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Comment by mc42 | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, I think that it's a matter of policy due to NASA's downright prohibition on working with China [1]

"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. But never mind." - [1]

On the other hand, I agree with you.

To paraphrase Andy Weir, scientists can always work together. Things get messy when politics are involved.

[1] - http://time.com/3901419/space-station-no-chinese/

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Like cryptography[1], rocketry has an inherent political character. If you disagree, then how would you feel about training a team of North Korean scientists in the type of long-range rocketry involved delivering a payload to a target as small as ISS?

I personally trust China with rocketry far far more than I trust North Korea, but "Do we trust this country with knowledge useful for killing large numbers of people?" is totally within the scope of a government to decide.

[1] http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf

But haven't China proven (again) that they already have that technology? Unlike the DPRK (who don't seem too eager to get into orbit, either). Not working with China in space feels like a rehash of the cold war space race, except the US and the PRC are quite a lot friendlier, at least in terms of trade, and travel.

NK is indeed working on delivering payloads to orbit. Their latest mission was declared a success, although most watchers determined the orbit was so bad it would be coming down soon. I didn't follow the mission closely so I don't know what became of it.

I find it funny that the United States Congress decides who takes part in the _international_ space station program.

Maybe if the other members of the international community invested as much into it, they'd get an equal say. The split is something like NASA 80%, Russia 10%, rest of world, 10%. (Although it depends how you adjust for inflation)

If you look at it based on what the contributed things are actually worth, it’s more like 50 25 25.

The US just happens to be very inefficient in space investments, because lots of politicians try to use it to get jobs into their states

Adding a new partner to the ISS requires unanimous agreement of all existing partners. As it happens, the US is the only one who opposes China, but, in concept, any of the participating space agencies (or their controlling government(s)) could block participation.

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