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

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."

Comments

Re:Why?

[ctr2sprt]

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.

It's not NASA's decision

[cyclone96]

Disclaimer: I work for NASA.

A lot of the comments on this thread are being critical of NASA for not allowing Chinese participation in ISS.

This is not NASA's decision. Hell, many of us would be thrilled to work with the Chinese (despite what you may see on the news, working with the Russians is very fun, challenging, and exciting to us grunt engineers). NASA takes its marching orders directly from the executive branch, and whether or not to include China in NASA's manned program is decided by the White House, and technical merit is at the very bottom of the evaluation criteria on whether to include them or not.

At the top are probably two considerations...

Political - this is a huge carrot to wave in front of the Chinese, and I don't think the White House is ready to cash in on it yet. I can imagine it coming into play if we wanted something from China with respect to either the North Korean or Taiwan issues.

Technology Transfer - like it or not, the same basic technology that is used to put people in space is also used to defend the United States. Any time you work with an international partner who is "behind" you technically, some of the technology bleeds over (no matter how hard you try to stop it) and the technology gap closes. You need to be very careful about that when you are talking about working with a potential adversary. Is the risk worth the benefit? Right now, I think the answer the national leadership has decided is "no".

So

[ColaMan]

They've got a craft with a docking ring for the ISS.

What's really to stop them from launching and just hooking on up with the ISS? Are there anti-spacecraft LASERS on the ISS?

Hell, if I could do it , I would ...
(Another quiet day on the ISS)
(Suddenly there's a bit of a bump)
radio: "Bing,bong!"
ISS crew: "er, Hello?"
radio : "Ah, g'day. Was just in the neighborhood and thought I'd do the friendly thing and drop in and say hi."
ISS crew: "(Stunned silence)"
radio: "I've got a six pack on ice here.... want one? We could chuck empty beer bottles at passing continents... bet you can't hit the white house from here!"