U.S. Cooperates With Frenemy Russia In Space. Why Not China Too?
Cooperation needed in space exploration, South China Morning Post
“Quite a few countries have active space agencies, but none has been as successful as Nasa, which has, as the Star Trek saying goes, boldly gone where no man has gone before. Nasa is also freely sharing valuable data with anyone or any country that takes an interest in the mission. Such missions are laying the foundation for planetary travels. It seems only a matter of time, perhaps decades, for humans to land on Mars. Led by America, such efforts should be cooperative and show what humans could achieve when they work together. This is the kind of leadership the world can and will admire about the US.”
China’s lunar first unlikely to kick off a new space race, Houston Chronicle
“It’s the gold standard of technological accomplishments, to be a nation to send someone or something to the moon,” Cowing said. “I think there’s been a general renaissance in thinking … that space is something you should no longer be afraid of trying to do.”
Culberson Optimistic Restrictions on US-China Space Cooperation Will Remain, Space Policy Online
“Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) said today that he is optimistic Congress will continue to prohibit NASA from engaging in bilateral cooperation with China unless certain conditions are met after he leaves Congress. Culberson chairs a key subcommittee and has included that restriction in each of NASA’s appropriations bills since he became chairman four years ago, continuing a practice begun by his predecessor Frank Wolf. Culberson lost his reelection race, however, so will not be returning in the 116th Congress.”
Congratulations to China’s Chang’e-4 team for what appears to be a successful landing on the far side of the Moon. This is a first for humanity and an impressive accomplishment! pic.twitter.com/JfcBVsjRC8
— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) January 3, 2019
China’s First Payload Arrives at the ISS, earlier post
“There is always a clever technical solution to overcome cumbersome political policies. People just have to want to find the solutions. Every time you do something like this, the original problem becomes less of a hindrance and is eventually replaced by new, usually unexpected, opportunities. Congratulations to everyone who made this happen. If we can calmly and professionally share a space station with the country who tried to steal our election then we can certainly share it with the country that makes our iPhones.”
Keith’s note: The Chinese clearly want to cooperate with the U.S. in space. There is strong sentiment within NASA and the space science community for doing so. But edicts from an earlier Congress prevent this fron happening. Given all of the rocky – often hostile – relations between the U.S. and Russia these days space is a comparatively benign and productive realm of cooperation. So if we can work with Russia in space – why can’t we try and work with China in space in an equally productive fashion? With Culberson’s departure and new House leadership maybe the prohibitions can be softened – or removed.
Earlier posts on China
It’s quite a two-faced situation.
However, US is still hostage to Soyuz being the only transport to ISS so with Russia and long term ISS cooperation agreement as well, stopping collaboration is practically impossible.
EU is collaborating with Chinese just fine, with multiple European payloads flying on Chang’e and Chang’e utilizing European ITAR-free electronics
Let me try:
We shouldn’t cooperate with Russia. We do. That should change.
We shouldn’t cooperate with China.
I’m going to repost two posts I wrote last time on the issue. It needs to stop coming up.
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Once again… no. Not not. Not ever.
Exactly how many times do we *actually* have to go over this? The answer now is the same as it was a decade ago. The answer will be the same ten years from now. And changing the underlying causes of that answer has absolutely nothing to do with space.
China has been spending years stealing Western technology in an attempt to catch up economically and militarily. They’ve used espionage. They’ve used demands on commercial firms working in their country. They’ve used state-backed enterprises buying up (or shares) of Western firms. It is a national strategy whose endpoint is to make China the premier technological power on Earth and use that to establish hegemony in Asia-Pacific and eventually displace the US in the international system.
That is not my opinion. That is the opinion of the US Intelligence Community and US Department of Defense. This is happening. This is real.
And yet year after yet we get this ongoing… I’m not even sure what it is at this point… thought I guess… that wouldn’t it be nice if we could all work together, cooperate in space and be friends.
Yes it would be nice. But not in this lifetime.
The US has spent the better part of 20 years of subscribing to the idea that engagement with China, in order to make it a “positive stakeholder” in global affairs, would ward off confrontation. It turned the other cheek on affront after affront, all to service this idea, that softballing China would lead to a better outcome down the line.
And how exactly did that work out for us? It’s been a disaster of a policy. Superpowers don’t share. The United States and Soviet Union didn’t when they were rising. Why should China? China, naturally, wants it all. And America trying to do things differently has significantly narrowed each and every advantage we have as we head into this inevitable geopolitical confrontation.
And now you people want to expand this to space. Yet again. Have you not been paying attention? China would love to cooperate with the US in space, so it can harvest any dual use technologies it could, or so it could outright clone technologies in an attempt to leapfrog us. That is what they have done litterally everywhere else we’ve engaged in technology and science cooperation.
There is not is not a space-based-cooperation principle, or scientific discovery worth that. That poll about space priorities show Americans are generally “Earth first”. Space policies must be in line with that. In this case, space policy must service national objectives, and the national policy of the United States now, rightly, is that the US is a strategic competitor, not a partner.
The ban between cooperation is so completely in the US’s national interests precisely because of this. The US and China can cooperate, when China changes pretty much everything about their entire geopolitical strategy and approach to technological gains particularly.
Until that day, how about a little less talk about cooperation at a Chinese space station, and a little more talk about sending more war ships to the South China Sea to ward off their illegal actions there. Because THAT is the reality we live in, not some nonsense (and it is nonsense) that we should be cooperating in space as some ridiculous “trust building exercise” while they militarize the region
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We worked with the Russians for years. We still do. We did to the point we intentionally made ourselves dependent on capability they provided.
And how exactly has that worked out for us? Here we are watching years roll over, as we count down to the day we’re finally free of our dependence on Russia in space. Because of actions on Earth that Russia and Russia alone initiated, and a policy of confrontation that they began that has severely harmed American and Western Security.
We let a country that was an adversary for 70 years in too close, too quickly, because we hoped that peaceful cooperation across many domains… an attempt to make them a productive stakeholder in a system we designed… would ward off a future confrontation. And 25 years later, that turned out to be an utter and complete failure.
And now you people want a sequel with China? Is this some kind of joke?
Russia was given chances it didn’t earn in the 1990s and early 2000s that Vladimir Putin took advantage of until he felt he had sufficiently rebuilt his powerbase to resume a policy of confrontation around 2013. All your years of extolling cooperating were burnt to the ground because it was all dependent on Russian foreign policy – that is to say, the policy position vis a vis America of Vladimir Putin – to remain as positive as yours. We were all fools to ever think that would be a thing.
It is the same thing with China. The exact same. Over the last five years alone, our relations have turned sharply towards confrontation, and that is only likely to accelerate in years ahead. And it should, because the greviences between the US and China are significant, important, and must be worked out.
I’m going to tell you exactly where this leads. It leads to Russia Situation 2.0 in the 2040s. America, because it wants to save a little bit of money, or some other silly reason decides to cooperate with China on something in space… let’s say that space station of theirs. And then China, being much stronger in the 2040s relative to the US than it is today, decides to do something aggressive on Earth that the US finds unacceptable… like their own little analog of the US Invasion of Panama somewhere in Africa or East Asia. And relations, already chilly for years, go way South, much the same as Russian-US relations did after Crimea. And then we count the days and lament our dependency on whatever it is China does for us in space, and start counting the years again until we’re free.
That is how this story ends. Because space plays zero role in reconciling Earthbound problems, and those Earthbound problems will always supercede space-based ambitions. We should be cooperating with countries in space who aren’t, you know, seeking to militarily or otherwise strategically challenge us and undermine our national security across nearly every domain. Which is exactly what China is doing.
That’s why this thought process regarding how desirable cooperation with China in space is so insane. You’ve seen this movie with Russia. You know exactly how it ends. And you want to see a sequel? Are you people just hoping this doesn’t spectacularly blow up in our face, like it did with Russia? Or do you just not care and are putting political philosophy and principle of peaceful exploration over national security challenges as defined by the Department of Defense? Because we can sit down and read their 2018 National Defense Strategy statements together. It’s quite clear. China and Russia are at the top of the pile in terms of threats to America and the free world.
I’ll just put this simply. If forbidding cooperation with China in space so long as they are a national security threat means that we never step foot on Mars in my life time, so be it. Space is a secondary national priority, and I say that as a lover of space. We got in this position with Russia because we saw in Russia what we wanted to see, not what they really were the entire time. Let’s not do the same with China.
Let’s not make the same cataclysmic mistake twice.
OK so what about the space station?
IMHO, ISS isn’t exactly the bleeding edge of technology. I see no problem with inviting China to visit ISS and even have long term crew members on ISS. Actual technological cooperation could be limited to docking interfaces and associated hardware as well as some basic interfaces associated with the experiment racks. Participation in the ISS program isn’t giving away any crown jewels.
China visiting the ISS would be as far as I would be willing to go. There is no great secret in docking interfaces and the like. It is fairly analogous to Apollo-Soyuz in that regard.
But I’d be very much against any Chinese modules, inclusion with them in ISS management, or technology sharing of any type beyond what they need to safely bring a capsule to the ISS.
What would these supposed crown jewels be, anyway ? Chinese space tech is every bit equal to western, if not ahead in some areas.
Remote imaging (e.g. space telescopes) since that same technology can be applied to optical “spy satellites”.
For example, the first picture of the earth from the moon (taken from the Lunar Orbiter in the 60s) was deliberately degraded when released to the press. In fact, the released image looks like garbage compared to the “restored” image that was recovered directly from the tapes.
https://petapixel.com/2012/…
Note that the above article doesn’t even have the full resolution version of the restored image, which is absolutely amazing.
Were you trying to answer the question ? There is no argument here that US has any technological “crown jewels” to protect
Deorbit it in 2024 or 2028. Or is the plan to actually keep it until the end of time? Is the 2028 extension going to become the 2032 extension, which becomes the 2036 extension and so forth.
The Space Station is apparently aging well, but won’t be orbiting forever. One of the key points of my post is that we’re stuck cooperating with Russia. We have to, because of poor decisions made many years ago. If there were a viable way to end our partnership, we should take it. But there isn’t, even once commercial crew replaces Soyuz flights. That’s unavoidable at this point. A relic of a time long passed, where Russia would become a normalized country within the community of nations.
We should take that as a warning. Don’t cooperate with Russia on post-ISS activities. Don’t cooperate with China on anything. Just because we’re stuck with Russia now, doesn’t mean we should emulate the mistakes of the 1990s be stuck with them in future missions or with China on anything.
Once the ISS is wrapped, we’ll be free of them. Let’s not go for a second round.
How about start with the De-occupation of Nepal and South China Sea. Oh and Russia out of Crimea too.
That would be a good start.
None of these are going to happen. Just like the sanctions against India when they became a nuclear power, eventually the rest of the world will accept it. No one wants to fight a war over it. It may take decades or even more than a century, but eventually the rest of the world will accept China owning Nepal, and Russia taking Crimea. The point to being upset about these situations is to prevent them from taking even more territory. The US sending navy ships near the islands in the South China Sea is about as far as I expect us to go there. Xi and Putin see themselves as Emperor and Czar. I don’t expect either to back down. It would be a complete lose of face for the leaders and their countries, so not going to happen. China won’t become part of the ISS anytime soon.
The argument is popular with the general population but somewhat naive. Let’s forget about the survival of humanity, and focus on the zero sum game some like to play. Chinese are copying the western tech because they don’t need to reinvent the wheel. That’s the cost effective way to play catch up. If you block them from copying, they invent. Given the huge market they have at home, it is not so hard for them to actually develop things we don’t have and probably more advanced. That outcome would be much worse than letting China just buy or copy everything and never get a chance to obtaining the skills of innovation by actually doing it. Then we can keep the competitive edge.
Did they ever ask to cooperate? My understanding of the Chinese space program, back to the days they achieved their first manned orbit, was that they *wanted* to go their own way. I remember state-run media making a big deal about how China was still be excluded from the ISS, but as far as I know… they never asked to be included. They didn’t want to be included. They wanted to achieve their own triumphs separate from the west, outside of our shadow. But that doesn’t prevent the state-run PR machine from scoring some xenophobic points to rally their populace for nationalist causes.
Has that changed in any way?
Exactly, they don’t need or want any help from the United States since they have the money and technology to go it alone. By contrast Russia’s space program was basically bankrupt when NASA started funding Shuttle missions to MIR and paying them to build ISS segments. The theory was by keeping the Russian space program intact their engineers and scientists would not go to work for other nations, showing them how to build rockets. So politically the situations are vastly different.
I think it was President Kennedy who said, “We should not negotiate out of fear, but we should also not fear to negotiate.” If we are competent, talking and cooperating with other nations on limited scientific objectives should not and has not harmed us. Likewise, using NASA as a political hammer has not helped us. China certainly has earned more of a right to cooperation than Russia.
The harsh reality is we are not willing to pay the price to go it alone for space exploration. Since the early 1970s plans are always 20 years out and never realized. The ISS has overall been a success and cooperating with Europe has extended our reach. Keith Cowling correctly asks, “Why not China too?”
I’ll repeat what I said above: If forbidding cooperation with China in space so long as they are a national security threat means that we never step foot on Mars in my life time, so be it. Space is a secondary national priority, and I say that as a lover of space and a scientist. We got in this position with Russia because we saw in Russia what we wanted to see, not what they really were the entire time. Let’s not do the same with China.
As we’ve seen with China and the complete collapse of their hacking pause from a few years ago, and Russia’s violation of the INF Treaty, these country’s don’t negotiate in good faith. They put on a good show, until their in a position to exploit the United States’ good faith adherence to the agreement. And then they do what they want.
The only hope humans have for going to Mars is SpaceX. NASA has neither the will nor willingness to take the necessary risks to even send humans to the lunar surface, let alone a new world. Why do you think they are pushing the Gateway? Because it will put off any commitment to do real space exploration with humans for decades.
I often wonder where the USA would be in space today if the ISS had lost that vote in Congress. It is quite possible that without the ISS achoring NASA to LEO it would have focused instead on going beyond LEO, using the Shuttle to assemble systems capable of reaching the Moon.
It’s a doozy isn’t it. China is an authoritarian state with a command economy that has been attacking western IP for decades in an effort to catch up. The Faustian bargain was that we would all get our $30 DVD players, or whatever the new equivalent is.. Now with all that is going on in the South China Sea, the whole silk road thing and the escalating weight throwing over Taiwan. The Russian precedent is hardly the same thing. However much Russia is a threat to it’s physical neighbors it is nothing to the US anymore and is a notional democracy now. What economic hooks does it have in the US? What are it’s territorial ambitions beyond it’s historical obsession with a warm water port? Now China is a horse of a different color. On the space side of things I find myself torn between the rising tide lifts all boats argument: The more of us out there the better. Then on the other hand I look at the South China Sea/Silk Road/Tiawan/2008 ASAT test and I wonder. With their recent lunar rover I was delighted they did it but then soon enough I had that wormingly uncomfortable thought: Nobody signed the Lunar treaty. So this will be international law by custom and that custom is possession, main force yada yada yada. Is this all of piece with territorial expansionism? If it is why on earth should we enable this?
It is the top of the hour now so I have gone back to thinking I am being ridiculously myopic on this and China really is just trying to get up there and what, from the outside, may appear to be authoritarianism to our eyes may just be reasonable social engineering and leadership by other cultural standards….
I am sure that is what the Uighur Muslims are thinking in the gulags (just reasonable social engineering and leadership)!
Not to mention tibet……. Is that me of Xi’s xmas card list then?
China has long been a signatory of the OST and are bound by it not to make any claims of sovereignty. Their behavior in the South China Sea by contrast is driven by the Exclusive Economic Zones that are allowed under the LOS Treaty.
Yes, but… UNLOS treaty has clauses for arbitration of disputed claims, and the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled against China’s claims in the South China Sea in 2016. China just ignored the ruling. It’s quite possible they would come up with their own interpretation of the OST and ignore any disagreement.
“China just ignored the ruling
And, properly, as would we. in a similar case.
Which is the problem with international law, there is no real enforcement mechanism against nations except economic sanctions and other nations being willing to put their troops on the line.
Which undermines your point about the Outer Space Treaty. But there is another, informal enforcement mechanism. Violating treaty provisions makes a country look bad. That hurts foreign investment, foreign policy and the willingness of other nations to sign treaties in the future.
In the case of the South China Sea, China apparently thinks it’s worth the bad press. In the case of the Moon, I really doubt they would feel that way. Of course, that also means the OST is only meaningful as long as there is nothing of value worth claiming in space… Finding a good, rich and easily accessed ice deposit might justify a treaty violation or two.
AFAIK the OST only really deals with WMD’s, liability and inherent sovereignty of launched property. The for all mankind stuff just reads like a pablum. If a state actor started to put multiple bases up there then the exploitation clause is rendered moot.
The US government should cooperate with domestic commercial space companies instead of China. Companies like SpaceX already possess more powerful launch capability than China, it wouldn’t be long before the commercial companies gain significant BLEO capabilities. Support your own country’s companies, that’s what China does.
I think this involves a number of things, all mixed up together.
The restrictions Mr. Culberson was talking about prohibit _any_ cooperation of collaboration. If I wanted a NASA grant to study something with no technology or practical applications (say, radio emissions from Jupiter’s aurora) and work with a scientist in China (they have a nice, low frequency radio astronomy experiment on Chang’e 4), the grant proposal would be dead in the water. That blanket prohibition only applies to NASA and to China. If I asked NSF to fund a similar proposal, they would (or would be allowed to consider it). If I asked NASA to fund a similar proposal working with a scientist in Iran, they would (or would be allowed to consider it.) That doesn’t make any sense to me, but that’s what was written into NASA’s appropriations by the chair of the relevant subcommittee.
Then there’s a list of countries we especially don’t trust. Citizens of those countries, or even people born there, have lots of restrictions place on them. That includes access to government centers (not just NASA), access to government supercomputers, ability to work on ITAR controlled or other sensitive topics, etc. China is on that list, along with places like Iran and North Korea.
Then you get into actual collaborative projects involving flight missions, and that’s all a matter of separate, individual negotiations. It could range from anything to one country providing components of an instrument on another country’s robotic mission (e.g. the scan mirror in the Juno UV spectrometer comes from the University of Liege), to entire instruments from one country on another’s spacecraft (e.g. the NASA-funded and SwRI-built mass spectrometer, Strofio, on the ESA BepiColombo mission to Mercury), to astronauts visiting ISS, to foreign contributions to future space stations.
That’s a whole lot of territory. I could (and would) say we ought to get rid of the NASA-China specific restrictions Mr. Culberson wrote into the appropriations bills. I could (and would) say it’s a bad idea to put China on the critical path for human landings on the Moon. The rest is debatable, in my opinion. But talking about all those levels of collaboration (or rules against it), all at the same time, is likely to get people talking past each other and cause confusion.
China and the US will be the world’s superpowers for the coming century. The relationship between us can be based on understanding and respect, or it can be based on hostility and suspicion and culminate in a new Cold War. Cooperation in space is purely symbolic, but it can be critical in determining which road we take.
I have worked with people from China, both Taiwan and the PRC, for much of the past thirty years. China has been through massive historical traumas including genocide, civil war, and occupation by foreign invaders, including Japan, the European powers, and even the US. A half century later China and the US fought a disastrous war in Korea, yet modern Chinese forget that conflict and remember World War II, when in their time of greatest need America came to their aid. China is a vast country with a vast history, and Americans who think of it simplistically as a monolithic adversary are ignoring reality.
The idea that NASA restrictions on cooperation are going to save America by preventing our precious secrets from being stolen is simply a fantasy. China is the world’s second largest economy and the world’s largest market. It is no accident that HP, Apple, Tesla, and even Walmart are expanding there, China is part of the world in which they do business. The Chinese I know don’t achieve success by stealing America’s secrets, they do it the same way Americans do, by being smart and working hard.