US Lawmaker Seeks to Partner with Russia to Clean Up Space: A prominent US lawmaker and advocate of the United States' role in space told a conference on the commercialization of space that the US and Russia should team up for extraterrestrial projects - and suggested they start by cleaning up the hundreds of thousands of pieces of manmade space litter and capturing and deflecting asteroids hurtling toward Earth.
"Now that Russia is no longer a communist dictatorship and has been evolving in the right direction, we should reach out to them even more than we did in the past, along with our European allies, to have joint missions in space," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said by Skype to attendees at the New Space 2013 conference in San Jose, California this past weekend.
"Even when it was the Soviet Union, even when they were our enemies, we were able to cooperate" in space, the vice chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee noted.
The international space team could "clear the space debris that threatens to limit our use of space" and work to "identify and deflect near-Earth objects from hitting Earth," the California lawmaker said.
