NASA Administrator Mike Griffin to visit China 70
Maggie McKee writes "China has repeatedly extended a hand to the US to work together in space, but for military and political reasons the US has always refused. Now, New Scientist Space reports that NASA chief Mike Griffin and other bigwigs are about to head to China for a meet-and-greet. But Griffin says: 'This is a get-acquainted session, and it is nothing more, and to characterise it as anything more would be to create expectations that would be possibly embarrassing to us or embarrassing to China.'"
Re:"China has repeatedly extended a hand to the US (Score:2)
Wish I could "steal" stuff like that. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because I'm sure they just had to be kidnapped and dragged over here; the alternative of ending up in some Soviet gulag, breaking big rocks into small rocks, being as enticing as it is.
Von Braun probably just stole a train [wikipedia.org] and hauled ass towards the Western Front for a shits and giggles.
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Soviets wouldn't waste such useful people in gulags either. They just happened to get less of them (for obvious reasons, German scientists, as well as most civilians and soldiers, preferred to meet surrender at parts of Germany controlled by Western Allies rather than the USSR), though IIRC they got slightly more equip
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Even then, quite a few notable German scientists were spared even sharashkas. Consider Helmut Gröttrup [wikipedia.org], von Braun's assistant, for example - note that he worked under Korolev when the latter conviction was already dismissed, so it w
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False staement. Funny how many America haters forget history. You do realize that USA sent tons and tons of supplies to the USSR went Hitler was going east. The USSR would have fallen if it wasn't for our help.
Besides, D-Day was almost nothing?
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Maybe you're forgetting the strategic bombing campaign, North Africa, and Italy?
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It is funny how people are so quick to denounce USA that they praise USSR as being the savior of Europe. USSR helped, a lot, but it was the factories of USA that beat Hitler and Japan through direct involment and supporting those who were in the War before USA joined. We sent tons of stuff to England as well as USSR.
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Ever heard of a thing called the Lend-Lease act?
Read about it here [wikipedia.org].
What space race? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:What space race? (Score:4, Interesting)
Which, given the current pathetic state of our space program, makes me expect we'll see a yellow star on a red flag planted on the Moon long before we see another Stars and Stripes.
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Of course, last I checked, the US devoted more resources to its space program each year than all the other world's space programs combined.
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Yes, it is a quiet race (Score:2)
Alternatives to a space race. (Score:2)
A "Space Race" is about national prestige. We've been there, done that as far as the moon is concerned. Furthermore, if we head for manned missions to Mars, we must remember we're being judged on a sliding scale. It should be no surprise that we can do that, which means from the point of view of national prestige, we can only lose.
What I'd like to see is a new effort towards establishing international technological prestige, but in a differnt
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It's an interesting theory, but short on specifics of why. A better explanation is that empires give up exploration as the administrative troubles involved in running the known empire start to multiply.
If we cure every disease today, then you have a very long life group of ppl. The problem is that we do not have the jobs.
The people will create the jobs, as well as consume th
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You do realize that the entire Constellation effort is for moon landings by 2020 and is driven by a Bush mandate right? You seem to be implying that the Ares I and CEV are somehow not a part of the lunar archite
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I am sure you just couldn't resist a chance to take a swipe at Bush.
You mean there's been only $500 billion spent and still no sign of Osama bin Laden and Bush said he's unconcerned about him, so he's unconcerned about 9/11/01 attacks, but that's supposed to be the reason for his "War on Terra" --- what am I missing here??? Oh, so it's about something else, is it???($$$)
George W. Bush [bushisantichrist.com], born on July 6th, 1946, at 6:00.
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China and the ISS (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite the fact that China has repeatedly asked to participate in the International Space Station, the US has always refused. Some have argued this is because of a reluctance to share technologies that might be co-opted for military purposes, but others say it is simply down to politics, with space the last bastion of Cold War thinking.
If so, I wonder if it's really the US that blackballs the Chinese. The country with the most to fear from China is actually Russia. They share an enormous common border. On the Russian side you've got endless empty taiga, natural resources galore...a paltry 140 million citizens...on the Chinese side, a billion hungry peasants. What's the Chinese for Lebensraum, I wonder?
Me, I'm totally OK with a strictly competitive stance vis-a-vis the Chinese in space. Much more gets done in that brisk atmosphere than in the suffocating 'cooperation in space' fug through which the ISS drifts, poor thing.
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Tibet. Oh, almost forgot, they have another word for it too. Taiwan.
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Italy used to rule Turkey. Why not then use this to justify Italian imperialist aggression against Turkey, should it ever occur? You are using a very similar situation to justify Chinese aggression against Tibet. Why do you play on people's ignorance in order to justify the unsupportable?
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Back when the ISS was first being designed, China had almost nothing to contribute except maybe some cheap labor. Today, they have a lot of bucks but not much space tech. They would love to collaborate with the U.S., obviously, to obtain its space tech. However China's government has painted the U.S. as an adversary power for so long now that it would appear hypocritical to suddenly become friends and allies.
They need a huge outside enemy to continue justifying their existence as an unelected
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As to lower quality, well, we have had more than our fair shares of issues. Many of ours were in the initial design. From Russia, we have learned a great deal about staying up there for long periods of time. After all, look at the history of the our only station; sky lab. We basically let it burn
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BTW: lebensraum - living space. I don't think many Americans want to live in Iraq or Canada.
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Well, it is sort of relevant, when you have a major imperialist power (China) which invaded, trashed, and annexed a separate nation during the 1950s and 1960s (Tibet), is currently openly planning to unleash a holocaust against another independent nation (Taiwan), and has made noises about other examples of expansion and aggression across international boundaries. It is currently led by a regime which has thought nothing of killing 60 million people as part of
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Probably the Soviet Union. It's gone now, but it was the major expansionist/imperialist power of the past several decades.
"If Canada is a Muslim country, you bet the army, instead of navy/marines will step over before going to Iraq"
What does Muslim have to do with anything? The Canada mention didn't make sense.
"What's the American for Lebensraum, I wonder?""
The American word was "Manifest Destin
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My understanding is that China has a lot of untapped resources as it is.
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Drill for oil, mostly. China now imports more than 30% of its oil and demand is growing spectacularly.
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Hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Only Griffin Could Go to China (Score:2)
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Beat me to it
Merv? (Score:2)
bada-boom
What's the US's problem here? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Pay close attention to the blury line is between military and non-military.
They get more mileage (and more money) out of maintaining that debt.
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What benefit can the US expect? (Score:2)
What benefit could the US expect from cooperation from China? Would it shrink the trade deficit, raise the value of the yuan, moderate the brutal Chinese regime? Will they provide money or advanced space technology? Most space technology is duel use, so why educate them? The US is rightly cautious.
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21st Century Reading List
Blood Money by T. Christian Miller, Hostile Takeover by David Sirota, The Bush Agenda by Antonia Juhasz, Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast, Jacked and also Other People's Money by Nomi Prins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman by
yeah, right... (Score:4, Funny)
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If OJ and that guy from Law and Order turned up on the plane going over he would have cause to worry.
Good luck (Score:1)
Haven't you heard? All of Space is the sovereign territory of the US -of- Fuckin' A! Uncle Sam'll be damned if he gonna let any slope get his yellow hands on a piece of that pie.
My first thought... (Score:1)
Sounds like a plan... (Score:1)
Vulcan Proverb? (Score:1)
time to make amends? (China's Tsien) (Score:1)
Naw... I have to be dreaming. The U.S. owes an apology to the "father of Chinese rocketry," who was a key contributor to rocketry in the U.S. before he was deported.
The reason China was able to rapidly build a missile program and later a space program is because the United States deported a JPL founder in the mid-1950s as a result of the McCarthy era. Tsien Hsue-Shen was one of the key developers of missile technology for the U.S. Army, and was sent to Germany on behalf of the Army to interview von Bra