NASA Chief Says Ban On Chinese Partnerships Is Temporary

An anonymous reader writes: Current head of NASA Charles Bolden has spoken out against the 4-year-old ban on collaborating with China. According to Bolden working with the Chinese is vital to the future of space exploration. Reuters reports: "The United States should include China in its human space projects or face being left out of new ventures to send people beyond the International Space Station, NASA chief Charles Bolden said on Monday. Since 2011, the U.S. space agency has been banned by Congress from collaborating with China, due to human rights issues and national security concerns. China is not a member of the 15-nation partnership that owns and operates the station, a permanently staffed research laboratory that flies about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth, but Bolden says working China will be necessary in the future."

Comments

NASA needs another vendor

[mschaffer]

NASA needs another vendor (now that Russia and the US aren't on the best terms) for heavy lifting.
So, why not work with another country with questionable politics?

Re:NASA needs another vendor

[ganjadude]

or better yet why are we not working with other american companies to do the work?

Re:NASA needs another vendor

[jonwil]

The US needs to stop relying on foreign countries for heavy lift rocket capability, manned access to space and their other space needs and fund NASA to the level required to develop a reliable usable 100% US heavy lift capability (whether that be the SpaceX Falcon rocket, the Atlas or Delta rocket using a US-built engine instead of the Russian one or something else entirely) and fund the Commercial Crew program to completly eliminate the need for the USA to book seats on Soyuz to get into space.

If the billions of dollars spent on expensive toys for the military that they dont actually need (F-35 for example) had instead been given to NASA and its contractors and entities, NASA could have replaced all uses of Russian hardware in the US space program by now.

Re:abysmal human rights records

[rmdingler]

Clearly. It works much better if only one of the collaborating nations is ridden with corruption.

Re:abysmal human rights records

[Rick in China]

You could replace China with America, there, and it would be fine.

Drone strikes on own citizens, arrests without charge for unlimited time for citizens mostly deemed to be a particular race or ethnic group (oppressing certain minority groups), awesome politics.. or how about the prison industrial complex tossing people away for decades for non-violent crimes under mandatory sentencing laws? It's all good in the US, tho, right?

Re:abysmal human rights records

[drinkypoo]

Yeah, they should torture its citizens the way we do it (solitary confinement) and manipulate politics the way we do it (through the media, and institutionalized vote fraud) and oppress only the minorities we oppress, etc. etc.

I mean, I'm with you on China, but we should clean our own house first

Re:abysmal human rights records

[AmiMoJo]

Maybe the US should stop torturing people, oppressing certain minority groups, fix the corruption in its politics etc. All countries have problems, and one of the best ways to address them is to work with them on neutral projects like space exploration so that there can be a cultural exchange. All the time the two cultures are seen as incompatible and unable to work together, it is easy to reject ideas about human rights as something western and non-universal.

Re:abysmal human rights records

[allcoolnameswheretak]

Unfortunately this is not butthurt, apologetic behaviour. There is some truth to that.
In other developed countries, e.g. Western Europe, we didn't torture people (waterboarding, electrocution, solitary confinement). We don't have an extrajudicial concentration camp for "terrorists" where innocent people are being held for years without hope of justice (Guantanamo). We don't have police killing minorities on a regular basis. We don't bomb and declare war on other nations, spreading chaos and desaster across whole regions, at the whim of a leader (GW Bush's illegal war in Iraq). We are not involved in a huge, paranoid mass surveillance scheme against everyone and everything, including our own citizens...

Re:abysmal human rights records

[wooppp]

May be China should just give pop vote to the people.

China has the goods on Mr Bolden

[mnemotronic]

Your friendly neighborhood Chinese govt has the background info on many US govt employees. Just for a sec, suppose there is something in there that, if leaked to the public at large, could cause embarrasment for Mr. Bolden and subsequently for NASA. Suppose the friendly Chinese govt contacted Mr. Bolden and "requested" his assistance in promoting cooperation between the US and the friendly Chinese govt. Just a crazy theory. Obviously cant be true. The friendly Chinese govt are everyones bestest friend in the whole world.

Re:abysmal human rights records

[tnk1]

Other developed countries have done all of those things and more. They just happened to do them in the past. And not even the distant past.

I'm not sure where you are getting any of that, or do you believe that history doesn't extend back farther than fifty years or so?