Space station future adrift (Soyuz purchase crisis)

Henry Spencer wrote:
In article , John Doe wrote:


snip

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 and how the traitorous
Democrat scum in the White House and Congress were letting them get away
with it. Serious space cooperation with China would require a major
policy turnaround, and years of effort mending the rather frayed relations
between the two countries. A lifeboat by that route is just not in the
cards right now.


And, on the other side of the equation.. The US is not exactly looking
like a good bet in starting partnerships right now. There is a tradewar
heating up and this would just be another bit of fodder. And, when it
comes to China, until we reach an agreement with them concerning the
exchange rate, don't expect much cooperation between the governments
on governmental projects.

On the technical side...

China seems to know what it wants. I don't see them diverting their
capsule production lines into a production program. They are still
very early in their test phase and they won't likely sign onto anything
that will throw off their planning at this stage. They have the next
5 years locked. It would be very uncharacteristic for them to shift
things around now. Had we cut them in a few years ago when they made
approaches during their initial planning stages, we could do this. But,
that did not happen and they aren't going to move their schedule for the
US.

I suspect a rather loud "No" from China on the question of cooperation
on ISS at this point, if they bother to answer at all.

"Charles Buckley"

. And, when it
comes to China, until we reach an agreement
with them concerning the exchange rate, don't
expect much cooperation between the governments
on governmental projects.

It look to me like the banking community can tolerate US trade deficits
or budget deficits, but not both. China has been forced to issue lots of
yuan in order to buy up all the dollars that they have coming in. And
then they use the dollars to buy our public debt. It may turn out that
by the time the Chinese get around to re-valuing the yuan, it won't be
necessary. The yuan is a bargain at the current artificial rate, but as
the dollar falls it will stop being a bargain and will arrive at its fair
value, at least from the US perspective. It will still be cheap to
Japanese and Euro buyers.

I don't understand all the complexities of the banking business, but it
is obvious that if foreign investors withdraw capital from a particular
region, the economy there suffers for it. (Higher interest rates would
slow the economy for one thing.) Here is a recent survey of the
situation.

-------
Foreign Interest Appears to Flag as Dollar Falls
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

NY Times
Published: November 27, 2004


WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 - Investors and market analysts are increasingly
worried that the last big source of support for the American dollar -
heavy buying by foreign central banks - is fading.

The anxiety was on full display Friday, when the dollar abruptly slid to
a record low against the euro after a report suggesting that the Chinese
central bank might start to reduce its holdings in the American currency.

Though Chinese officials later denied the report, and the dollar
recovered, analysts say the broader trend is that foreign governments are
becoming less willing to finance the growing debt of the United States
government.

On Tuesday, a top official with the Russian central bank said his
government had become worried about the sinking value of the dollar and
might switch some foreign reserves to euros.

A day later, India's central bank hinted that it was worried about the
same issue and might shift some reserves into other currencies.

Japan and China, which together have amassed nearly $900 billion in
United States Treasury securities, have both slowed their buying sharply
from the frenetic pace in February and March.

"There is an emerging consensus that banks around the world are moving to
expand their reserves of euros at the expense of dollars," said Laidi
Ashraf, chief currency analyst at MG Financial Group in New York.

The Bush administration has essentially condoned the dollar's decline. At
meetings with foreign ministers last week, the Treasury secretary, John
W. Snow, repeated the American mantra of support for a "strong dollar"
but also for letting "market forces" determine exchange rates.

A continued decline of the dollar would be good for American
manufacturers, because it would make exports cheaper in foreign markets
and push up the cost of imports.

But a diminished foreign appetite for dollars could push up interest
rates. The Federal Reserve has already raised short-term rates four times
this year, but the shift in the sentiment of foreign investors may soon
seriously affect long-term rates that influence the cost of home
mortgages.

"Sell U.S., buy Europe," summed up Richard Berner, chief United States
economist at Morgan Stanley, in a report last week. Mr. Berner noted that
investors have begun demanding higher yields for 10-year Treasury
securities than for comparable European bonds, and he predicted that the
spread would widen.

Recent data from the Treasury Department indicated that foreign
governments had sharply slowed their purchases of Treasury securities.
The question is whether those purchases will continue to slow or start to
increase again as countries try to shore up the American currency to help
maintain their own industries' competitiveness.

Japanese purchases of Treasury securities, which ballooned by about $100
billion from October 2003 to March of this year, have slowed sharply and
actually declined slightly in September.

Largely as a result, the dollar has sunk to its lowest level against the
Japanese yen, about 102.5 yen to the dollar on Friday, in four and a half
years.

Chinese purchases of Treasury securities slowed to a crawl, increasing
just $2 billion in September, to $174 billion.

On Friday, a top Chinese central bank official denied reports in a
Chinese newspaper that the government planned to reduce its holdings of
Treasury bonds.

But Chinese officials, under prodding from the Bush administration, have
repeatedly said they want to gradually relax their 10-year-old policy of
locking its currency, the yuan, at a fixed exchange rate to the dollar.
Any move to a more flexible exchange rate for China would probably cause
the dollar to drop in value and allow the Chinese central bank to stop
buying United States debt securities.

America's current account deficit, the broadest measure of its
indebtedness to other countries, is on track to exceed $600 billion next
year, about 6 percent of its gross domestic product. The United States
needs to attract about $2 billion a day to keep its spending at current
levels.

The nation attracted enormous sums of foreign money in the late 1990's as
well, but the character of that money has changed. Back then, a big part
of the inflow was through foreign direct investment and purchases of
American stocks.

This year, by contrast, foreigners have been net sellers of stocks. The
big growth has been in foreign purchases of Treasury securities, and the
big buyers have been foreign central banks that wanted to prevent their
own currencies from rising too much against the dollar.

Tony Norfield, currency strategist for ABN Amro in London, said he was
convinced that central banks were trying to scale back their purchase of
dollar assets, a move that could push the euro, already up about 30
percent in the last years, even higher.

"You do not need the central banks to sell Treasuries for the dollar to
go down," Mr. Norfield said. "All they have to do is buy less and the
dollar is going to be in trouble."

The euro hit a new high of $1.3329 on Friday in light trading, before
settling back about a half-penny.

European leaders are alarmed about the potential damage of a sinking
dollar to their exports.

"Recent moves on exchange markets of the dollar versus the euro are
unwelcome," said Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central
Bank, at a banking seminar on Friday in Rio de Janeiro.

"I want to underline the importance of recent statements by the Treasury
secretary of the United States on his determination to pursue a strong
dollar policy," Mr. Trichet added.

But Mr. Snow and Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve,
offered no hint that they would intervene in currency markets to prop up
the dollar.

"The market for U.S. Treasury securities is deep and liquid and continues
to be attractive to a broad and diverse pool of investors," a spokesman
for Mr. Snow, Robert Nichols, said.

That remains to be seen. According to the most recent Treasury data, the
biggest source of growth in securities came not from China, Japan or
Europe but from Caribbean banking centers.

(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.

On 29 Nov 2004 14:34:41 -0800, in a place far, far away,
(Kieran A. Carroll) made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:


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.

Actually, if that's all it took, he wouldn't have been elected in the
first place, since the man was a 24-7 sex scandal throughout his
political career.

What it took was a perjury and witness-bribing-and-intimidation
(felonies, note) scandal, brought on by a sexual-harassment law that
he signed with his own pen, but thought should only apply to the
commoners, not to himself.

In sci.space.policy Henry Spencer wrote:
In article , John Doe wrote:
Rutan would be the only one capable of whipping up something cheap and simple
within 2 years.

There are plenty of people who could at least be *testing* something
suitable in a couple of years or so... given generous funding and an
absence of bureaucratic roadblocks. But it would probably be another year
or so, even in a maximum-speed program, before the result was cleared for

Random thoughts:
The shuttle could going to ISS could several test articles of minimal reentry
devices.

Load them up with stuff that would otherwise be going down in the progress,
and throw a few dozen overboard when at a safe distance from ISS.

Unlikely unfortunately.

On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 13:46:09 -0500, John Doe wrote:

I have sympathy with the Russians.
As I recall the idea was to have a space space station by 1992.
Then 2005. Now 2010. All contributers have bailed out long ago
due to astronomical cost overruns.
Who wouldn't loose patience?

--
Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/

"Jim Oberg"

Space station future adrift
By Philip Chien
27 November 2004 // SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Thanks for the interesting post. Chien restates a situation that the
Russians have been calmly reminding NASA about from time to time.

In the event that Shuttle remained grounded, RSA has said that it would
have to reconsider the nature of its ISS operations, which I took to mean
that it would essentially became the Russian Space Station.

Even when US funds were being sent to RSA, there were bureaucratic
malfunctions. Cash went from NASA to the Russian treasury and never made
it all the way to RSA. Arrangements were later made for direct payments.

I think that Russia has been diligent in its work on Soyuz because of the
not inconsiderable number of flight made by the Shuttle to the Mir
station. But it seems that the Russians have now paid off their account.

The Iranians aren't helping things at all on this front. While they have
apparently given some sort of agreement not to produce weapons-grade
uranium, they still operate a 40 MW plutonium production reactor. The
upside to this, such as it is, is that it takes longer to produce a
plutonium bomb than a uranium bomb, buying the diplomats a few years of
breathing space. The downside is that the plutonium bombs fit better on
top of intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

K.

Philip Chien wrote:
a cash-strapped Russia wants
compensation for building more of the spacecraft after 2006.

Correction. 'Capitalist' Russia, NOT 'cash-strapped' Russia. If it's
'cash-strapped', then the same can be said to N.A.S.A. and even the
U.S.A.



Well... Political issues aside (considering that the U.S.A., the
Russia federation, the P.R.C., and so on are run by the same group)
the actual question is, is I.S.S. still going to be use after the 11th
Soyuz?

If yes, then more Soyuz or what ever vehicle will be supplied. How to
do it is up to the people involved to decide the way.

If not, then just use the I.S.S. without a lifeboat or abandon the
I.S.S.

What? Abandon the I.S.S.?

Why not? Mir obviously is scrapped that easily, despite its historical
nature, its capability, and so on. But of course, one of the primary
reasons on why Mir was scrapped it was because it symbolize the
superiority of the U.S.S.R.


This I.S.S. without a lifeboat thing is intentionally overblown with
the intention to terrorize people.

On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 16:06:06 +0000, Jim Oberg wrote:

Space station future adrift
By Philip Chien
27 November 2004 // SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

http://washingtontimes.com/national/...1743-6276r.htm


"We're planning to have both purchasing and barter agreements that
will cover 2006 to 2010," said Alexei Krasnov, head of Roskosmos'
manned-mission programs.


Maybe Russia's Space tourists will get to ride up or down on the Shuttle so
the Soyuz can stay at the space station for six months. Although it would
increase the risk that the tourist would have to be willing to take,
riding on two vehicles might actually increase sales on there infant space
tourist bussiness.

I wonder if that new space tourist law was passed? That would be really
ironic if NASA was the first to limit their liability with the new
law that was ment to foster private space travel.

Craig Fink

On Sun, 28 Nov 2004 19:59:20 GMT, in a place far, far away, Craig Fink
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

I wonder if that new space tourist law was passed? That would be really
ironic if NASA was the first to limit their liability with the new
law that was ment to foster private space travel.

That legislation would not apply to NASA.