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China

Everyone Is Investigating Everything at NASA

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 22, 2013
Filed under ,

Former Huntsville NASA center boss Robert Lightfoot will lead foreign security probe, Huntsville Times
“NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot will lead a new in-house probe of foreign access to NASA field centers in the wake of the arrest of a Chinese national allegedly attempting to smuggle data out of the U.S. to China. Lightfoot was director of the Marshall Space Flight Center before being promoted in 2012 to the top civil service position in the agency.”
Wolf Threatens To Call NASA Security Whistleblowers To Testify, Aviation Week
“Career civil servants” have been coming out of the woodwork with reports of lax security practices at NASA since Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) raised the issue publicly, and the powerful committee chairman may call some of the whistleblowers to testify publicly about their charges.”

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

13 responses to “Everyone Is Investigating Everything at NASA”

  1. Steve Whitfield says:
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    I wonder what Qian Xuesen would have thought of all this.

  2. dogstar29 says:
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    Considering the previous anti-Chinese tirades of Congressman Wolf, I am amazed he is taken seriously. But here’s something NASA should be taking seriously. America’s largest manufacturing export is commercial aircraft, and China is our third largest export customer, both in commercial aircraft (and in overall trade, in which China trails only Canada and Mexico). NACA was created to support the US aircraft industry, and NASA should be doing everything it can to support exports of high-value manufactured products. But the bizarre actions of Congressman Wolf have created an international incident. I know there is no one at NASA who can read Chinese, but there is outrage in the Chinese language press. And what about this: http://articles.orlandosent
    Maybe Airbus can use more customers. Maybe the EU can use more exports. With friends like Wolf, we don’t need enemies.

    • Joseph says:
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      If there is anything NASAwatch does not need, it is agents of the People’s Republic showing up here, calling Congressman Wolf “bizarre.” That kind of propaganda might have flown _before_ the arrest, but since the arrest, the evidence is clear.

      • kcowing says:
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        Who are the “agents of the People’s Republic”?  Names?  Oh yes: In the U.S. people are innocent until/unless proven guilty. In China, well, not so much.

      • Steve Whitfield says:
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        since the arrest, the evidence is clear

        Only to someone who had already made up their mind he was guilty.  If his day in court should declare him not guilty will you be back to post a retraction?  an apology?

      • dogstar29 says:
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        Wow, I’ve been accused of being an agent of the PRC! Does this mean I am banned from NASA facilities? ROTFL.

        I read the FBI arrest statement and it is troubling to me as an American. Jiang was asked (with no warning about his rights) if he had any computer equipment, and he apparently showed them everything he had in his carry on luggage. Apparently the FBI had already searched his checked luggage and found the other laptop, but nothing in the FBI statement suggests that they specifically explained that they wanted to know if he had anything in his checked bags. Easy mistake to make, particularly since the interrogation was conducted in English, which was not his first language. But I could be wrong. If anyone has solid facts, please post.

      • Geoffrey Landis says:
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         “since the arrest, the evidence is clear”

        I have seen no “clear evidence” of anything so far.  I see that a Chinese visiting student got arrested, but I have yet to see what evidence there may be to think that he did anything illegal.

        So far, it looks like the Hsue-Chu Tsien case.

    • Steve Whitfield says:
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      vulture4,

      I’m starting to get the feeling that there are considerably more people who think like Wolf than I thought.  And also more people who would appear to be completely indifferent to his antagonistic anti-Chinese statements.  I find this kind of scary.  I keep looking at my calendar, and it says 2013, but an uncomfortable number of people are acting like it was 1913 and the world was headed for a major war.

      This Wolf vs. China nonsense started out as laughable, but it seems to be growing into a potentially very bad situation, and no one in authority appears to be doing anything to rein him in.  Do you think he might push things far enough to cause significant political and/or economic tension between China and the west?

      Steve

      • dogstar29 says:
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        I agree. When reading the comments on some of the news articles reporting the incident, I am overwhelmed by the level of jingoism. People aren’t just indifferent, they are eager to find a foreign devil to blame for all their problems.

        In the Chinese-language blogosphere the level of anti-American comments is likewise skyrocketing. It’s easier to burn bridges than to build them.

    • Ralphy999 says:
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      I don’t think the Chinese are going to start a trade war. It’s just highly unlikely. They sell way more than what they buy from the US on an overall spectrum. What I suspect is that there will be far fewer graduate students coming to the US for their education which will put a crimp in a number of US universities’ graduate programs and they are a powerful lobby.

      • dogstar29 says:
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        I agree. What Chinese parent would send their child to America knowing they might might never see him or her again? Ironically this undermines the exchange of cultural values that Kissinger saw as the goal of the first US-China graduate student exchange program.

        • Wendy Yang says:
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          But still, you have to consider that over at U.S., the chances for a successful career is still far greater than over China.