Hacker News Reader

Comment by emadehsan | Hacker News Reader

Wish there were opportunities for non-European & non-American people to work in these inspiring and endeavoring organizations

View on HN

India has ISRO

Japan has JAXA

The UAE have a space agency that even has a Mars mission running currently.

Same for China.

There's more I'm forgetting, but space stuff is not limited to Europe and the US.

Very true, although I assume that most or all of those listed have their own form of ITAR. Space (mostly defense) is inherently siloed to country borders.

Isn't that most large capital intensive efforts?

Also to be fair a lot of US defense and aero contractors have manufacturing partnerships around the world.

> Isn't that most large capital intensive efforts?

No.

For example in university i was part of a satellite design competition. We couldn’t let Chinese nationals on the team or we’d be breaking the law. There was a list of approved countries a team member could have citizenship from, if not we’d be guilty of violating export controls.

I wonder, could an American join a satellite design competition team in a Chinese school?

If an American did the US State Department might want a word or two with them.

Satellites are considered munitions… working on a foreign power’s weapons programs is… discouraged.

I can't speak for the other nations, but Space technology in Canada is controlled under the Controlled Goods Program (CGP). A CGP clearance is obtainable as a Permanent Resident. No citizenship required. Various Canadian companies are suppliers/partners for space projects in the US. For example the Artemis project is using the Canadian company MDA as a key supplier (to manufacture space robotic systems, including a newer version of the robotic arm currently on the ISS). SpaceX also has a number of Canadian suppliers, although their involvement is not advertised very much.

The US is the same. You don't need to be a citizen to work an ITAR controlled job. A green card will suffice.

I'm part of the rest of the 4 billion. The ones you mentioned only take their own citizens (probably except UAE).

> except UAE

I got bad news for you. Their spacecraft was built by University of Colorado at Boulder.

Not generally known, I think, but Canada is technically part of ESA. Not a full member, a 'Cooperating State', but there are some benefits. Wiki sez "Canadian firms can bid for and receive contracts to work on (ESA) programmes."

Yeah, and a lot of people also think it's a "EU only" club, but other countries like Norway, Switzerland, and the UK are also members.

ESA isn't even an EU Institution, the EU has its own space agency called EUSPA[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Agency_for_the_...

EUSPA isn't really a space agency. As the article says, EUSPA gets ESA to do the technical work.

There's plenty of contractors working on space technology that would hire someone without citizenship, I'm sure.

Strictly speaking for American contractors, I'm 99% sure that is not true. If you have any contract with the government for space stuff, all of your workers have to be citizens. I'm not even sure they'd let a permanent resident work there because of ITAR.

Permanent residents are considered US persons under ITAR, so provided the company's activities are limited to civilian space projects it isn't an issue. However, if the company has defense contracts and requires employees to obtain a security clearance, that requires citizenship.

Lol. Not even. What about Musk. He is not born in US

Elon supposedly got full U.S. citizenship after he made connections with the CIA (Michael D. Griffin) although the details aren't really known.

He became a citizen by naturalization in 2002 (the same year he launched SpaceX), not some shadowy conspiracy.

Those aren't mutually exclusive.

He became a citizen

There are? Japan (JAXA), India (ISRO), China (CNSA) and Russia (Roscosmos) all do science missions.

I think that the UN had a program for facilitating smaller nations access to space. Currently, I'm finding only the outer space office there though.

Alternatively, many of the private space companies don't have citizenship requirements.

>Alternatively, many of the private space companies don't have citizenship requirements.

In America at least private companies are equally covered by ITAR, so they do have citizenship/greencard requirements (or need a variance that is nearly never granted in practice). SpaceX can't just hire international talent as it wishes. I assume there may be similar rules in some other countries, though certainly not all. But it's not merely a matter of private vs public fwiw.

Your odds probably wouldn't be much better if you were an American.

Not really true. The industry has grown dramatically in the last 10 years and is hiring aggressively. There are budgetary ups and downs (both for privately funded stuff and NASA), but overall, if you are an American and are passionate about getting involved in the space industry, there are countless opportunities to do so.

Very true. Many space startups and NASA contractors always hiring. But aerospace famously pays peanuts (I think too many fanboys who just hear “space” and sign on dotted line)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com