Politics - the friend of scientists everywhere
That’s because the US enacted a law called the Wolf Amendment in 2011, which prevents NASA from using government funds to cooperate directly with China.
unless it has certification from the FBI that such collaboration poses no threats to national security or risks inadvertently leaking space-related tech or data.
Cool, so the article is a nothing burger because NASA just needs one extra signature before studying them.
They’re almost certainly never going to get authorized, the whole point of researching moon rocks is to learn space data, and of China requires that you share the data you learn from the rocks you’re studying, it’s impossible
It was authorized last time with Chang’e 5. The problem is it’s not just getting a signature, the bureaucracy takes months and China wants to hand out samples quickly, so last time the US had scientists fill out the application to get rocks before they were authorized to work with them, which risked China wasting time on dead-end applications and having to do even more work to re-assign those samples to someone else if it wasn’t authorized.
China will probably allow US scientists to do that again, but this only works because China agrees to put up with it. They can put a “this research is currently legal” check box on the application and Americans won’t be able to check it until after the deadline.