>"I haven't heard any member of Congress talk about removing those restrictions from 11 years ago. Fact is, Loral and Hughes were desperate for cash back then, they would have sold just about anything if they could slide it by the laws of the time. In fact they did after this launch, got caught and Chinese launchers are off limits to this day. I suspect that it was either Loral or Hughes engineers, on the scene in China, that brought back stories of Chinese theft of technology and hardware that ultimately caused the "political paranoia" that you mention."<<br /><br />The political aspect was kind of funny, actually, with the Republican Congress trying to use revelations of "technology transfer" with China to embarrass Democratic Clinton. What made it funny was that a Republican President (Bush No. 1) had been in office when U.S. built comsats began to fly on Chinese launchers in 1990!<br /><br />The "technology transfer" during the launch failure investigations (there were two or three commercial Long March failures altogether) was, as I remember it, actually not really a big deal. Someone forgot to file some paperwork about a meeting, for example. It did, however, occur during the time that the U.S. was discovering that China had apparently infiltrated Los Alamos and other U.S. labs to steal nuke secrets. That is where the real damage was done to U.S. security. That and the recon plane intellegence bonanza that the U.S. handed to them a few years later when a spyplane crew landed on one of their runways.<br /><br /> - Ed Kyle