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American space policy is not like other American foreign policy. It is the USA that is pushing a model of international cooperation and governing treaties. It i

American space policy is not like other American foreign policy. It is the USA that is pushing a model of international cooperation and governing treaties. It is China that is taking an approach of unilateral actions and national appropriation.

simion314 6y ago
Isn't China not allowed to "Cooperate" by the Americans ? Honestly with current american leadership I expect as soon as China will have a decent space station they will also demand that S will have an even bigger and cooler US only one.
- garmaine 6y ago
  China doesn’t cooperate with other agencies largely because they have no desire to. The purposefully shun international cooperation, then turn around and complain in People’s Daily that the international space community has rejected them. When I was at NASA we tried very hard to build a scientific relationship with China’s planetary science researchers, to no avail. We were able to get Saudi Arabia and Israel to come together and sit at the same table together, but not China. On the US side working with China is not banned specifically, but the fact that the Chinese space program is military not civilian and because of a history of aggressive hacking and stealing of technology and trade secrets, it requires special permission and extra care.
  - echelon 6y ago
    This is exactly the comment I wanted to read. What's your perspective on China's desire to do things unilaterally? Are they "catching up"? Do they pose a threat to peaceful space endeavors? Are they good or bad stewards with respect to space junk? Does your perspective here give you insight as to other ways China conducts its affairs? How do you see One Belt One Road panning out? Will China own Africa and the developing world? Will they leap frog the West?
    - garmaine 6y ago
      I should mention that my opinion of China's government is colored as much by the fact that I married a Taiwanese girl, my kids have Taiwanese passports and I'm personally connected to the struggle of both Taiwan and Hong Kong. But nevertheless not only is being unbiased in government work A Very Big Deal, but I've also worked more recently on contract proposals related to Belt and Road and you gotta keep personal biases at bay to be successful in business too. I'll try to give you the informed, yet detached answer you're looking for. First, the Chinese communist party is a kleptocratic, oligarchic organization. All government programs exist to profit and empower those in charge, whom for the most part inherited their privileged position. Second, the CCP maintains their control over their population through stoking nationalist fears and anti-west sentiments. Same as Iran and other autocratic states. These two facts have a particular bearing on their space policy. The space program is a source of national prestige--when they launched a man into space they accomplished something only two other nations had done (never mind that it was a near exact clone of the Russian Soyuz capsule...). Unlike the Europeans, Japanese, Canadians, India, UAE, and Israel, China doesn't have to rely on anybody to launch their astronauts to space. Each new milestone they reach--landing a rover on the moon, launching a space station--magnifies this point. Once they send human beings to the Moon they will use that as a claim of technical superiority over the west. We saw a glimpse of this when they landed a rover on the Moon, a feat the USA never did on the Moon specifically. To partner with any other nation would be to diminish or perhaps even eliminate entirely the propaganda value to the party. But the value of the Chinese space program isn't just propaganda. It's also being used as a play for potential power and profit. Jokes aside, military space power really is the dominant domain of the 21st century for conflict between superpowers, whether actual or merely planned for, like air power was in the 20th. I'm not going to adequately summarize military space policy in a HN comment, but basically the analogy to air dominance is very accurate: without satellites most of our modern war fighting capability is neutralized or made ineffective. Anti-satellite weaponry in its various forms is the new ICBM or stealth strike bomber. This isn't common knowledge outside of the military-industrial complex, but that's because our adversaries since the collapse of the USSR have had asymmetric capabilities with anti-satellite weapons consisting of camouflage tents and caves. The one thing uniquely positive I have to say about about the Chinese space program leads to the final point to be made: profit. Whereas every other human space program is science and/or prestige based, China's is run by a country looking for an exploitative edge over major world powers, and bureaucrats within the party looking for ways to get internal leverage themselves. It turns out that the Moon and near-Earth asteroids are an abundant source of minerals and metals rare on Earth and can be mined for far less than you might naïvely think. So there are young turks within the party who are advocating for a cislunar economic exclusion zone. They are talking about violating the Outer Space Treaty of 1967's prohibition against claims of sovereignty over celestial bodies. The official plan is to construct a lunar base and perform resource exploration, WITHOUT international cooperation. Indeed, while NASA is working to get the Artimis Accords in place to reaffirm the existing cooperative model and try to build a collaborative effort to return to the Moon and go beyond, while opening up cislunar space to private resource exploration, China is laying the ground work for a land-grab. There are serious talks about a Chinese cislunar economic exclusion zone explicitly compared to the South China Sea, and estimated to be worth $10 trillion dollars by 2050 (crazy optimistic numbers, but that is the claim). Regarding Belt and Road, I'm not sure what unique opinions I can offer. It's what most commentators have described it as recently: a debt trap to capture the best ports and enter into lucrative markets with the same sort of unequal treaties the europeans used against China in the 19th century. Tit-for-tat. At least some good infrastructure is being built though, particularly the roads through Central Asia which can't be monopolized in the same way that the deep-water ports they're building are. Whether they leap frog the West depends more on whether we take proactive actions ourselves. SpaceX gives me reason to be optimistic, be we can't count our chickens before they've hatched.
  - simion314 6y ago
    If US and Russia could find a way to cooperate then the fact US and China can't do it is still a diplomatic issue, incompetent leaders/diplomats (not the scientists). >a history of aggressive hacking and stealing of technology and trade secrets, Really? US should not complain about this since they have a lot of secret military satellites/weapons in space, detonated nukes in space, who knows what other covert operations have - but some other countries should not dare test soem anti-satellite weapons or other military equipment since only US is the only one to be trusted with this.
  - ShorsHammer 6y ago
    > China doesn’t cooperate with other agencies largely because they have no desire to. Which nation refuses to sign more international treaties than any other and is actively working to retroactively disengage and absolve themselves of the responsibility they signed up for? Hint: It's not China. [1] China was explicitly banned from the ISS program[2], you'll let the Saudis who stone adulterers to death in the streets but for some reason China can't possibly participate in the only hope for humanity to unite as one. China's space program is offering a lot to the scientific world and they keep pushing forward despite US efforts to stop everyone on Earth collaborating with them. Their lunar base and farside radio telescope plans have some in the interantional community willing to give a big fu to those from overseas who demand we ignore what they are doing. Breaking out of your bubble is a good thing now and then. Any country taking sides in the coldwarV2.0 game is getting played and you will be left behind. Look after yourself. [1] https://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/26665-us-position-on-international-treaties.html https://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/26665-us-position-on-int... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_Space_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_...
    - garmaine 6y ago
      > Which nation refuses to sign more international treaties than any other and is actively working to retroactively disengage and absolve themselves of the responsibility they signed up for? Hint: It's not China. "American space policy is not like other American foreign policy" As to restrictions against China, blame Congress not NASA. But the bans are not blanket bans, they are actually highly specific.
      - justicezyx 6y ago
        > As to restrictions against China, blame Congress not NASA. But the bans are not blanket bans, they are actually highly specific. What does that even mean? If I am selling food so expensive that no one can afford and start to dying from starving, then I can say: "I am not not allow you to eat, it's just that my price is highly specific?" Do you really think regulations are not pushing away competitions because of the investment needed to overcome the numerous details? Would that same logic apply to your "highly specific" rules? Like, you invested 1Billion, oh sorry, I cannot let you have this piece of tech, because of this rules; and I certainly forgot that this rules apply to this tech...
  - dispoatim 6y ago
    This is full of ... let's say ... misinformation. So sad HN is gradually turning into Reddit these days after the publicity/community has grown. > In April 2011, the 112th United States Congress banned NASA from engaging in bilateral agreements and coordination with China > In 2013, officials at NASA Ames prohibited Chinese nationals from attending Kepler Science Conference II. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_exclusion_policy_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_exclusion_policy_of_NASA > China has been barred from the ISS since 2011, when Congress passed a law prohibiting official American contact with the Chinese space program due to concerns about national security. “National security,” of course, is the lingua franca excuse for any country to do anything it jolly well wants to do even if it has nothing to do with, you know, the security of the nation. https://time.com/3901419/space-station-no-chinese/ https://time.com/3901419/space-station-no-chinese/ The truth is that China is willing and has been actively cooperating with other space agencies. > The Long March-5 rocket for China's Tianwen-1 Mars mission was transported to the launch area at China’s Wenchang Space Launch Center on July 17, 2020. Note the logos of the European (ESA), French (CNES), Argentine (CONAE) and Austrian (FFG) space agencies in addition to that of the China National Space Agency (CNSA). https://www.space.com/china-mars-mission-tianwen-1-international-partners.html https://www.space.com/china-mars-mission-tianwen-1-internati... > The ultimate goal is for ESA to establish a long term cooperation with China and ESA astronauts to fly on China’s space station. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Astronauts/ESA_and_Chinese_astronauts_train_together https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...
    - garmaine 6y ago
      This is my industry. I think I know a bit about it :) Those restrictions aren't as broad as you are implying. There is no prohibition against NASA and the Chinese working together on certain types of projects. It just requires explicit authorization from headquarters to make sure that it doesn't run afoul of the very specific prohibitions in those legislation... which in practice is very hard to achieve, because of lawyers being lawyers, but not impossible when there is a powerful sponsor like the NASA Administrator behind it. My wording in the earlier post was poor: I should have said “broadly” instead of “specifically.” That more matches what I was trying to say, but the edit window has closed. The prohibition, btw, is against "NASA’s use of appropriated funds for bilateral cooperation with China." Part of getting approval is showing that there is zero added cost to the collaboration, which in the case of things like planetary science research using existing assets, which is usually easy to do.
socialdemocrat 6y ago
Eh... the US deliberately kept China out of any space collaboration. So no... the US isn’t all that warm and fuzzy about cooperation
- jackinloadup 6y ago
  It's kinda important to note why they have been barred. They broke international space laws and were caught hacking JPL. Additionally china's space program is tightly tied to their milliary unlike NASA, ESA, JAXA, CSA, and Roscosmos.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Hahaha. NASA is very strongly tied into the US military. NASA projects are bid on by US military contractors, and NASA flies military airframe all the time. NASA pretty much is an arm of the US MIC, in a way that the ESA or the CSA aren't. And also, the Soviet space program was also openly tied into their military, and that wasnt an issue. The real reason is that the US wants to make everything hard and expensive for China, due to perceiving them as a competitor. It's just not interested in cooperation. As for violation of international law, neither the US nor the Soviets cared about it. It's just politics.

simion314 6y ago

Isn't China not allowed to "Cooperate" by the Americans ? Honestly with current american leadership I expect as soon as China will have a decent space station they will also demand that S will have an even bigger and cooler US only one.

garmaine 6y ago
China doesn’t cooperate with other agencies largely because they have no desire to. The purposefully shun international cooperation, then turn around and complain in People’s Daily that the international space community has rejected them. When I was at NASA we tried very hard to build a scientific relationship with China’s planetary science researchers, to no avail. We were able to get Saudi Arabia and Israel to come together and sit at the same table together, but not China. On the US side working with China is not banned specifically, but the fact that the Chinese space program is military not civilian and because of a history of aggressive hacking and stealing of technology and trade secrets, it requires special permission and extra care.
- echelon 6y ago
  This is exactly the comment I wanted to read. What's your perspective on China's desire to do things unilaterally? Are they "catching up"? Do they pose a threat to peaceful space endeavors? Are they good or bad stewards with respect to space junk? Does your perspective here give you insight as to other ways China conducts its affairs? How do you see One Belt One Road panning out? Will China own Africa and the developing world? Will they leap frog the West?
  - garmaine 6y ago
    I should mention that my opinion of China's government is colored as much by the fact that I married a Taiwanese girl, my kids have Taiwanese passports and I'm personally connected to the struggle of both Taiwan and Hong Kong. But nevertheless not only is being unbiased in government work A Very Big Deal, but I've also worked more recently on contract proposals related to Belt and Road and you gotta keep personal biases at bay to be successful in business too. I'll try to give you the informed, yet detached answer you're looking for. First, the Chinese communist party is a kleptocratic, oligarchic organization. All government programs exist to profit and empower those in charge, whom for the most part inherited their privileged position. Second, the CCP maintains their control over their population through stoking nationalist fears and anti-west sentiments. Same as Iran and other autocratic states. These two facts have a particular bearing on their space policy. The space program is a source of national prestige--when they launched a man into space they accomplished something only two other nations had done (never mind that it was a near exact clone of the Russian Soyuz capsule...). Unlike the Europeans, Japanese, Canadians, India, UAE, and Israel, China doesn't have to rely on anybody to launch their astronauts to space. Each new milestone they reach--landing a rover on the moon, launching a space station--magnifies this point. Once they send human beings to the Moon they will use that as a claim of technical superiority over the west. We saw a glimpse of this when they landed a rover on the Moon, a feat the USA never did on the Moon specifically. To partner with any other nation would be to diminish or perhaps even eliminate entirely the propaganda value to the party. But the value of the Chinese space program isn't just propaganda. It's also being used as a play for potential power and profit. Jokes aside, military space power really is the dominant domain of the 21st century for conflict between superpowers, whether actual or merely planned for, like air power was in the 20th. I'm not going to adequately summarize military space policy in a HN comment, but basically the analogy to air dominance is very accurate: without satellites most of our modern war fighting capability is neutralized or made ineffective. Anti-satellite weaponry in its various forms is the new ICBM or stealth strike bomber. This isn't common knowledge outside of the military-industrial complex, but that's because our adversaries since the collapse of the USSR have had asymmetric capabilities with anti-satellite weapons consisting of camouflage tents and caves. The one thing uniquely positive I have to say about about the Chinese space program leads to the final point to be made: profit. Whereas every other human space program is science and/or prestige based, China's is run by a country looking for an exploitative edge over major world powers, and bureaucrats within the party looking for ways to get internal leverage themselves. It turns out that the Moon and near-Earth asteroids are an abundant source of minerals and metals rare on Earth and can be mined for far less than you might naïvely think. So there are young turks within the party who are advocating for a cislunar economic exclusion zone. They are talking about violating the Outer Space Treaty of 1967's prohibition against claims of sovereignty over celestial bodies. The official plan is to construct a lunar base and perform resource exploration, WITHOUT international cooperation. Indeed, while NASA is working to get the Artimis Accords in place to reaffirm the existing cooperative model and try to build a collaborative effort to return to the Moon and go beyond, while opening up cislunar space to private resource exploration, China is laying the ground work for a land-grab. There are serious talks about a Chinese cislunar economic exclusion zone explicitly compared to the South China Sea, and estimated to be worth $10 trillion dollars by 2050 (crazy optimistic numbers, but that is the claim). Regarding Belt and Road, I'm not sure what unique opinions I can offer. It's what most commentators have described it as recently: a debt trap to capture the best ports and enter into lucrative markets with the same sort of unequal treaties the europeans used against China in the 19th century. Tit-for-tat. At least some good infrastructure is being built though, particularly the roads through Central Asia which can't be monopolized in the same way that the deep-water ports they're building are. Whether they leap frog the West depends more on whether we take proactive actions ourselves. SpaceX gives me reason to be optimistic, be we can't count our chickens before they've hatched.
- simion314 6y ago
  If US and Russia could find a way to cooperate then the fact US and China can't do it is still a diplomatic issue, incompetent leaders/diplomats (not the scientists). >a history of aggressive hacking and stealing of technology and trade secrets, Really? US should not complain about this since they have a lot of secret military satellites/weapons in space, detonated nukes in space, who knows what other covert operations have - but some other countries should not dare test soem anti-satellite weapons or other military equipment since only US is the only one to be trusted with this.
- ShorsHammer 6y ago
  > China doesn’t cooperate with other agencies largely because they have no desire to. Which nation refuses to sign more international treaties than any other and is actively working to retroactively disengage and absolve themselves of the responsibility they signed up for? Hint: It's not China. [1] China was explicitly banned from the ISS program[2], you'll let the Saudis who stone adulterers to death in the streets but for some reason China can't possibly participate in the only hope for humanity to unite as one. China's space program is offering a lot to the scientific world and they keep pushing forward despite US efforts to stop everyone on Earth collaborating with them. Their lunar base and farside radio telescope plans have some in the interantional community willing to give a big fu to those from overseas who demand we ignore what they are doing. Breaking out of your bubble is a good thing now and then. Any country taking sides in the coldwarV2.0 game is getting played and you will be left behind. Look after yourself. [1] https://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/26665-us-position-on-international-treaties.html https://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/26665-us-position-on-int... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_Space_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_...
  - garmaine 6y ago
    > Which nation refuses to sign more international treaties than any other and is actively working to retroactively disengage and absolve themselves of the responsibility they signed up for? Hint: It's not China. "American space policy is not like other American foreign policy" As to restrictions against China, blame Congress not NASA. But the bans are not blanket bans, they are actually highly specific.
    - justicezyx 6y ago
      > As to restrictions against China, blame Congress not NASA. But the bans are not blanket bans, they are actually highly specific. What does that even mean? If I am selling food so expensive that no one can afford and start to dying from starving, then I can say: "I am not not allow you to eat, it's just that my price is highly specific?" Do you really think regulations are not pushing away competitions because of the investment needed to overcome the numerous details? Would that same logic apply to your "highly specific" rules? Like, you invested 1Billion, oh sorry, I cannot let you have this piece of tech, because of this rules; and I certainly forgot that this rules apply to this tech...
- dispoatim 6y ago
  This is full of ... let's say ... misinformation. So sad HN is gradually turning into Reddit these days after the publicity/community has grown. > In April 2011, the 112th United States Congress banned NASA from engaging in bilateral agreements and coordination with China > In 2013, officials at NASA Ames prohibited Chinese nationals from attending Kepler Science Conference II. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_exclusion_policy_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_exclusion_policy_of_NASA > China has been barred from the ISS since 2011, when Congress passed a law prohibiting official American contact with the Chinese space program due to concerns about national security. “National security,” of course, is the lingua franca excuse for any country to do anything it jolly well wants to do even if it has nothing to do with, you know, the security of the nation. https://time.com/3901419/space-station-no-chinese/ https://time.com/3901419/space-station-no-chinese/ The truth is that China is willing and has been actively cooperating with other space agencies. > The Long March-5 rocket for China's Tianwen-1 Mars mission was transported to the launch area at China’s Wenchang Space Launch Center on July 17, 2020. Note the logos of the European (ESA), French (CNES), Argentine (CONAE) and Austrian (FFG) space agencies in addition to that of the China National Space Agency (CNSA). https://www.space.com/china-mars-mission-tianwen-1-international-partners.html https://www.space.com/china-mars-mission-tianwen-1-internati... > The ultimate goal is for ESA to establish a long term cooperation with China and ESA astronauts to fly on China’s space station. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Astronauts/ESA_and_Chinese_astronauts_train_together https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...
  - garmaine 6y ago
    This is my industry. I think I know a bit about it :) Those restrictions aren't as broad as you are implying. There is no prohibition against NASA and the Chinese working together on certain types of projects. It just requires explicit authorization from headquarters to make sure that it doesn't run afoul of the very specific prohibitions in those legislation... which in practice is very hard to achieve, because of lawyers being lawyers, but not impossible when there is a powerful sponsor like the NASA Administrator behind it. My wording in the earlier post was poor: I should have said “broadly” instead of “specifically.” That more matches what I was trying to say, but the edit window has closed. The prohibition, btw, is against "NASA’s use of appropriated funds for bilateral cooperation with China." Part of getting approval is showing that there is zero added cost to the collaboration, which in the case of things like planetary science research using existing assets, which is usually easy to do.

socialdemocrat 6y ago

Eh... the US deliberately kept China out of any space collaboration. So no... the US isn’t all that warm and fuzzy about cooperation

jackinloadup 6y ago
It's kinda important to note why they have been barred. They broke international space laws and were caught hacking JPL. Additionally china's space program is tightly tied to their milliary unlike NASA, ESA, JAXA, CSA, and Roscosmos.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Hahaha. NASA is very strongly tied into the US military. NASA projects are bid on by US military contractors, and NASA flies military airframe all the time. NASA pretty much is an arm of the US MIC, in a way that the ESA or the CSA aren't. And also, the Soviet space program was also openly tied into their military, and that wasnt an issue. The real reason is that the US wants to make everything hard and expensive for China, due to perceiving them as a competitor. It's just not interested in cooperation. As for violation of international law, neither the US nor the Soviets cared about it. It's just politics.