Biden space advisers urge cooperation with China

Top advisers to Joe Biden have argued that it's important to cooperate with China on space exploration, even as the incoming administration treats Beijing as its top economic and military competitor in virtually every other realm.

Valerie Mai Valerie Mai

December 21, 2020 | 14:28

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Cooperation with China: Reduce relations tensions and destabilize space race. (Photo: Politico)

Cooperation with China: Reduce relations tensions and destabilize space race

Joe Biden's advisors assert that despite China's pattern of stealing American technology and diverting it for military purposes, a limited space partnership between Washington and Beijing could reduce tensions and the likelihood of a destabilizing space race. The move would be akin to the cooperation between the U.S. and Russia's civilian space programs during the height of the Cold War.

A move toward peace through space would be difficult to reconcile with China's aggressive actions, including the theft of intellectual property, abuse of religious leaders and cultural minorities, and development of anti-satellite weapons, said Politico.

China on Friday said that three of the four priority areas, as set out by the US-President-elect Joe Biden, are providing space for cooperation. Wang said 2020 might have seen the “greatest damage to international relations” while calling out arbitrary foreign interference in internal affairs and the use of sanctions. The two countries are currently witnessing a historic low in bilateral relations, according to Andalou Agency.

Chinese developers work on the flag presentation system miniature on the moon. (Photo: Global Times)

Risk of losing leading position if US excludes China

The debate gained more urgency recently after China became just the third nation to retrieve samples from the moon, the latest in a series of major achievements for its ambitious space program. Most of the nearly two dozen former astronauts, government officials, and space experts interviewed by Politico agreed that America could lose its position as the global space leader if it shuts Beijing out entirely.

“My concern is not that China is going places, but that our partners are going to China,” said former NASA administrator and astronaut Charles Bolden, who endorsed Biden and worked with him in the Obama administration. “We seem to be satisfied to allow them to go off and build their own space station. … That’s short-sighted. … It’s not the mark of a good leader.”

“Trying to exclude them I think is a failing strategy,” Pam Melroy, a former astronaut who is serving on Biden’s NASA transition team and is among those being considered to lead the space agency, said before the election. “It’s very important that we engage."

China National Space Administration (CNSA) photo released by Xinhua News Agency. (Photo: Xinhua)

Lawmakers stand in the way

Lawmakers are skeptical of any cooperation and have made it difficult to join forces with China in space. Anything the U.S. shares with China, they argue, could ultimately come back to hurt it. The transition team declined to comment on Biden's plans for China and space. Biden has said little about space during the campaign and has not broached the issue of working with China on exploration.

One barrier to working with China is that Congress made it harder for the two nations to collaborate in space, citing Beijing's history of stealing intellectual property, using technology developed by other nations or companies to bolster its military, and violating human rights, said Yahoo News.

In 2011, former Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) included an amendment in the NASA authorization bill that prohibited the space agency and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from spending any appropriated money on cooperation with China. If either agency wanted to work with China, it had to seek a specific exception from the FBI, which would have to certify that there were no risks to sharing information and that none of the Chinese officials involved had committed human rights abuses.

NASA can still work with China under the Wolf amendment. (Photo: CNBC)

The door to cooperate still opens

NASA can still work with China under the Wolf amendment as long as the FBI signs off that there are no risks to sharing information For example, the head of NASA’s Earth science division met with officials in China in 2015 to discuss working together on carbon monitoring satellites.

Commercial companies are not subject to the same restrictions as federal agencies, making them another avenue for cooperation. Chinese researchers sent an experiment to the International Space Station in 2017 by working with Nanoracks, a private company that helps others use the orbiting lab. Nanoracks CEO Jeffrey Manber said five doctoral students from the Beijing Institute of Technology built the whole project in the U.S. and published their results in an English scientific journal, adding that “there are ways to structure it” to work together while protecting American interests.

The U.S. has used space to improve an untrustworthy, tense relationship before, when it partnered with the former Soviet Union. In 1975, a handshake in space between astronauts and cosmonauts was broadcast to the world in the midst of the Cold War. Less than 50 years later, Moscow is Washington’s closest ally in space, launching American astronauts on Russian Soyuz rockets and operating jointly on the International Space Station.

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