Steve Durst – the US citizen space diplomat who reached out to China

Steve Durst, a US space entrepreneur who spent decades building rare bridges with China’s space sector despite restrictions on official cooperation, has died aged 82.

Durst, who founded the non-profit International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA), was publishing on China’s astronaut training as early as 1980, when the country’s human space flight ambitions were still little known to the outside world.

He died at his home in California last month, shortly after attending a workshop in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

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There, his team and collaborators from mainland China, Hong Kong and Thailand reviewed progress on a small but cutting-edge optical camera that ILOA helped fund, which will fly aboard China’s Chang’e-7 mission to the moon’s south pole, scheduled for later this year.

“The telescope will stand as Steve’s final, major space legacy, and it’s both poignant and profoundly fitting,” said Quentin Parker, director of the University of Hong Kong’s Laboratory for Space Research, a key international partner in the project.

“Steve was a proud and patriotic American,” Parker said. “He loved his country, its pioneering spirit and its long history of trailblazing achievements in space.”

But he also invested time, energy and both political and financial capital in building constructive, practical collaborations with China’s space community “at a time when doing so was neither straightforward nor fashionable in some Western circles – and is increasingly difficult today”, Parker added.

South China Morning Post