Us International Space Cooperation Slows

The American space program, after five decades of setting the international agenda for exploration, appears increasingly stymied when it comes to new cooperative ventures with other countries, writes ANDY PASZTOR FOR "THE WALL STREET JOURNAL".

The United States has been a leader in big science ventures with multinational partners ranging from the Hubble Space Telescope, International Space Station and the CASSINI SPACECRAFT in orbit around the planet Saturn.

In the past year or so, however, the United States has declined to include the CHINESE in the International Space Station complex, declined to cooperate with the Europeans on missions to Mars, and has set NASA sites on asteroids rather than the Moon for future human missions.

The American commercial sector appears to be speeding-up private efforts to build orbital launch capacity for humans and cargo, robotic probes to land on the moon and conduct space resource surveys in this decade unlike the government-centric programs around the globe.