载人航天不能只考虑钱

Alan Stern: I’d like to see the United States go back to exploration of the planets with human beings.

艾伦·斯特恩：我希望美国能重新将宇航员送入太空探索行星。

You're listening to planetary scientist Alan Stern. He's principle investigator an ongoing NASA mission called New Horizons that launched an unmanned spacecraft to explore Pluto. Dr. Stern told EarthSky he believes in sending humans, not than just robots, to explore the moon and other planets.

今天记者采访了行星科学家艾伦·斯特恩。他是美国宇航局首席研究员，负责正在进行的探测项目“新地平线”。该项目已成功发射无人宇宙飞船探测冥王星。

Alan Stern: Human beings are much more efficient than the robots. Now robots can go much farther afield, the robots can go to toxic environments where humans can’t go, but for doing fieldwork on the moon, for exploring Mars, the kind of things that we do with robots are pretty limiting. It’s been said that the Mars rovers that have been on Mars since 2004 have done about as much work as a single, two-man Apollo crew would do in a day.

艾伦·斯特恩：人比机器高效很多。现在机器虽然能行进更远的距离，可以在人类无法接近的有毒环境工作，但它们在月球实地测量、火星探测等领域所起的作用非常有限。据说火星漫游者计划送出的探测器自2004年以来完成的工作量仅仅相当于一个载有两人的阿波罗航天器一天的工作量。

The major hold-up, said Stern, is the large costs involved. But Stern argues that the money needed would only amount to about five tenths of a penny for each federal dollar spent.

斯特恩表示，巨额成本是载人航天的主要障碍。但他同时指出，这一成本仅占联邦政府开支的5%。

Alan Stern: When I was a boy, in the 1960s, astronauts walked on the moon every few months and explored different terrains, different sites on the moon. And we haven’t done anything like that since 1972. By now, from a technological standpoint, we could have had bases on the moon, asteroid mining, expeditions to Mars. But we haven’t.

艾伦·斯特恩：在60年代，当我还是个孩子的时候，宇航员每隔几个月就能到月球上行走，在月球表面不同的地方探测各种地形。然而自1972年以来人们再也没干过这种事了。从技术角度来讲，到目前为止我们应该已经在月球上建立了基地，着手小行星开矿，并进行火星考察，但这一切我们都没有做到。

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