The Chinese Betray American Trust

China conducted an anti-satellite weapons test by launching a missile at an old Chinese weather satellite. The test was successful.

The Bush administration sat on the test for a week. The report I read described the US government's activities during the week as, "it weigh[ed] its significance." I would say, it was trying to figure out what the hell to say: either sound like pushover wimps or whiny hypocrites. hey chose the latter.

China's weather satellites, according to our science correspondent Chaim Sugarman, would travel at about the same altitude as U.S. spy satellites.

The test, according the media report I'm plagiarizing from, "represented an indirect threat to U.S. defense systems." If I were China, I would have done what the United States does to justify anything -- explain it as part of the war on terror.

Try not to laugh when you read the American response:

"The United States believes China's development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of cooperation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said. "We and other countries have expressed our concern to the Chinese."

That's funny. There's a "spirit of cooperation" in the civil space area? See that's what's actually been holding up the Star Wars program all these years -- it's not the technical difficulty of shooting missiles from space, it's the difficulty of working everything out with the Chinese. You know getting their buy-in is a pain in the bush. Sure, it's the price of the "spirit of cooperation," but how do you explain such project graphics --as the one below -- in Chinese?