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NASA Banned From Working With China
astroengine writes "In the wake of the Chinese cyber-threat and claims of espionage, a clause included in the US spending bill approved by Congress to avert a government shutdown a few weeks ago has prohibited NASA from coordinating any joint scientific activity with China. The clause also extends to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy."
Yeah, if China was actually interested in hurting USA in one place, it would really hit hard, they'd just stop buying US bonds and also stop rolling over the ones they have already, and never mind NASA, US wouldn't even have money to run its military.
You can't handle the truth.
This actually hurts NASA more than China, and as NASA gets hurt and sheds jobs where do you think the best are going to go if they want to get paid? I really do not understand why some in politics are trying to replay the end of the cold war and get the USA to play the part of the crumbling USSR.
The US already made china the next superpower. It doesn't need to steal US research, it can do everything on its own in probably a more efficient manner.
This way the US cripples its research, and we'll cut off another reason for the US to exist for this economy.
China says: and nothing of value was lost. "See Yu onna moon, sucka!"
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
and how my friend do you come up with that answer? why does everything have to be about race these days? dont agree with the president? you MUST be racist. Dont want to work the a country that has horrible human rights record? known to have stole technology from you? MUST be racist.. Heres a clue, not EVERYTHING is about race, I have come to realize that those who scream racism at every corner are usually themselves the biggest racists
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
NASA's "science" has always been heavily politicized. The same sort of thing went on with the Russians back during the Cold War. They even used to coordinate their launches with anniversaries of Soviet space accomplishments just to try to show up the Russkies (they even held the first space shuttle launch back just so they could have it coincide with the 20th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first man in space flight). NASA has ALWAYS been more about politics than science. And now China are the new "bad guys."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It would be racism if they didn't allow Chinese-Americans work for NASA either. This is about politics - not race.
And Chinese isn't really a race anyway. It's a nationality.
Now we'll never have to worry about the Chinese stealing all our secrets that cost ten dollars and a ball of pocket lint to make.
Let me see then, its alright to take China's money to keep us afloat, but we can't work with them on anything non-political.
I don't remember this level of exclusion even in the bad old days of the USSR. I would also remind
I wonder, though, what this will actually stop ? For example, the Chinese are apparently expressing some interest in participating with the ISS (the space station). Is that a " bilateral policy, program, order, or contract" ? No, it isn't. It is multinational and multilateral. Any Mars mission (the Chinese have an orbiter, Yinghuo-1, on Phobos-Grunt), likewise. And, who decides whether a visitor is "official" ? Well, the bureaucracy does; no visitor (except maybe for the President or Premier) has to be official. So, if the NASA administrator wants to do something. I am not sure this would stop him.
I would also remind Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) that we fought World War II with Stalin, although that was of course a multilateral program.
was it during the Mercury or already the Apollo program?
You're swallowing his kool aid. The fact is without US technology and US raw materials China would have a LOT less to produce. China is two decades away (at least) from having trees to support its production of lumber, furniture and other such goods. They're also dependant upon western (often american) technology which they essentially clone and sell domestically. They have demonstrated a great ability to produce but little in the way of useful original ideas when it comes to those gadgets and geegaws.
A trade war with China would hurt them way more than us. We do still have factories sitting idle, and we have workers without work. There's also an entire globe for each of us to compete in. Just wait til Brazil gets rolling in another decade or two... China who?
Well this is institutionalize racism not individual racism.
Why is it as a culture we accept immigrants from Europe much more favorably then from China or India?
I have seen commercials where they say in pride they they got some guy from Europe to work on this.
While if they are from China or India, they give them americanized names and make sure their accent is a clean as possible, as well as people debating if we should let these people immigration or not.
Done fool yourself racism is still here. It has changed but it is still there.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I just bought 3 pair of socks this winter that were made in the USA.
Yeah... that's not racist.. way to go America.. national security is hindering science they have already banned all scientists from pakistan from working on scientific projects in the US now packistani scientists are working in time share and retail.. wont be longbefore other contries ban americans from working on well paying jobs
I am guessing you live in the Midwest because on the coasts Indian and Chinese food, culture, religion, etc is very much accepted and embraced.
And the US doesn't Americanize names anymore. The people choose to do that themselves to make their lives easier.
Openstack is slowly becoming THE cloud project for IaaS. Now, NASA is clearly involved in the project, and has written some part of the code, and obviously, will continue. Does this mean that if a company in China decides to contribute, NASA will have to stop any work on Openstack? Or does this concern only space, and open source projects are not included in the ban?
It doesn't matter. If necessary, NASA can just as easily be exempted. After all, according to legislation, NASA was prohibited from cancelling contracts related to the Constellation program, even though the Constellation program was cancelled. This same spending bill released them from that obligation.
There are two things that are really worrisome to me. First is the power that individual senators have over NASA. Senator Hatch dictated that NASA had to use solid rockets, much to the delight of the solid rocket manufacturers based in his state. Now Senator Wolf's computer gets hacked by some Chinese bot and poof, NASA can't play space with China. This seems awfully dictatorial and arbitrary to me. These are National programs being manipulated. Isn't there some sort of democratic process that should come into play here?
The second thing that worries me is this whole concept of riders. Clauses can be added to bills that have no relation to the subject of the bill, so that when the bill becomes law, so does the rider. It's Trojan horse politics, and it should be banned. If something is important enough to be a law, then it should get its own bill. If it doesn't have the merit to stand on its own, then it has no business becoming law.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I'm pretty sure the Chinese have whatever secrets they want already, at least those that are stored and accessible via the Internet.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Meanwhile in China...work with NASA continues.
And Chinese isn't really a race anyway. It's a nationality.
Indeed. Chinese is a race about as much as Norwegian is a race.
There's too many -ism's floating around today anyways. It's gotten to the point where if you dislike any group for any reason someone else is ready to strike at you with an accusation of some -ism. In the real world there ARE real reasons to dislike certain groups, and a country spying on you or engaging in sabotage is a perfect reason to start disliking them.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
And the new space race officially begins.
factor 966971: 966971
We could have it either way, but it looks like we don't have enough "enemies", so yeah let's go ahead, cut the ties. 'Cause who needs friends in this world anyway?
*Beware: Sarcasm! *
We should have done this almost 20 years ago, instead of selling/giving them rocket technology in the 90s.
This is the kind of crap that gets me upset. Those politicians stick random bits of policy like this into a spending bill that everyone knows "has to be passed" to avoid a government shutdown.
The USA's commie bureaucracies, such as NASA, don't actually have to work in order for society to function, so they can just run pursuing uneconomic launch systems like the Shuttle for decades, generally leaching off the taxpayer, putting private launch service companies out of business while claiming to "help" them, etc.
Marx actually had some insights into capitalism's weakness and it may very well be that China has been exploiting those weaknesses quite effectively -- helping the USA's capitalists fall into the failure modes most obvious to Marx. Don't underestimate the Chinese.
Seastead this.
So even if we entertain the idea that guys from JPL will not suffer any human rights oppression in China, do you still think they'll go there vs moving to SpaceX or Boeing, or someplace else in the US? I think they'll be quite happy in the US but not at NASA.
There was a joint Soyuz-Apollo project. Mostly symbolic, but it had some practical value -- it standardized docking equipment and procedures, made it possible at least in theory, for USSR and US spaceships to be used to rescuing crew from each other in case of emergency... Too bad, US ended Apollo soon after that, and placed all its effort into that fat Concorde-shaped thing.
I probably need to read some more history books, but as I recall this mission was totally political/symbolic. There was no standarization of anything. A specially made dongle was made to connect the spacecrafts (the APAS or the so-called Androgynous Peripheral Attach System). The apollo-soyus mission was flow w/o the lunar module and the APAS was stored in it's place. This also meant that like the lunar module, the dongle/dock wasn't connected at launch, but needed to be extracted from the base of the last stage of the rocket (the TD&E manuever, or Transposition, docking and extraction). This particular APAS system (APAS-75 the "75" being the year it was used) was only used on that mission and no other mission.
There were two main reasons for the adapter dongle: First, they wanted to try docking both ways (each ship in the active/passive roles, hence the androgynous part of the name). Second was you needed airlocks to go between the ships as it was Nasa's practice to pressurize with 5% pure oxygen (see apollo 1 for a discussion why), and the Soviets pressurized to to near ground level with oxygen and nitrogen.
The Soviet space agency eventually used APAS-89 which also happend to be use on the US Space Shuttle for connection to MIR (I believe the space station uses a later varient APAS-95, but I could be wrong).
Of course in typical NIH fashion, since APAS was mostly a Soviet/Russian invention, NASA went and developed Yet-another-dock, they called Low-impact-docking-system (or LIDS) for the now-cancelled Orion project, which is a simplified APAS, but of course totally incompatible.
As a result of this mess the international space community finally recently (last year) created the InternationalDockingStandard which is basically a hybrid between APAS-95 and LIDS and of course not implemented by anyone yet...
Of course if your mission doesn't fly with the right APAS, there's theoretically no way to dock which means in practice, there's no way to rescue a crew w/o using an airlock (which you would have to do anyhow if the pressurization was different between the two ships).
Just pointing out how the mentioned "problem" of Beijing is much less of an issue (maybe even particularly with people working on rockets; possibly proportionality unlikely to, say, protest the whole fabled military-industrial complex and its actions in the first place?)
Then if the money's good...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I once thanked a guy for helping me get a job - while we were working late on a Saturday. We worked hard on a very interesting project that was going to help a lot of people. It was the kind of thing you can really get caught up in. 6 months later the company who owned everything pulled the plug on our employer and chose another development partner and I was on the street. This was completely non-government work. From what I hear, it happens a lot more in government so you should be *more* aware of that possibility and less likely to be personally invested in it. I've also seen it happen in plain old automotive developments too. Don't think you're special because you're at NASA.
This doesn't bother me at all. We should expand that to the rest of the government and the private sector. I'm a capitalist but I draw the line at dealing with nations whose systems of government are rife with human rights atrocities. And yes, I'd include many middle-eastern nations as well despite their oil.
We long lost the ball on the notion that exporting capitalism would induce democracy. The Chinese have done one thing too well, managing to hold capitalism in a box and make it produce nice things for it without having it overly-influence it's populace. The game's over. Stop doing business with them and have some ideological fortitude.
Yeah... the lack of quality control is a huge problem in Chinese factory production today, but that's bound to improve. Japan used to have the exact same issue, and back then, Americans kept using that as the reason why "Japan won't be relevant!". Within less than 10 years though, they got their act together and started selling cars to us that were better than anything our U.S. factories could produce, quality-wise.
LoL!!!
Yeah, the Chinese are just so missing out. They are reconstructing a space program around a very generous budget, and the same sorts of goals and ambitions they are using with the building projects in their own country, many of them of a size and scale never before done by mankind.
Yeah, I bet they are just wailing in the streets over there.
By the time the Chinese get done with us, they will own half the moon and our private industry the USA is working on will still be sending up tinker toys.
The only reason why they are cutting the space program in the USA, is because the wall street bankers need more money to cover all of their criminal activity with state pensions, mortgage fraud. After all, it is more important that JP Morgan wall street investment bankers get those 300 dollar hamburgers and 150K wrist watches than some ole space program.
Everyone here knows that.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Doc: Unbelievable, that his piece of junk could be such a big problem. No wonder this circuit failed... it says, "Made in Japan."
Marty: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
Doc: Unbelievable!
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
This is wrong. The industrial output of the US is still the largest in the world, and it produces quite a bit more than china. While it's true that the US produces a lot of raw materials, they also produce high-value items like aircraft, specialty chemicals, electronics, cars, pharmaceuticals, and a lot of other things I haven't listed here. The idea that the US doesn't produce these things has traction because most of it's economy (when measured in dollars) comes from hand-wavy products like financial services. But even if you cut out all that fat, there's quite a bit of meat left.
The reason the US is taking on debt while China is taking on monetary assets is an excess of consumption, not a deficit of production (when compared with China). The idea that the US is somehow incapable of paying back one and a half trillion dollars in real items it pretty silly. Think about it this way, a new 747 costs $260 million which means that our entire debt to China is equivalent to about 5,000 747 airplanes. The US is certainly capable of 5,000 747s. That means it's also capable of building other goods that would represent an equivalent value to pay back the debt. The only reason this hasn't happened is the US hasn't been put in a situation where this is necessary.
Interesting that most comments are more generally encompassing than mere specifically about NASA.
The Chinese have done pretty well in their weapons program despite western embargo on weapons technology after Tiannamen Square.
I don't think they're going to be losing too much sleep over this one.
In what world? The pursuit of wealth drives creative ways to make something for nothing. Creativity derives from a culture of creativity (which the japanese have in spades) not from a culture of "work harder and steal the opposition's ideas."
China already stole everything they needed, I think at this point, from a mutual cooperation at least the US can get input instead of output of information. You can't stop China from getting what they want, if they want secrets, they will bribe, steal, spy or do what it is needed to get them.
China can not afford to do that. If they do that, without freeing up their yuan, then inflation, MASSIVE INFLATION, will hit them the second that they quit buying these AND the yuan will rise massively against all other currency. You see, because they do not allow their yuan to float, then they HAVE to do something with it. They can not sit on all those dollars.
Now, US needs to quit importing so much esp. from China, and we need to balace the budget. But the good news is that if China decided to not buy our bonds, other nations are likely to step forward on it. And even if not, we could finally balance quickly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This clause was surreptitiously slipped in by ONE GUY, how is this democracy? We desperately need to get rid of riders.