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U.S. Snubs China's Offer for Space Cooperation

Posted by timothy on from the one-upmanship dept.

Devar writes "According to this space.com article The US has turned down China's offer for cooperation in space because their 'technology was not mature.' "Anticipating future space cooperation with the U.S., China fitted the Shenzhou craft with a docking ring capable of linking up with the International Space Station (ISS) and has at least one launch site, Jiuquan, located at near the same latitude as NASA's Cape Canaveral, which would allow similar launch profiles." This action has prompted China to turn to the ESA."

3 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Why? by Dios · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Is this the result of Bush Foreign Relations policy? NASA being 'big headed' or what? Why would we ever deny the chance for an up and coming nation to work with us?

    1. Re:Why? by ctr2sprt · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Simple enough. China wants Taiwan. The US views Taiwan as the hope of democracy for China, so we want Taiwan to stay de facto independent. We protect Taiwan using the Navy, so China can't invade without attacking US warships. China is developing missiles they can fire from the mainland to attack Taiwan. (This isn't WMD-ish speculation, China's admitted they're doing it.) This is actually one of the driving forces behind our "missile shield:" it's being built around Aegis cruisers because those are what we have defending Taiwan. This is 99% of the world's fear about us withdrawing from the ABM treaty, that it will, er, unbalance the balance of power in southeast Asia by rendering China's missiles worthless.

      You can probably see where this starts to tie in to NASA now. NASA works a lot with satellites and advanced guidance and propulsion systems for missiles, exactly the technology we don't want China to have. Well, it's a pipe dream to hope they'll never have it, but we need to stay just enough ahead of them for our missile shield to work (at least, work as well as it ever will).

      I applaud you (I'm being serious, not sarcastic) for asking, by the way. Far too many Slashdot posters are intellectually lazy and assume the easy answer is the right one: "Bush sucks at foreign relations, so this must be just another screwup." But you never learn anything unless you look deeper!

      Besides, this is the point now where we get into the really interesting stuff: whether the position is right, whether it will work the way it's supposed to, whether it's relevant... all that good stuff. It's much more fun than mindless bashing of an unpopular politician.

  2. Democracy and East Asian Policy by Tiro · · Score: 3, Interesting
    No one in the U.S. government--certainly no one in power in the Republican party--cares about Democracy in China. This is a matter of economic competition.

    The U.S. supported very authoritarian regimes in Korea/Japan in the thirty years post WW Two.

    David Harvey makes a good case for the campaign to increase U.S. power in the Middle East as a way to divert needed energy resources away from the rapidly expanding East Asian economy.