The double standards and shamelessness of the Americans can be said to be rare in this world, and on the one hand, they prohibit any exchanges between China and the United States in the field of space, and on the other hand, they ignore their own rules, try to ask us for cooperation, and shamelessly ask China to study the lunar soil brought back by Chang'e-5 before. Recently, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), also known as NASA, has its eye on Chinese lunar soil samples in an attempt to "get a piece of the pie" in this study. One thing to say, NASA's decision is quite surprising.
On the one hand, this move can be called a crazy temptation on the verge of "breaking the law". You must know that under the "Wolf Clause", it is illegal for Americans to carry out space cooperation with China in any form, but NASA is now trying to give the US Congress a "green light". On the other hand, during the Apollo missions of the last century, the Americans brought back a total of 382 kg of lunar soil. When we combine these two points, the question arises, why does NASA take the risk of breaking the law to ask China for cooperation when it clearly has lunar soil at home?
Objectively speaking, the reason why NASA did this is of course not because science knows no borders and wants to explore the moon with China, but because the lunar soil brought back by Chang'e-5 is very different from the lunar soil brought back by Apollo. You may think that there is no difference between the lunar soil, it is all the soil on the surface of the moon. But actually, the difference is huge. First of all, the U.S. Apollo program is not the same as the location where Chang'e-5 landed on the moon. To put it bluntly, the difference between the two is that one is the soil you dig casually on the main road, and the other is the soil you dig on Mount Everest, and the other is the soil you dig on Mount Everest.
Second, the lunar soil we brought back is about 2 billion years old, which is at least 800 million years younger than the lunar soil brought back by Apollo. Since most of the lunar soil brought back by the Americans from the moon is over three billion years old, the moisture content in these samples, as well as some radioactive elements, is likely to be affected by other asteroids in the extra hundreds of millions of years. Therefore, the United States needs some new lunar soil samples to compare, so that their judgment of the specific situation of the moon can avoid some miscalculations as much as possible.
These eliminated miscalculations are crucial for the formulation of the next lunar landing program, which can not only prevent the wrong path when setting new goals, but also effectively reduce the cost of each link. That's why NASA is studying Chinese lunar soil at the risk of violating the "Wolf Clause". To put it bluntly, this is the hegemonic egoism of the United States, not the scientific spirit of the US space agency, as some opinions on the Internet say. If the Americans really have a scientific spirit, then where did the "Wolf Clause" come from?