There's an Extremely Stupid Reason NASA Scientists Can't Study China's Amazing New Moon Rocks

#savedyouaclick:

That's because the US enacted a law called the Wolf Amendment in 2011, which prevents NASA from using government funds to cooperate directly with China.

Wolf Amendment

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Earlier this week, China's Chang'e 6 lunar probe landed in Inner Mongolia, delivering the first-ever samples collected from the far side of the Moon.

The mission has the international scientific community excited — the far side of the Moon, which permanently faces away from the Earth, remains mysterious, with only China having touched down on its surface so far.

The controversial piece of legislation has turned into a hot-button topic, with a potential repeal becoming a "political football, tossed between hawkish factions eager to paint China as an emerging adversary in space and less combative advocates wishing to leverage the country’s meteoric rise in that area to benefit the US," as Scientific American wrote in 2021.

"The source of the obstacle in US-China aerospace cooperation is still in the Wolf Amendment," China National Space Administration vice chair Bian Zhigang told reporters this week, as quoted by the Associated Press.

While China has cooperated with a host of countries for its Chang'e 6 mission, the US likely won't be part of the picture as scientists analyze the samples in a lab due to the Wolf Amendment.

In a rare case of US-Chinese cooperation last year, NASA urged scientists to apply to study samples returned by the country's Chang'e 5 mission to the near side of the Moon in 2020.

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