to the extent the WTO wanted. It’s likely they never intended to.

      China has no interest in being a responsible stakeholder. That approach only works if the other party is playing the same game. China is not. It gets let in, then violates agreements, counting on Western passiveness and confrontation adverseness to allow it to act with impunity until it gets what it wants. In the WTO, it was the final decline of manufacturing in the western world.

      We let China work with us on the space program, they’ll make it sound great and hopeful for a while. But they’ll just be methodically strip mining us of our national advantages, our technology, or experience, in order to close the gap. This is what they’ve done with US tech firms, which went into China under the understanding that in exchange for technology transfers, they would have access to the Chinese market. The tech transfers happened. The access? Not so much. Firms are fleeing en masse. China looked to steal western tech, to catch up, so it’s own companies could become global brands.

      This is all extremely well documented at this point. This isn’t controversial whatsoever. It is not Anti-China. They are events. These thins happened. They are facts.

      And yet, with all due respect, you’re proposing to give these people who have so successfully played us, yet another one of our crown jewels? On the vain hope that yet again, they become a peaceful “stakeholder”?

      Before we do that. We need to make sure China actually starts honoring the commitments it has already made with us, rather than giving them more opportunities to steal from us. And I didn’t even get into the industrial-scale hacking they’ve done, on everything from Google to Microsoft to Ford, to Lockheed Martin.

      So no. No cooperation with China. No nothing with them. Not until they’ve proven… conclusively proven… that the US hope for making them a “responsible stakeholder” wasn’t just us deluding ourselves for two decades into thinking that there was a peaceful way out of the next broad global geopolitical struggle.

      • Anonymous says:
        0
        0

        If you wrote this based on things you heard or read from the so called news, well, the only thing I can say is you are a good student of the mass media.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
        0
        0

        Actually the US-Russia collaboration on ISS has built many respectful ties and kept things much more stable than they would have been otherwise. The fact that many Americans and Russians have met and worked directly together productively has changed many attitudes, although it could not keep Bush from invading Iraq, which essentially gave the green light to any country that wants to invade any other, and of course it could not keep Putin from invading Ukraine.

        If you believe China is maintaining its unprecedented growth rate by stealing NASA secrets you had better talk to the people that are actually transferring technology, Apple, HP, GE, GM, Boeing, even Walmart. They are all moving to China because China is the next major world market, and if the Chinese learn to make thier products that is fine with them, because the Chinese will also be buying thier products.. What China might learn from NASA is different; that superpowers can work together in peace.

        • mfwright says:
          0
          0

          “…unprecedented growth rate by stealing NASA secrets you had better talk to the people that are actually transferring technology, Apple, HP, GE, GM, Boeing, even Walmart.”

          I always wonder with all the hoopla about China stealing all our secrets and yet ***nobody*** questions the latter.

          Regarding cooperating with China, maybe it’s a good idea like back in the days we signed treaties and did a space cooperative in 1975 with USSR to show this kind of interaction with can be done. Some say Soviets were able to tap Apollo technology (even though we were developing Shuttle), that program may have enable them to see how we do things (and learn what works/what doesn’t work). China probably can learn some things from us (not sure how much benefit). What China benefits most is build up of manufacturing infrastructure that will happen anyway whether if we have a space cooperative or not.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
        0
        0

        “China, which is even more revisionist than Russia is?”

        If you spent time there or actually worked with people from China you would have a completely different viewpoint. China is as capitalist as the US. Communist ideology was abandoned by Deng Xiaoping.

        China endured decades of humiliating occupation by Western powers (including the US), bent on forcing the Chinese to accept the addictive drug opium in payment for their exports, followed by the Japanese occupation which left 20 million dead, and the Communist era with the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Modern Chinese see themselves as the inheritors of one of the world’s oldest civilizations. They are looking forward to democracy, but their first priorities are stability and economic growth.

        The US and China will be superpowers of the next generation. We need to find ways to coexist without the kind of nuclear confrontation that dominated the Cold War. The last thing America needs now is provincialism and xenophobia.

    • duheagle says:
      0
      0

      Ignoring the actual depredations of genuinely devious foreigners is also popular in certain political circles.

  2. sunman42 says:
    0
    0

    Hear, hear.

  3. montagna_lunga says:
    0
    0

    No. Absolutely not.

  4. Jonna31 says:
    0
    0

    For the 18th time, no. And don’t ask again.

  5. Daniel Woodard says:
    0
    0

    Please explain what you mean in more detail.

    • fcrary says:
      0
      0

      I suspect he means the difference between saying, “They are good scientists, but they work for a government with an appalling human rights record” and saying, “They are good scientists, and it isn’t appropriate to comment on the internal affairs of another country.”

      • Daniel Woodard says:
        0
        0

        If your goal is to promote human rights in China, excluding China from participating in the ISS program is a singularly ineffective strategy. You might want to promote communication and understanding between the US and China instead, as Kissinger proposed. Or you might want to spend some time in China yourself, or working with people from China, getting to know them well enough to understand their points of view.

  6. Jim R. says:
    0
    0

    Not interested.