NASA Denies Entry To Chinese Journalists For Shuttle Launch
U.S. space shuttle Endeavour blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, kicking off its 25th and final mission. The event was important to the eyes of media and scientists in China because the shuttle carries the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS) particle detector, mankind's most ambitious effort to date to explore the universe' origin with Nobel laureate physicist Samuel Ting as the program's principal scientist. The 7,000-kg AMS worth 2 billion U.S. dollars will be placed in the International Space Station (ISS) and an international team of more than 600 scientists, including many from China's mainland and Taiwan, have joined Ting's exhausting but respectable AMS program.
China's scientists have played a crucial role in designing and manufacturing some core parts of the device. However, Chinese journalists who hoped to cover the launching of Endeavour were simply denied entry to the site by a ban initiated by Frank Wolf, chairman of the Committee of Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies in the House of Representatives.