(Henry Spencer) wrote in message ...

If the yanks can't send money to Russia, perhaps they could get China to
supply the "Soyuz" in exchange for becoming a member of the ISS ?

Distinctly unlikely. Many of the people currently in power in Washington
have gotten there partly by howling with alarm about the Yellow Peril:
how the evil Chinese were stealing US technology...

In order to capture the flavour of the times from when this story was
first being crafted, you have to add in, at this point, "...in order
to develop Weapons Of Mass Destruction (i.e., rocket launchers and
nuclear warheads) which the evil Chinese will use to attack the
United States and kill us all..."

... and how the traitorous
Democrat scum in the White House and Congress were letting them get away
with it.

A necessary adjunct to this ploy was the newspeak redefinition of
all spce-related technology as "munitions", and hence the regulation
of all space-related things and thoughts under ITAR, in order to
keep the evil Chinese from learning how to build launch vehicles
and nuclear bombs. Ironically, this has had the net effect of forcing
various countries, that would otherwise not have developed various
items of advanced space technology (which turned out not to be very
hard or expensive to develop, but which previously were marginally
more convenient to obtain by buying them from US companies), to
actually push through to becoming independent of US space technology
in their satellite equipment supply chains. So, the anti-China ploy
has directly resulted in the profileration of space technology
world-wide, something that in a big-picture sense we should all be
grateful to those Republican congressmen (and their instrument in
these matters, the State Department) for.

Too bad about virtually all US space equipment and services
companies losing virtually all of their export sales, though.

As far as I could tell at the time, this was what the anti-Clinton
crowd thought it would take in order to get the enemy impeached. It's
only after this failed, that they found out that all it took was a
good, old-fashioned sex scandal. Who'd have thought?

- Kieran A. Carroll

Disclaimer: These opinions are mine, and aren't intended to represent the
opinions of my employer.