NASA's wishful thinking is too loud, and while asking the United States to give a "green light" and allow researchers to ask China for lunar soil research, it does not want to cooperate with China in substance, but the United States first needs to pass a hurdle, and will China give lunar soil samples?Which hurdle will the United States have to pass again?
At the beginning of October this year, China made an important decision that could be regarded as beneficial to the world, that is, at the 74th International Astronautical Congress, Hu Hao, the chief designer of Chang'e-5, as a representative of the team, announced that the scientific research samples of Chang'e-5 will be open to the international community, and scientists from all over the world are welcome to work together and share the results. In other words, scientists from all over the world who want to study lunar soil samples brought back from the moon by Chang'e-5 now only need to apply to the Chinese side, and if the application is approved, China can facilitate it. Obviously, this is absolutely good news for experts from all over the world in the field.
It is worth mentioning that as soon as this news came out, it immediately aroused great interest from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), as a global leader in the field of aerospace, NASA naturally did not want to give up such a good opportunity. In this context, a number of ** reports have recently pointed out that NASA has sent an email to its insiders, informing the latter that the agency is seeking to give the U.S. Congress a "green light" to the "Wolf Clause" of the ban on space cooperation with China, allowing researchers to apply for and study lunar scientific research samples collected by China because the samples collected by China have "unique values".
NASA believes that the samples are from areas of the Moon that "have not yet been sampled by NASA" and are expected to provide valuable insights into the geological history of the Moon, the Earth-Moon system, and may help NASA develop future lunar exploration programs.
In the early years, in order to completely exclude China from cooperation on the International Space Station and prohibit NASA from cooperating with the Chinese Space Agency, the United States specially formulated a legal provision, which is the infamous "Wolf Clause", which was officially adopted by the US Congress in 2011. Now, NASA is seeking a goal that the U.S. Congress will appropriately "open the net" and give the "green light" to the "Wolf Clause" so that NASA researchers can access Chinese lunar soil samples.
Ironically, before this, in the face of the "Wolf Clause", NASA, as a scientific research institution, not only did not oppose this bill of political interference in science, but even NASA Director Nelson shouted at the congressional hearing to support the perpetuation of the "Wolf Act". Now that China has opened up its lunar samples, NASA is starting to blush again.
It should be pointed out that this time, in order to seek the "green light" from the US Congress, NASA is still hiding "careful thinking", in the words of the US side, when it contacts and cooperates with China, "it will not create a risk of causing technology, data or other information related to national or economic security to be transferred to China or Chinese companies". To put it simply, NASA wants to ask China for lunar soil to conduct relevant research, but it does not want to maintain substantive cooperation with the Chinese team. In other words, using China's lunar soil to do its own thing, but not to give China benefits, and at the same time not to offend the US Congress, I have to say that NASA's wishful thinking is really sounding.
However, even if NASA's wishful thinking is played again, it has to face two realities, the first is whether the US Congress can pass that hurdle, the "Wolf Clause" is already a formal law, and the US side has been implementing it for more than 10 years, and now saying "green light" is "green light", that is undoubtedly to let the US Congress take the lead in "breaking the law", and those congressmen and politicians in the US Congress who are full of "political struggle" all day long will obviously not easily agree;Second, China's attitude is very clear: lunar scientific research samples are open to international applications, and scientists from all countries are welcome to conduct joint research, but the research results are to be "shared", and NASA's "wishful thinking" is precisely to turn a blind eye to "results sharing", and it wants lunar soil to conduct research but does not want to "share results", and China obviously will not allow the US to wantonly break the rules.
In fact, having said that, whether it is the US Congress, NASA and other US scientific research institutions, the above-mentioned actions have once again confirmed one point, that is, in the eyes of the United States, "science has borders", which is completely contrary to the concept of "science without borders" that it has been boasting about, which shows its hypocrisy. Now, NASA's predicament is entirely self-inflicted.