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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where I work we deal with both EAR and ITAR equipment. Since I have been here I have seen a lot of different points of view. Currently, as I understand it, we treat any mechanical or un-programmed electrical hardware as EAR. Unless there are special circumstances (i.e. specific customer requirements).
Electrical hardware doesn't become ITAR unless it has ITAR software/firmware on it. Sub-assembly and top level drawings are EAR unless they call out a piece of hardware that is ITAR. Once a lower level drawing calls out an ITAR item all higher level assembly drawings have to be ITAR as well. While, an ITAR assembly drawing can call out either ITAR or EAR items, an EAR assembly can only call out EAR items in the BOM.
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
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.
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.
It also affects proposals to NASA that have ANY international collaborators. When sending out various drafts, we have either ITAR-safe or ITAR-unsafe versions because foreign citizens not working in the US are not allowed to even read vague descriptions of hardware, let alone have the hardware. So for the ITAR-safe version, whole sections of the proposal have to be removed for the safety of our foreign collaborators. After all, if you know how to build a [redacted for your safety], you must be a terrorist...
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