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Space Shuttle Spy Gets 15 Years
goG writes "A Chinese-born engineer was sentenced Monday to more than 15 years in prison for hoarding sensitive information about the US space shuttle with the intent of giving it to China. US District Judge Cormac Carney called Chung's crimes a matter of national security, saying he had committed a breach against the trust Boeing and the country had placed in him. Attorney Greg Staples said, 'The [People's Republic of China] is bent on stealing sensitive information from the United States and shows no sign of relenting. Only strong sentences offer any hope of dissuading others from helping the PRC get that technology.' Staples also 'noted in sentencing papers that Chung amassed a personal wealth of more than $3 million US while betraying his adopted country.'"
I think we learned that trick from the Russians
Except that we've saved them billions by letting them learn from OUR mistakes...
...but let the Chinese have the secrets and dump money into their program. We were getting out of the Shuttle program anyway because it is outdated and has enormous cost. At $700+ million per launch, why not just let the Chinese waste a little money?
Not really, the only reason the US wasted billions of dollars is because of bureaucracy (later years) and initial research (earlier years). If the PRC doesn't have to do the research, that takes a big chunk away and then if the bureaucracy is replaced with a set of people that hardly get paid for the work, you save another few billions.
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What should have done in addition to his prison sentence is to strip his entire family assets; to send a clear message of don't ever f*ing bite the hands that feeds you.
...but I've known quite a few Chinese Americans, both from the mainland and from Taiwan, who despite having become citizens here seem to be more concerned about their former homeland than their new one. I remember when the American spy plane had the collision with the Chinese fighter jet in 2001, almost every Chinese person I knew, despite being US citizens, was adamant that the US should apologize. During the Tibet unrest, many Chinese Americans I know accused the US media of bias--begging the question why they care so much about how China is portrayed if they're now Americans. Maybe this is no different than past waves of immigrants, and maybe it's no different than some Jewish Americans (even born here) who show more support for Israel than they do for the US. It's also no different than Muslim immigrants to Europe who show more allegiance to their religion and the ummah than their adopted nations. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see if anyone else had any thoughts or experiences in this matter. In short, in today's world, what are the real loyalties of an immigrant population? This story obviously shows one--money--but the question is whether there's anything beyond that.
I say let him go and let China do something with the plans if they so wish. Its not as if the shuttle program is continuing after this last flight or that NASA is going to do anything useful with the plans, other than let them gather dust or get lost. They don't have much of a budget anymore to even create a suitable replacement at this point. As a fan of the shuttle (despite the cost issues), it would be nice to see someone wasting their money on keeping the dream alive.
I know this is probably not a popular viewpoint in the USA, but I just want someone to get us to the moon again, somehow in my lifetime.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It's interesting that as much as we Americans deride the terrible space shuttle, only the Russians were able to build anything like it, but only the Americans were ever able to operate one.
Kinda makes you wonder, that, if we are not going back to the moon, can we at least keep these shuttles flying, or gasp, build a more modern one. I mean, the whole point of the new NASA way is to perfect in orbit assembly, and it seems we're kinda doing that now with the space shuttle and...
maybe we just need to make a new space shuttle that can be boosted farther into deep space, if we need to.
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A funny thing happened in the 60's during the development of Concorde, the USSR was of course spying on the Europeans as they were also workin gon their supersonic Tupolev. One of the (numerous) big issues was that of the rubber with which to make the tyres, as it had to be solid enough to resist the speed and whatnot. In a documentary from 99, one of the European engineers said they had noticed spies collecting material on runways after tests, so they created a sort of unusable goo and pasted it on the runways for them to collect. He said he'd have given anything to see the Russians' faces while trying to make sense of the stuff to create tyres with it...
I'm going with a literal interpretation. The article says information on the space shuttle, not the boosters.
Further, going to Boeing's page on the space shuttle, all I can tell is their involvement is strictly limited to the orbiter, not the rocket boosters.
This leads me to the conclusion of why China would want the shuttle? Maybe there's a few secrets in the orbiter worth having, but the value of the boosters is not necessarily within Boeing's possession.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
If it'll help launch a new space race, I'm almost for letting them have it all.
I want to see the Chinese do something completely wild, like launch an 180-day orbit mission to Mars or something, completely blowing away anyone's expectations of what they're able to do, a la 2010.
That'll restart the space race.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
How much does it cost to launch a shuttle, vs. launching a bunch of ICBMs? And how many warheads can the shuttle carry and drop (remember, it takes some energy to launch them on targets)? I'm pretty sure that carpet-bombing with ICBMs would be more cost-effective on megatons delivered somewhere where it hurts per dollar, even if we assume that the shuttle would get back intact.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
technology has advanced to the point where it could be shot out of the sky now.
I am not so confident of that. True china can hit a satellite going a few thousand mph in a consistent orbit that is not weaving or avoiding, similar for our rockets, they can break up stuff flying horizontally in low earth orbit. I am not so sure if the space shuttle, once in it's higher orbit, could be caught so easy. IE the shuttle has the energy of orbit to make small changes that would take it out of range of any detected launch of anything attempting to catch it in orbit altitude. If it went on a kamikaze straight down mode no fuel, I doubt anything currently known would be both maneuverable enough, and pack enough punch to destroy the shuttle and payload falling straight down from the sky, at say Mach 10+. Hit it, sure, but break everything into small pieces before landfall?
Amusing, but you forget, unlike the USSR, the P.R. of China owns several trillions of dollars of our collective asses... and you can thank the past four administrations for that situation (especially "W").
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You mean the tech and geniuses that the USA plundered from the Nazis?