China and 15 other countries joined NASA officials this week to consider how they might cooperate with U.S. plans for human exploration of the moon and Mars.
The three-day Washington workshop was the first in a series of meetings sponsored by the U.S. space agency, NASA’s Michael O’Brien said on Thursday, the last day of the gathering.
“It was somewhat precedent-setting for this particular meeting to have the Chinese there in attendance,” O’Brien said in a telephone news conference.
China has its own space program and is not among the countries participating in the international space station. However, O’Brien said the State Department approved inviting the Chinese delegation since President Bush had urged international participation in the exploration effort.
Under Bush’s plan, a robotic space probe could go to the moon as early as 2008, but no Americans are expected to travel there before 2020.
No specific agreements were made, but representatives from the 16 countries plus the European Commission and the European Space Agency all gave themselves “homework assignments” for the next meeting, expected next year.
Besides China, other countries represented at the workshop were Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.
NASA has been struggling with money problems as it aims to return to human spaceflight in 2005, two years after the Columbia shuttle disaster prompted the grounding of the three-ship shuttle fleet.
The space station has been operating with a skeleton crew of two, down from three, since shortly after Columbia disintegrated over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003, killing all seven astronauts.