Space Sovereignty — incident
The Wolf Amendment
Congressman Frank Wolf inserts language into NASA's appropriations bill barring the agency from any bilateral cooperation with China. PRC astronauts will not, under American law, set foot on a US space site.
Representative Frank Wolf, then chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee covering NASA, inserts language into the agency's 2011 funding bill barring it from any bilateral cooperation with the People's Republic of China and any company owned by the PRC. The Wolf Amendment is renewed in every subsequent NASA appropriation.
PRC astronauts will not, under American law, set foot on a US space site; American instruments will not, in any straightforward way, ride a Chinese mission. The amendment is the legal architecture under which the two largest civilian space programmes in the world conduct effectively no joint scientific work — a posture without precedent in the modern history of any other engineering discipline.