NASA: Joint Spaceflight With China Unlikely

WASHINGTON -- Any joint human spaceflights involving China and the United States will have to come in the future when there is more trust and openness between the countries, the NASA administrator, Michael D. Griffin, said Wednesday.

Speaking in Shanghai toward the end of the first visit to China by top officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Mr. Griffin said there were "no current plans to work with China on the space shuttle and space station programs."

Mr. Griffin, who characterized the five-day visit as enjoyable and informative, said that it was too early to talk about any cooperative programs between the nations, but that the first steps probably would be in data sharing and some type of joint effort with robotic spacecraft.

"We did discuss closer cooperation in our nations' science programs," Mr. Griffin said during a news conference in which American reporters participated by telephone. "We're all very encouraged by those initial discussions."

The biggest difficulty, Mr. Griffin said, was with a civilian agency like NASA working with a Chinese space program dominated by that country's military. Aside from concerns about national security issues, like missile technology proliferation, human space cooperation "requires a great deal of trust and openness."

Tags: nasa space china spaceflight politics

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