Can Nasa and China work together in space? One small step towards ending the ban on scientific collaboration
Meeting offers hope that decades-old freeze on space cooperation could be thawing
One small drive from the US embassy in Beijing last month may yet prove to be a giant leap for cooperation between the American space agency Nasa and China’s space programme.
In mid-July, a US embassy vehicle drove into the guarded compound of the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics in central Beijing, carrying Dr Michael Freilich, the director of Nasa’s earth science division, Christopher Blackerby, the agency’s Pacific Rim representative, and other US government staff.
If we are going to Mars, to send the first human visitors there and bring them back, it will go beyond the capability of any single nation
Once inside they spent hours with their Chinese counterparts in a closed-door meeting on TanSat, a Chinese satellite to be launched later this year.
In an attempt to thaw the icy relationship between the two countries in space, Beijing had made a major concession several years ago, offering management of TanSat, China’s first carbon-sniffing satellite, to Nasa so that it could be incorporated into one of its constellations of earth observation satellites. That would have given scientists around the world a new tool to monitor greenhouse gas emissions and discover the mechanisms driving climate change.
To the disappointment of the research community, the arrangement did not work out, and the small delegation led by Freilich was in Beijing to discuss with Chinese scientists what crumbs of teamwork – such as data exchanges and information sharing – could be salvaged.