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Tiangong-1 Experimental Module Launched
Why isn’t China part of the ISS??? The irony here is that the US may be paying the price of our history of simplistic opposition .. first to Mao’s fight against the Kuo Min Tang and later to our image of a unified red scare.
Joan Johnson-Freese, a space expert at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island said, “China has the advantage, 40-plus years later, of not having to start at the bottom of the learning curve on its human spaceflight program,” China applied repeatedly to join the ISS, but was rebuffed largely on objections from the U.S., prompting it to adopt a go-it-alone strategy.
“It is a nation doing its own thing saying, ‘OK, we can do what you did for our own country separate from cooperation, on Chinese terms,’ Basically, they will get what they want regardless of how long or what it takes for the authoritarian state to accomplish the assigned tasks,” “said Charles Vick, an expert on the Chinese space program with Globalsecurity.org, which tracks military and security news.