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NASA Administrator Mike Griffin to visit China
Maggie McKee writes "China has repeatedly extended a hand to the US to work together in space, but for military and political reasons the US has always refused. Now, New Scientist Space reports that NASA chief Mike Griffin and other bigwigs are about to head to China for a meet-and-greet. But Griffin says: 'This is a get-acquainted session, and it is nothing more, and to characterise it as anything more would be to create expectations that would be possibly embarrassing to us or embarrassing to China.'"
From the article:
Despite the fact that China has repeatedly asked to participate in the International Space Station, the US has always refused. Some have argued this is because of a reluctance to share technologies that might be co-opted for military purposes, but others say it is simply down to politics, with space the last bastion of Cold War thinking.
If so, I wonder if it's really the US that blackballs the Chinese. The country with the most to fear from China is actually Russia. They share an enormous common border. On the Russian side you've got endless empty taiga, natural resources galore...a paltry 140 million citizens...on the Chinese side, a billion hungry peasants. What's the Chinese for Lebensraum, I wonder?
Me, I'm totally OK with a strictly competitive stance vis-a-vis the Chinese in space. Much more gets done in that brisk atmosphere than in the suffocating 'cooperation in space' fug through which the ISS drifts, poor thing.
The US wouldn't had a rocket program if it hadn't "stolen" some Nazi scientists.
Yeah, because I'm sure they just had to be kidnapped and dragged over here; the alternative of ending up in some Soviet gulag, breaking big rocks into small rocks, being as enticing as it is.
Von Braun probably just stole a train and hauled ass towards the Western Front for a shits and giggles.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
... and if we just pulled into the space pits and sat there, they could catch up.
Which, given the current pathetic state of our space program, makes me expect we'll see a yellow star on a red flag planted on the Moon long before we see another Stars and Stripes.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
That's not really China, it's actually a movie set in the middle of the desert...