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Arms Regulations Damaging US Space Industry
athe!st writes "International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) are a major headache for companies trying to put their satellites into space, so much so that some companies are using 'ITAR-free' (aka free of US technology) as a selling point. The European Space Agency is trying to reduce its dependence on ITAR components, and the regulations are also threatening the nascent space tourism industry."
Reminds me how the Arms Controls stifled innovation and adoption in the Crypto field back in the 1990s.
Our company used to buy a certain kind of component from the US to put into the products we make. Every single one needed an export licence and an import licence. That is an export licence from the US and an import licence from the UK. If something goes wrong with the component and it needs fixing, we need an export licence from the UK and an import licence to the US to return it for fixing or replacement. Again, that replacement needs another import/export licence. That's just for traffic between the UK and the US. If you're then going to export your product to a third country, you need another export licence and possibly another import licence for that country too. It's so bad we actually hire people just to track what's going on with all of the difference licences!
To cut a long story short, we switched supplier to a European company who make similar components. Now of course we need an import licence for the US if selling to the US, but in general apart from countries like Iran, we can freely export our product without the nightmare stack of licences and yes, it is a factor you talk about when giving sales presentations.
Yeah, that's pretty much the case. I used to work in an aerospace company. We liked to use the adjective ITAR'ded.
Yeah, and this has been the case since, oh, 2001? Well, at least it seems that's when it started to be enforced more strictly. I've heard rumblings that the administration was going to change it, but who knows how likely that is.
Hmmm... I wonder if we could correlate the US's drop in space proficiency with when ITAR for space components started?
ITARded
But ITAR is responsible for keeping a lot more US jobs than it loses thanks to it's prohibitions. In a lot of places it's the only thing keeping engineering and manufacturing from being outsourced.
There's a reason for why technology exports are regulated.
And what is that? I mean aside from weapons technology that is? The down side is that it shrinks the market available to US producers. Eventually they are driven out of business when faced by foreign competitors who are free to sell to anyone. Then we (the US) have to buy from these foreign suppliers. So, what's the up side?
Have gnu, will travel.
Sometimes the policy is good and sometimes it is bad. Do you really want Iran getting a hold of the blueprints for the shuttles solid rocket boosters? Obviously not, they could be adapted in a matter of months to nefarious purposes. But then there is technology that is by no means cutting edge, in the US or anywhere, that remains on the ITAR restricted lists out of inertia, it doesn't stop enemies from getting a hold of technology, all it does is make US companies less competitive in the global marketplace.
Well if you'd read the article, it's from the Institute of Engineering Technology (what Aerospace company is that?) and the article is about electronics components, computer chips made mostly by US based manufacturers.
Now foreign governments are backing competing companies outside the US to source the same type of components in what is a growing market. The first papagraph talks about how many more sats will be launched in the next decade over the previous one.
Since most of the folks mentioned are launching outside the US anyway, no US aerospace company is losing a dime.
In the article they also say the US based components are better, so we have a market that's growing, where US based companies have the best product and people are going somewhere else because of this regulation.
If I owned a big chip company I'd move my HQ outside the US immediately if staying meant I missed out on 10 years of growth.
Do you read the headlines, do you know what growth for businesses in the US is projected to be for the next 10 years, it's not 50% more like sat launches and their electronics components are.
You jest, but the fact that the entire civilized world is on pins and needles to see if Muslims will fly off the handle over a freaking book burning speaks volumes.
I think there's an alternative line of reasoning: if you don't export these technologies to other countries, they will either get it from your competitors or develop it themselves. So your choice is not between whether they have the technology or whether they don't, it's between whether you control their access to the technology or whether you don't.
you may find this recent article enlightening. From the article:
The impact of export controls on the high-tech industry have caused problems for everyone from browser makers—who once ran up against restrictions on their encryption software, despite its wide availability outside the US—to hardware makers; Apple once advertised that its G4 processor fell under export control due to outdated definitions of what constituted a supercomputer. But they also affect more mundane items. In the announcement that outlines the reform efforts, the White House notes that the brake pads for the army's M1A1 tank are essentially identical to those used in fire trucks, but only the former ends up under export controls; "Under our current system, we devote the same resources to protecting the brake pad as we do to protecting the M1A1 tank itself."
I was part of the CubeSAT program at my university. We were designing a 1 foot x 1 foot x 1 foot satellite to be launched. To track the satellite, we needed a GPS module on board. However, due to the ITAR components on the module, the student in charge of software couldn't touch the GPS code or schematics, because he was not a US citizen.
ITAR covers such things as software, documentation for software and even a software engineer talking to someone about said software, even if what the engineer is saying is freely available in public documentation. I work at a place where we have to review ITAR and EAR (Export Administration Regulations) policies every year and at the end of the presentation they make it clear just about anything could be an ITAR violation.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Unfortunately, for most of the world, that "someone" is the United States military.
It's not really very hard to take a space launch system and turn it into an ICBM system, after all the opposite transition is basically how the space industry got its start int he first place (strap a capsule on the top of an ICBM and give it a bit more oomph to make orbit). Now I think that the argument is over what is and isn't commercially available from other countries without export restrictions, and whether the controls should be the same regardless of who you're selling to (does it really make sense to require the same paper work to send a rocket to the UK as it does to say Pakistan?). IMO, once a commercial equivalent to a piece of technology is available, a device should be taken off the ITAR lists, but that isn't the way the system works.
There are indeed reasons why technology exports are restricted. I just can't think of any, right now.
Past restrictions included banning the Beowulf clustering technology (which caused such an uproar that the code was smuggled into Canada, and ITAR-free alternatives were developed such as MOSIX and Kerrighd) and the banning of crypto in excess of 40 bits (which, combined with RSA patents, led to the International PGP versions, but which had a severe impact on nascent e-Commerce).
During that same time, a New Zealand engineer developed a home-made cruise missile using off-the-shelf parts, a Scottish rocket club built a flying waverider airframe, the Swedish navy were designing stealth ships that were invisible to Radar and nuclear weapons research continued unabated in the Indian subcontinent.
In more recent times, the entire schematics for the Raptor were exported to Iran (where they were published online) because those dealing with actual secrets were not bothering with elementary containment procedures in order to make a fast buck off eBay.
So, yes, I can believe that ITAR has value and importance. What I cannot believe is that the things that get caught in the net are of greater significance than the things that get through. This does not mean removal of ITAR, but it does mean it should be no stronger than the US is willing or able to enforce. Otherwise it hinders allies without hurting threats. ITAR, as it stands, is also open to extreme abuse. In Britain, it is illegal to export anything to any country for the purpose of, or in the knowledge it will be used for, violating international law. Doesn't matter if the recipient is an ally, doesn't matter if the export would have been legal for any other use. Criminal cases along these lines usually don't change behaviour and don't often succeed, but they do generate some measure of accountability that simply doesn't exist in the current ITAR.
And that, ultimately, is the sole purpose of any sort of export control on militarizable technology - preventing it from being abused by the recipient. If it was going to be used sensibly and rationally, what would it matter who it was sent to? It may be entirely reasonable to assume that X is never going to be sensible or rational, but if X is likely to develop the technology soon anyway and is threatening Y who is not, then blocking the technology helps, not hinders, X. Since the US cannot police the world (it has tried!), all of these different factors need to be considered. A law that is absolutely rigid by name and not by any other criteria can never consider such factors.
I don't know what the correct solution would be, that would require considerable analysis in areas I'm not familiar enough with, but it will involve more role-based access controls and fewer fixed lists.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Nope. Sorry. The big aerospace companies do plenty well by suckling off of the government teat. ULA doesn't bother to sell to non-domestic customers because they know they have a near monopoly on government contracts, and dealing with ITAR is a pain. They don't need ITAR reform nearly as much as tihe small companies, who have to jump through ridiculous hoops for dumb things.
My favorite example is when Bigelow was preparing to launch one of their test habitats aboard a Russian proton. For assembly, they needed a table, so they grabbed some aluminum slabs out of their warehouse and bolted them together. Turns out this particular variety of aluminum falls under ITAR restrictions, so while in Russia, the table made out of scrap aluminum had to be watched by two armed guards at all time.
I'm not a tea-partier, I believe that in many cases good regulations make the market much more robust. However, ITAR is not good regulation. It is out of date, it places undue legal and financial burden on small startups, and partitions our space industry from the rest of the world. If we're not careful, we will become a backwater of mediocrity in the high frontier.
There are a handful of commercial companies that can build ICBMs. You can restrict them using ITAR. it works.
Imagine if companies like boeing, raytheon and lockheed martin would be allowed to sell weapons directly to Iran or to south korea. Would make those tyrannical state's job that much more difficult.
Currently, they are indeed developing their own versions - but it's a long process and that give you time to either develop countermeasures or to somehow stop them.
Also, the first version of anything will never be as good as a polished version 20.0 of the same thing. I believe that applies to ICBMs as well.
Sigs are for the weak.
ITAR has been around for my 10 years in space systems and was around before me. European companies are just using it as an excuse to award European only contracts to kill off American competitors. It's actually been greatly improved in recent years, with a majority of commercial space components being put under the Commerce Dept rather than ITAR.
Brasil is developing a C-130-class military transport with no US technology in it specifically to get around ITAR. Scuttlebutt is that Venezuela is the driver but it wouldn't surprise me if most countries are tired of the US sticking their nose in.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Looks to me like our military fetish and desire to be a world super power is stifling advancements in aerospace. This is an industry where the USA can still compete with the world. We need to cultivate this industry instead of choking it.
Blar.
Which is why our current foreign policy is complete bullshit. Rather than maintaining honest friendships and alliances, we instead seek to keep other countries in the stone age and use diplomacy only when they gain equal technology.
Rather than encouraging the development of technologies, we try to hoard them based on a stupid belief that if we do this we will prevent other countries from developing weapon technologies, instead we cripple ourselves and are a laughingstock in front of other countries.
Think of how much more we as humanity could do when artificial barriers to trade are eliminated. It doesn't make us safer, it alienates us from the rest of the world and prevents us from doing beneficial things. Rather than having an unsustainable foreign policy of making sure that no one else other than the US gets technology, we need to have alliances and diplomatic principles that make it so when countries -do- get advanced technology they won't use it against us.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Actually, the U.S. administration has already admitted that the current export control system is messed up. In April 2010 U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates called for a major overhaul of America’s export control regime, saying the current system is outdated, hurts America’s competitiveness, and does not adequately protect national security. Of course, admitting there's a problem is not the same as making a change that solves it (or makes it better), but at least they know there are problems and are trying to find solutions. I particularly like this part: "One major culprit is an overly broad definition of what should be subject to export classification and control. The real-world effect is to make it more difficult to focus on those items and technologies that truly need to stay in this country. Frederick the Great’s famous maxim that “he who defends everything defends nothing” certainly applies to export control."
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Engineering and manufacturing are being outsourced PRECISELY so they don't run afoul of iTAR!
We are LOSING sales and LOSING jobs and LOSING technology due to this stupidity.
Wow, to hear you tell the story, I'd say ITAR is doing a great job at driving innovation. I say keep it in place! Of course, I'm not american, either.
All kidding aside, I think it would be helpful to americans if they could distinguish between what helps their country and what helps certain powerful interests in their country. I don't see much evidence that many of you folk can.
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Not to be confused with Col.
mean aside from weapons technology that is?
What exactly is "weapons technology"?
About 20 years ago I developed what is still the fastest, most robust image registration algorithm there is. It was the first algorithm based on sampled pixels, and predated mutual-information and other similar techniques by about three years.
I developed it for a medical application. When I realized how well it worked, I also realized it was perfectly suited to the terminal phase guidance system of a cruise missile. It ran fast enough on the commodity hardware of the time (33 Mhz 386) that it put it nicely in the price range of your average "credit card terrorist."
So far as I know, the organs of the security-industrial complex are still studiosly ignoring this reality: most technology can be adapted for to build weapons. IEDs and the like are proof of this. Never-the-less, no one suggests that cell phones and digital watches be banned, presumably because the kind of asshole that works in the security-industrial complex isn't about to give up their cell phone and digital watch, or even pay more for them.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Do you really want Iran getting a hold of the blueprints for the shuttles solid rocket boosters?
Your "logic" makes no sense.
The SRBs are 35 year old tech NOW and one day they will be even more "by no means cutting edge", which you apparently have no problem publishing. Which is a good thing, because information wants to be free: one leak and the genie can never be put back in the bottle.
Everyone knows how to build nuclear weapons today. Anyone who is trying to restrict the spread of technology is pushing water uphill.
So you'd better be prepared to be safe in a world where everyone has every nasty kind of tech you can imagine. History suggests that conventional military thuggery is not the right way to go there.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
"Again, you misunderstand. Having technology that makes your military more effective *does* make you safer, after a fashion. Look back at the interaction between the Spanish conquistadors and the Incas. The conquistadors had metal armor and guns. The Incas had wooden/hide armor, spears and arrows. A single conquistador was a more effective military weapon than a single Incan soldier."
Well, it was guns, *germs*, and steel (see the book with that title). And it was other things as well, like the Inca seeing the invaders as gods, and also being highly centralized and vulnerable to a centralized attack, otherwise millions of Inca would have wiped out a few hundred men with musketts, even on horseback. It's sort of like by the fourth airplane on 9/11 the strategy of the terrorists wasn't working anymore as the people began to fight back (and so that plane crashed in a field). Eventually, the Inca did fight back more, but by then the (mostly unintended) germs were wiping them out. There was also a civil war at the time the Spanish took advantage of, and other factors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Inca_Empire
"The situation went quickly downhill. As things began to fall apart, many parts of the Inca Empire revolted, some of them joining with the Spanish against their own rulers. Many kingdoms and tribes had been conquered or persuaded to join the Inca empire. They thought that by joining the Spaniards, they could gain their own freedom. But these native people never foresaw the massive waves of Spaniard immigrants coming to their land and the tragedy that they would bring upon their people."
So the Inca empire itself was unstable... If the Inca empire has been more stable, and had (unintentional) disease not been a major factor, I'd suggest the Inca would have easily kicked out the Conquistadors, despite guns and steel.
Columbus' destruction of the Arawaks on Haiti might be a better example of what you say... And a very sad one... They offered him gifts and friendship amd a better way of life, and he repaid them in death, justified in part by religion as well as his business obligations...
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
But is that what you want to hold up as an ideal? Columbus only lived to age 54; might he have lived to age 100 if he and his men had just settled in Haiti and never gone back to Europe? All that violence must have been stressful for him, and what did that genocide for profit against the Arawaks get him? Beyond being remembered for it (plus being the last person to discover America)?
If you see my other reply, you'll see that all this military technology is ironic and, essentially, making us less secure in the 21st century because it is designed from the wrong paradigm of extrinisic unilateral security (not intrinsic mututal security). For example, having a loaded self-propelled Howitzer cannon in your suburban backyard does not make you safer from home intrusion in a small community (or cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabestes, the real killers of most US Americans) -- it makes you seen as a nutcase and your neighbors start talking about how to deal with you and get rid of it in case it went off accidentally or kids took it for a "joyride". But if you insulate your house to keep it warm at low cost, use the savings to put solar panels of the roof to power a fridge full of cool beers for passerbys, and then grown an organic garden producing abundant veggies you share with your neighbors, then you are going to have a lot more security and health and prosperity for both yourself and your community for a lot less cost than buying and maintaining a Howitzer in your backyard.
And that's basically the previous poster's point.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land
Wrong. Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are nearly useless as weapons. They are actually too powerful to be very useful. And they would render whatever land you wanted to acquire uninhabitable for a very long time. What's the point of land where no humans can live for a hundred years or so. I don't really see them even as much of a deterrent because no modern nation is going to be stupid enough to actually use them. For weapons that have only ever been used a couple of times when they were first invented (more as beta testing than anything else) I don't really see why so many people are impressed by them. They really aren't all that great. UAVs and robot soldiers OTOH really are strategically important. The idea is to kill as many enemy soldiers as you can without endangering your own soldiers and while avoiding as many civilian casualties as possible. Whoever has the greatest number of remote controlled, bullet resistant, and well armed robot soldiers will have the advantage in future wars. And the nice thing is no humans really have to die until all the robots from at least one of the sides have been destroyed. The US is a military badass not only due to the sheer amount of money spent, but also due to technology. Technology is make or break in a real war against any kind of serious adversary (Afganistan and Iraq were pushovers precisely because they were lacking in military tech). Afghani soldiers actually are pretty badass, but they don't have the technology to compete. If the other side is using arrows we want to be using firearms. If the other side is using firearms we want to be using bulletproof robots with particle beam weapons and xray or gamma ray lasers etc. Even without superior technology you need to have better manufacturing than the other side. It takes more than soldiers to win a war. It takes a whole lot of guns and bullets too.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
It is a mistaken notion that you can use the technology for an ICBM for orbital spaceflight and the other way around. They are not quite the same engineering domain, and from my experience when you try to design a rocket for one domain (building an ICBM) then apply it to orbital flight, the costs involved skyrocket to the point that the rocket is unusable for anybody but a government entity anyway.
It gets even worse for the use of orbital spacecraft being fit into use as a ICBM, as most orbital spacecraft are explicitly designed so that the general thrust is controlled in such a way that the stress on the payload is kept to a minimum. Most modern launchers will only do an average acceleration of about 5-7 "g's", but ICBMs typically do about 15-30 "g's". A nuclear warhead is usually a pretty sturdy thing that can handle those stresses. This is a critical factor as the spacecraft going up on a more leisurely pace is going to be tracked longer, and can be much more easily intercepted. In addition, other characteristics of the flight profile will make it painfully obvious that the object of the flight is to make it to orbit.... something easy to detect and distinguish from a purely ballistic trajectory.
Another distinguishing feature about an ICBM is that it must be ready to fly in a short notice (mostly on the order of about a half hour or less) and must either be fueled very rapidly or have something like a solid rocket motor that is explicitly designed to spend years or even decades in a "ready" state. A spacecraft on the other hand has no ned to be concerned with long-terms anti-corrosion measures, and if it takes an hour or two for the launch to happen it isn't that big of a deal. Solid fuel engines are generally discouraged for spaceflight and are only used for auxillary purposes... mostly because of cost. The Space Shuttle is quite unusual in this aspect and it should be pointed out that the Shuttle is considered overly complicated and not really cost effective either.
My point is that if a "terrorist group" somehow was able to get the plans for a SpaceX Falcon 9 and decides to use that rocket as an ICBM..... my hat is off to them both for getting the money together necessary to reproduce the efforts that SpaceX has made, overcome the quality assurance problems found with any sort of new rocket project, and even once it gets into the air it will be a cinch for the U.S. Air Force to shoot the thing down with existing technology like the Patriot missiles. In short I say "bring it on" in terms of any terrorist group wanting to build such a missile and good luck with that. They certainly aren't going to be building such a rocket covertly or without the express permission of whatever country they happen to be in. In short, orbital launch rockets are not a threat to national security at all.