Suspension of NASA contact with Russian entities | Hacker News Reader

Suspension of NASA contact with Russian entities

spaceref.com

64 pointsmindstab60 comments

Not mentioned: contacts between American aerospace companies and their Russian subcontractors. Which is interesting because rocket engines for the American Atlas V booster are Russian-built. ULA, the American launch consortium that builds Atlas V supposedly has two years' inventory, but they're under contract to provide launch services for longer than that.

(Orbital, the "other" American company doing cargo launches to the space station, is also using Russian engines --- in fact, engines that were literally built for the Soviet lunar program, and were plucked out of a warehouse in Kazakhstan years later --- but they have enough inventory to fulfill their contracts already in the US.)

This sort of thing underscores how economic interdependence promotes peace. It's bad business to declare war on your suppliers or customers.

Didn't work during the last two World Wars, can't imagine it'll help prevent the next one whenever that happens either.

"Promotes", not "guarantees" or "forces".

Trade dominance is soft force, so when that fails or is denied war is inevitable.

I saw api working off the premise that economic interdependence has generally increased over the last century.

It doesn't seem like a crazy premise, wikipedia even gets us there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_globalization#Post-W...

We could instead get there with a simple note of the history of any of the WTO, IMF, or the European Coal and Steel Community that helped unify central Europe after WWII, later expanding into broader economic links throughout Europe. Friedman has a whole book on this that's probably cited even too much, but for basics, "The World is Flat" might deserve an offhand mention.

Do you think this inaccurately captures trends in economic interdependence?

EDIT: That said, long periods of peace haven't historically been reliable indicators of the end to all wars, so it's probably dangerous to ignore the precarious overtones of international diplomacy over the last few months.

Of course, every country in the world should be suspending contracts with the US over NSA spying, torture, unjustified wars, going against the UN, etc. etc.

Absolutely. It would only be fitting given that the rest of the world stopped engaging in any such activities ages ago.

I don't see what the big deal is, everyone's doing it.

I think his point is when YOU are waterboarding people, why would you even bother breaking ties with other countries that also waterboard people? Aside from as part of an elaborate ploy to pretend you don't?

Oh I get his point quite clearly, and was responding with what I thought were appropriate levels of irony. Apparently HN is running in literal mode today.

Speaking in general, the "big deal" of criminal/immoral behavior is in the extent of it, and in the borders it crosses, specifically referring to acts that everyone does.

Everyone does (at least) minor law breakages during life, but that doesn't mean that if somebody, say, evades taxes for millions of dollars is not a big deal just because everybody does that for a few hundred bucks.

Some activies, for example torture and mass surveillance, are definitely crossing moral borders - at the very least, the way have been applied (and this is quite a generous statement).

That is a bit like saying Mexico is as heavily armed as the US. No. They're not. They're not even close to having a proportionally large military. Most other nations have no trans-ocean logistics. No blue-water navy. No fighter jets. No heavy bombers. No main battle tanks.

So what gives you the idea they have an NSA?

You seem to be ignoring China, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and several other powerful nations in your assertion that the US is the only credible power player on the world stage. The biggest, perhaps, but certainly not the only one - and not the only one taking advantage of American military and intelligence assets because they find it in their own political interests to do so.

You realize that all nations you listed but China are pretty much "one and the same" as the US when it comes to NSA spying? You only underlined how disproportionally powerful that intelligence alliance is.

Yes - that was my point, that a moral line between the "rest of the world" and the US can't be clearly drawn.

What is not clear about five eyes? Then you have China, maybe Russia. That's it. That leaves "rest of the world". Seems like pretty clear lines to me.

There are ~195 sovereign nations on the planet. Billions of people don't live in a US-style panopticon.

The NSA only kinda cares about US law when operating against US citizens inside US borders. Outside of this, the gloves are fully off and from what we've seen, pretty much everything goes. Billions of people outside of the US live in a much higher resolution panopticon than those living in it.

We didn't annex a sovereign nation.

Na, you just threw out democratically elected leaders, multiple times.

Sadly enough, booting out democratically elected leaders in other countries just counts as business as usual. (The USSR played the same game, back when it existed and had the clout for that.)

They're both bad, but they're not comparable.

They're absolutely comparable. If anything at least Russia is being upfront about its imperial ambitions by using its own military. US just outsources its imperial projects (mostly, though Iraq, Afghanistan are counterexamples) by fomenting political disruption or destroying economies until demands are met.

Same ends, different means. One's just more covert.

You didn't annex THAT sovereign nation...

not in the traditional sense. the US is more subtle.

Ha! We didn't annex a sovereign nation, TODAY.

What about Hawaii? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hawaii#American_terr...

And Texas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Annexation

To some extent it is already happening: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/20/us-boeing-brazil-i...

You missed an "A". It's a common mistake. NSA does the spying, NASA explores space.

It'd be a shame if someone accidentally boycotted the wrong one.

Hasn't NASA been flying the spy satellites and top secret spaceplanes up into orbit to begin with, though?

"At the present time, only operational International Space Station activities have been excepted."

I'm guessing this means that we're still flying astronauts up on the Soyuz.

I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that this ultimately will give NASA the drive to rebuild its manned spaceflight capability. I don't have high expectations, though.

SpaceX

How close are they to manned space flights?

The Dragon capsule is already flying to the space station, and is supposed to be able to transport people, but only transported cargo so far.

http://www.spacex.com/dragon

http://www.spacex.com/news/2014/03/11/upcoming-mission-falco...

With current funding and assuming all goes according to schedule: no sooner than December 2015.

This aside: it could probably start ferrying people tomorrow, although with some safety features still missing (even then it would probably be safer than STS)

There are a whole bunch of items that you'd want to add to a cargo Dragon to make it fit for human travel. IMHO, the two standout items are launch abort handling and docking, but there are a whole bunch of other stuff you'd want as well (in terms of life support, advanced communications, etc.).

On these two items:

NASA doesn't want crew in the Dragon capsule until it has a launch abort system (LAS) that would let it get away from a failing booster rocket. The current design involves much stronger versions of the orbital thrusters; this is scheduled for tests this summer.

Also, the cargo Dragon doesn't currently dock autonomously with the ISS; instead, it effectively parks itself close enough for the station's robot arm to grab it and move it to a berthing port. When Dragon leaves, the process is reversed --- meaning that the arm and its support systems need to be operating in order for the spacecraft to leave. In normal operations, that's manageable --- but one of the things you want in a crew transport is that it be able to leave a failing station quickly in an emergency. The berthing arrangement doesn't really suit.

NASA is planning to deal with that by adding new docking hardware to the station, and mounting compatible hardware on the Commercial Crew vehicles (whoever winds up winning that competition). But the hardware isn't there yet; it's actually scheduled to go up on Dragon cargo flights next year.

What in hell? AFAIR even in the middle of the Cold War, NASA was freely collaborating with Russian scientists. So why such decision, why this is one of the first moves by US government in the topic of Ukraine and, in short, what the fuck, America?

I suspect the current political management of the USA is caught with their pants down and feel they need to quickly do something that would not be too hard to do. Statesmanship and political responsibility is not their forte, unfortunately.

NASA being a governmental organization (not part of the government, but financed and controlled by it) has to follow. I do not think the scientists and engineers would make this choice, but I do not think they had a choice.

It's a P.R. move. As mentioned earlier, this doesn't do anything to contracts between US companies and Russian companies. I expect the NASA activity to be "outsourced" to a US company, and with the rearrangments in place business can continue as usual.

The US administration desperately wants to appear strong, capable, and relevant, and to appear to be doing something. This is "doing something" at least.

> So why such decision, why this is one of the first moves by US government in the topic of Ukraine

Its not really "one of the first moves"; I guessed you missed the US: not sending a presidential delegation to the Paralympics, initiating two rounds of sanctions by executive order, cancelling a broad array of contacts through NATO (as well as a number of other acts through NATO), participating in reverting the G8 back to the G7, participating in the decision at OECD to stop Russia's accession process there, participating in the UNGA vote declaring Russia's actions illegal, etc.

Because like most things politicians and presidents do, it doesn't mean anything. "Contracts suspended except when they're not" is not exactly a brave, bold stance.

Umm... there was some collaboration. But characterizing it as "free" seems rather optimistic. Even the present reduced degree of collaboration represents, I think, a much closer tie to between the two countries space programs than ever existed during the cold war.

http://www.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/coldWarCoOp.html

You are wrong. Both NASA and the russian space program were a part of the military complex. Since the two countries were at war with each other (Cold War) it would be rather odd for their militaries to be 'freely collaborating'.

They were arch enemies.

Any chance of you expressing yourself without the seemingly obligatory 'fuck'?

I'm sorry but I live only ~300km from Ukraine, and after reading this piece of news I seriously started considering stacking up on meat cans and bottled water. It's hard not to get nervous.

Ivan, I don't know how to tell you this, but I'm not allowed to speak to Russians any more.

Johnny, is the same here. Is no more talk to the Americans. How lucky we are to both be speaking to empty air near open microphones at the same time. And winking.

It would be nice to believe that scientists and engineers would be above political squabbling.

Does any of this remind you of 2010 (Space Odyssey part two), where the US and Russian astronauts (that flew together) were told not to communicate anymore? I read that a few years ago, and thought that it was somewhat comical in that it was based on what I thought were very dated world relations. Now it is coming true.

Well, ISS operations is explicitly exempted (the story there is particularly interesting as the current commander is Russian from Crimea).

Genuine question - was he Ukranian when he went up there? I guess customs for space flight isn't such a concern, but that would be a weird thing to have go down while you're off the planet...

Actually it seems there was a changeover to a new expedition a month ago and the current commander is Japanese. I was thinking of Oleg Kotov whose nationality is Russian and was prior to this but is from Simferopol, Crimea. His Expedition 38 ended on 10 March 2014.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Kotov

This is not anything interesting about space programs; this is politics where the space program is just a host organism.

Since the actual (political) content is predictable, and predictable content is not interesting, HN can do without this.

this is politics where the space program is just a host organism

This is such a perfect description.

Now that the cold war is back, does that mean we'll be returning to the moon?

Sigh. This was not unexpected (sort of like putting your bishop out there for the queen to capture) but it is challenging. It would be nice if this was dumping a ton of funds to accelerate the Dragon program at SpaceX though, not having access to the ISS anymore would pose something of a challenge.

This is simply politics. I am flagging this.

Freedom Fries, Part 2

It's funny you mention Freedom Fries.

The top four spacefaring countries in the world are Russia, the US, China, and France.

It is already illegal for NASA to have any bilateral contact with the Chinese. And now NASA is cutting ties with the Russians as well.

At this point, we should probably try to keep the French on our side ...

You lost us (in spirit) already with all your french bashing when you went on with your illegal war in Irak.

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