To TheGalaxyTrio and Russ--

Before we start bandying about words like treason, a few words are in order about technolgy in general. When I studied physics in college, there were a whole lot of Chinese students, and Indian ones, and in fact people from all over the world. While any country is well within its rights to try to prevent transfers of technology where they think it appropriate, I would submit that the whole exercise is not very effective. After all, Chinese people can read. They can subscribe to the aerospace trade pubs. They go to conferences and share ideas with all their colleagues, insofar as they are allowed to.

Anything they got from Loral might save them time and development money, but little else. And I would further submit that since the actual technology of getting a capsule into space is old (40 years now) and well-understood, and a part of some aerospace engineering course curricula at every university that has it, it would be almost inconcievable to me that the Chinese -- or anybody else with the money (a key point) -- wouldn't develop space vehicles eventually if they wanted to.

I am not going to get into whether the Chinese are a threat or not, or how to respond or not, that's a whole other issue. I'm just saying that every time any product goes abroad, or even to people within the U.S., somebody has probably reverse engineered it. I mean, you can't tell me that Apple and Microsoft don't do this to each other to figure out what makes the other company's technology good -- or bad, as the case may be -- and how to do it better, even if they don't "steal" from each other.

So whatever the motivation, and I have no idea what it is beyond the obvious prestige issues -- the Chinese are planning to be a space-faring nation in some fashion or other, and there is little any other nation could do to stop it. I'd be interested to see how they go about it, and what methodologies for getting to the moon (if that is what they are after) they decide on.

By the way, a bit OT, but given the poor state of science education in the US, and the dearth of students who choose those careers, is it any wonder that other countries might start developing technologies in these areas, and investing in it, while we sit back and do little, and far less than we are capable of? I have had the opportunity (if you can call it that) of speaking to many policy makers at the local and state levels. Like the public they represent, they have, often, only the vaguest understanding of science and how it works. That might explain why funding is given in the haphazard way it is, and why the idea that requiring every high school student to have a full four-year science curricula, same for math, and a foreign language (and I mean competent foreign language) is so alien to many Americans, who see often science and philosophy as a frill when they are core subjects in the rest of the world. And it might explain why the Chinese are going to space with the kind of enthusiasm we haven't seen here for thirty years.