Trump Space Advisor Wants To Invite China To Join ISS
Trump space advisor Bob Walker wants to invite China to join the International Space Station program. https://t.co/uRDK4Bhmhz
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) October 26, 2016
Trump space advisor Bob Walker wants to invite China to join the International Space Station program. https://t.co/uRDK4Bhmhz
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) October 26, 2016
Trump isn’t always consistent with his staff, or even his running VP. If I hear it from the man himself, this will be the first thing ever that I would find insightful and open from him.
But would he have the ability to just declare it so? I imagine Obama would have allowed it if it was that easy. We all know China would be on-board.
If China is invited India should also be invited to join.
Why? It will just cause increased complication, it will slow down the project. Do we NEED their contributions?
I agree. It is the _International_ Space Station.
Wow Trump accused china of perpetrating the climax change hoax and now wants them to come to the ISS. I wonder how that will sit with the republicans who have been fighting to not let NASA even talk to the chinese.
I hope not! We already spend too much effort on translation, joint meetings, negotiating small details, etc etc. It would be ok IF we could give China an Interface Control Document and they could build payloads that conform to that.
If follow the money was in play, What would Walker’s financial gains be if he could get the white house on board? Walker has his finger in a space enterprise?
Interplanetary space exploration will be so expensive that only joint efforts will be affordable – at least that’s the assumption kicking around. I don’t know if it’s true. After Mr. Musk mounts his mission we will have a better idea.
My own sense is that even Mr. Musk is headed in there wrong direction – or in the right direction but far too soon, decades in advance of the enabling tech we need to actually survive and finally profit from space exploration.
I could be wrong. Perhaps the BFR is actually a very small rocket analogous to Henry’s tiny caravan, a sturdy but diminutive vessel that rarely spent the night off-shore because they had no real ability to store water or food, no knowledge of local conditions – sound familiar?
Whether we will cooperate or not is hard to say at this point, but we are not in a new space race. As my Chinese friend puts it. “If you want to race to the Moon [or Mars] go ahead. We will not race with you. You will be racing by yourself.”
That’s exactly what the snail said to the hare.
Robert Smith Walker is neither a scientist, an engineer nor a visionary for human expansion off Earth (VSE died along with our only human rated spacecraft). He has no scientific publications and is not even a pilot. He is a career politician like the rest of them and is part of the whole problem that our country, world and species is experiencing – working in fields they have no real clue about and putting their two cents worth in and causing unending chaos and delays. Our country deserves exactly what it has, BS, and we will continue to get it when we keep allowing these people to have power just to fulfill their egos.
Perhaps a Republican House might be more cooperative with a Republican president, but really, if China is such a dangerous rival, why have we allowed so much of our manufacturing industry to move there? Somehow the whole world will end if NASA exchanges aerospace technology with CNSA, but assembling every one of our desktop and laptop computers and tablets and most of our integrated circuits there is alright?