Oct 12, 2013 09:59 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Due to a technicality in a federal law meant to protect against American technological knowledge, Chinese students were turned away from a NASA astronomy conference, but the space agency can do nothing to fix the problem.

Fox News reported Yale post-doctoral student Ji Wang planned to present data findings at the conference from the now-inactive Kepler Telescope. Although NASA chief Charles Bolden admitted the mistake, the government shutdown will not allow the approval process to take place.

"Because of the ongoing federal government shutdown, there is no one at NASA HQ who can complete the approval process," Alan P. Boss, a member of the Carnegie Institution for Science and co-chair of the conference, told FoxNews.com. "The efforts of NASA's Ames Research Center to ensure that our Chinese astronomer colleagues will be able to attend the Second Kepler Science Conference have been halted by the fact these approvals must be entered into a computer system at NASA HQ in Washington D.C."

Bolden said he would try to do anything he could to rectify the situation.

"In performing the due diligence they believed appropriate following a period of significant concern and scrutiny from Congress about our foreign access to NASA facilities, meetings and websites, [they] acted without consulting NASA HQ," Bolden wrote in a statement. "Upon learning of this exclusion, I directed that we review the requests for attendance from scientists of Chinese origin and determine if we can recontact them immediately upon the reopening of the government to allow them to reapply."

The issue stared with a law enacted in 2011, passed for national security reasons. In a recent email, an Ames Research Center employee brought up restrictions lead by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) The restrictions included Chinese nationals from presenting at the conference, but also specifically stated students were exempt.

According to Xinhua News, Chinese officials and scientists called the decision "deplorable and wrong." After learning about her post-doctoral fellow Wang's denial to present, Debra Fischer said she would boycott the conference.

"The meeting is about science and planets around stars, not about national defense. There is no classified information - it is all publicly available data," she said. "I believed that it was not fair that some of our colleagues were barred from the meeting based on their country of origin."

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