NASA Chief Says Ban On Chinese Partnerships Is Temporary 63
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."
abysmal human rights records (Score:2, Insightful)
or maybe China should stop torturing its citizens, throwing political opponents (and their spouses sometimes) into psychiatric institutions or putting under house arrest , oppressing certain minority groups, etc. etc.
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The least these stupid barbarians could do is torture outside their soil, on a Caribbean island, like civilized people.
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China can't do that, otherwise the Communist Party will fall and lose all its power it has carefully built over decades. Why do you think they still keep WWII alive? As long as they keep the population mad at the Japanese, the people won't come to the conclusion that their government is a piece of shit. China has the unique position of being a power that is completely safe. They have no real enemies and nobody will ever invade them because they're too big to digest. So the only threat is their own peop
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Apples and oranges. The Tibetians, for the most part, did not resist at all and there was a history of Tibet being associated with China.
The Natives in America were ultimately beaten and dispossessed, but while the fight may have seen their inevitable defeat in the long term, it was not at all one-sided in terms of tactical victories and even savagery.
If the Tibetians and Chinese had the same history, I think you might see a much different treatment of the Tibetans. There is no indication from history tha
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I'm unclear on you stance as to which is the apple and which is the orange. You claim they aren't comparable, then compare them. But never state which is worse, which was my statement you are correcting, so I'd assume you'd have some opinion on that otherwise, why bother to post.
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I did not compare them. I acknowledged that they had a superficial similarity (ie. people oppressed to some degree by invading conquerors), but that there are specific differences which caused the actual situations to differ. Then I discussed them very briefly. Since it was too briefly to make an impression, here's the specifics.
If the Chinese and Tibetans had fought a two hundred year war for domination of the Chinese mainland or even just Tibet, the result would probably be exactly the same as the nati
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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 (Score:1)
Because most Americans are smug self-righteous assholes who despite all evidence to the contrary continue to believe they are right and everyone else on earth is wrong...
Re:abysmal human rights records (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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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?
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Okay... so all of that is fine, because it has happened in the past?
So you won't mind if I whack your wife over the head with a wooden club and take her into my cave, because it has happened in the past? What kind of argument is that?
Re:abysmal human rights records (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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May be China should just give pop vote to the people.
Why? The US doesn't have a popular vote for the most important positions. The people can't be trusted.
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The only "torturing" I'm aware of was questionable interrogation techniques of those caught in the field hanging with terrorists. maybe they shouldn't have been best buddies with those killing people and blowing up shit, then they wouldn't be in Gitmo getting their underwear pulled down and face covered with wet towels, etc. Mild stuff compared to what China does to innocent citizens.
Wrong, we never should have done any trade or projects with China whatsover, it's hurt our own workforce and economy to fo
NASA needs another vendor (Score:3)
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?
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Haven't you heard of outsourcing, H1-B visa? (Score:1)
Don't you know that outsourcing and the H1-B Visas have become the rage nowadays?
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because if they choose an american vendor then each part must have parts made in each state.
Why was nasa so expensive? because they couldn't source parts from states and companies they wanted to but had to source parts only from select vendors that congress choose.
Get congress out of the line item budget for NASA and their costs would have dropped by 30% at least. Actually get congress out of the line item budget for a lot of things and costs will go way down.
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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 billi
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Seriously? (Score:2)
You do realize that NASA is the middle-man. They don't make most of the stuff they use.
Why spend it at all? (Score:2)
How about having the government not spend tons on stuff that is not needed (like the F-35 in your example) and then NOT giving the savings to NASA?
Give taxpayers a break and help move the "Tax Freedom Day" back a few days? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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You could probably do both, if you were able to end certain programs.
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I haven't been paying attention to the world news lately. What now with Russia and USA? Another cold war?
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I haven't been paying attention to the world news lately.
Sort of like watching the soap operas, eh? you can miss a few episodes , tune in, and still understand the gist of it.
What now with Russia and USA? Another cold war?
Let's hope. A hot war is ever so much more involving personal sacrifice and inconvenience.
National Security? (Score:2)
National Security? China already broke in and stole anything that was even marginally interesting, and they still have root. Might as well get the changes to the design back from them...
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The Martian (Score:2)
Well, they had better get this worked out soon. We'll need their help to get Mark Watney back!
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China has the goods on Mr Bolden (Score:3)
Support lifting the ban on collaborating w/ China (Score:1)