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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

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.
- dispoatim 6y ago
  "This is my industry. I think I know a bit about it :)" That's great! I understand there are genuine issues and concerns with international space cooperation especially round the sharing of technology. Do you mind sharing your insight and opinions on whether the current legislation is the best solution. And whether there is any alternatives? -- from someone who is deeply interested in space exploration and cooperation but not in the industry.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    Yes, but I'll have to come back to this comment after the holiday.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    The legislation is the work of a xenophobic China-skeptic, and it shows. There was no one willing to lobby against it because IP theft by China is a huge issue, so the big contractors would rather just not be exposed. But the legislation is not as comprehensive as it seems at first glance: it bans using appropriated funds for bilateral relationships involving China. This is actually highly specific: any project which either (a) doesn't involve expenditures (no added cost), or (b) is multilateral is exempt from the restrictions. So NASA can't make bilateral agreements with China, but can totally make a 3-way agreement with China, the USA, and Canada. Or it can let China participate in ways in which there is no added cost from China's participation per se. Now of course the reality is that to make sure that NASA remains compliant, NASA HQ has instituted requirements that any project with interacts with China must get approval from HQ, and (lawyers being lawyers) it's way easier to just say no than to go through the effort of actually seeing if a proposed collaboration is compliant. Now I can say that China is not interested in these sort of multilateral agreements unless they are entering as the dominant partner because of my experience at NASA, where I was fortunate enough to be working on a high-profile headquarters project that had an advocate on the 9th floor with the administrator's ear. We didn't have to worry about lawyers shooting down our proposed collaboration just to make their job easier. And our collaboration was both multilateral and zero added cost. However the Chinese space agency declined repeated efforts, and one of our China contacts eventually told us why: China refused to interact with NASA unless they are the dominant partner in the relationship. We, on the other hand, were building a team of equals. They were prohibited on their end from interacting with us for that reason. Meanwhile I was getting calls to fix a database server backing an internal web service which was having performance issues... which I found was because it had saturated its network connection exfiltrating data from our internal network back to some IP associated with a Chinese research university. The issues here are very real. A "partner" that is not interested in developing a mutually beneficial relationship, but rather stealing IP and extracting whatever leverage it can to leapfrog ahead of you, is not really a partner. There probably should be restrictions in place. But the current restrictions are rather toothless, and don't prevent the theft, which is happening anyway.

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.

dispoatim 6y ago
"This is my industry. I think I know a bit about it :)" That's great! I understand there are genuine issues and concerns with international space cooperation especially round the sharing of technology. Do you mind sharing your insight and opinions on whether the current legislation is the best solution. And whether there is any alternatives? -- from someone who is deeply interested in space exploration and cooperation but not in the industry.
- garmaine 6y ago
  Yes, but I'll have to come back to this comment after the holiday.
- garmaine 6y ago
  The legislation is the work of a xenophobic China-skeptic, and it shows. There was no one willing to lobby against it because IP theft by China is a huge issue, so the big contractors would rather just not be exposed. But the legislation is not as comprehensive as it seems at first glance: it bans using appropriated funds for bilateral relationships involving China. This is actually highly specific: any project which either (a) doesn't involve expenditures (no added cost), or (b) is multilateral is exempt from the restrictions. So NASA can't make bilateral agreements with China, but can totally make a 3-way agreement with China, the USA, and Canada. Or it can let China participate in ways in which there is no added cost from China's participation per se. Now of course the reality is that to make sure that NASA remains compliant, NASA HQ has instituted requirements that any project with interacts with China must get approval from HQ, and (lawyers being lawyers) it's way easier to just say no than to go through the effort of actually seeing if a proposed collaboration is compliant. Now I can say that China is not interested in these sort of multilateral agreements unless they are entering as the dominant partner because of my experience at NASA, where I was fortunate enough to be working on a high-profile headquarters project that had an advocate on the 9th floor with the administrator's ear. We didn't have to worry about lawyers shooting down our proposed collaboration just to make their job easier. And our collaboration was both multilateral and zero added cost. However the Chinese space agency declined repeated efforts, and one of our China contacts eventually told us why: China refused to interact with NASA unless they are the dominant partner in the relationship. We, on the other hand, were building a team of equals. They were prohibited on their end from interacting with us for that reason. Meanwhile I was getting calls to fix a database server backing an internal web service which was having performance issues... which I found was because it had saturated its network connection exfiltrating data from our internal network back to some IP associated with a Chinese research university. The issues here are very real. A "partner" that is not interested in developing a mutually beneficial relationship, but rather stealing IP and extracting whatever leverage it can to leapfrog ahead of you, is not really a partner. There probably should be restrictions in place. But the current restrictions are rather toothless, and don't prevent the theft, which is happening anyway.