Space Sovereignty — incident
Loral and Hughes under review
Washington opens technology-transfer reviews into Loral and Hughes assistance to China after a string of Long March failures. The reviews will end careers and rewrite American export law for a decade.
After a string of Long March rocket failures involving US-built satellites, the State Department opens technology-transfer reviews into Loral Space & Communications and Hughes Electronics. American engineers had assisted Chinese launch teams with failure analysis in ways that, prosecutors will later argue, drifted into the design of guidance systems also relevant to ballistic missiles.
The reviews snowball into the Cox Committee investigation of 1998 and reshape American export law for a generation. They are the proximate cause of the move of all commercial communications satellites onto the United States Munitions List in 1999 — and of the consequent decade-long collapse in US share of the global satellite-export market.