未来太空三种战略趋势

“There’s three strategic trends that I see in space.”

“我在太空中看到了三种战略趋势”。

General Jay Raymond, Commander of Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs. He recently visited Scientific American to talk about Space Command, which is responsible for space and cyber for the Air Force.

科罗拉多斯普林斯空军空间指挥官杰伊.雷蒙德将军说道。他最近访问了《科学美国人》并讨论了太空司令部，该司令部负责空军的太空和网络。

“One is space is congested…we track 23,000 objects in space. We provide the conjunction assessment warning, if you will, so for every object in space we do the analysis on every other object in space to see if there’s a potential collision. And if there’s a potential collision we make the warning for satellite operators around the world to maneuver their satellites to keep that collision from happening…

“其中一个趋势是太空空间拥挤…我们跟踪太空中的23000个物体。我们提供了联合评估警告，如果愿意的话，对于空间中的每一个物体，我们都会对空间中的其他物体进行分析，以确定它们是否可能会碰撞。如果可能发生碰撞，我们就会向世界上卫星操作员发出警告，操作卫星，防止发生碰撞……

“I see the trends of that growing. If you look at the numbers of launches that are occurring, the numbers of launches are up largely because the cost of launch has gone down. So the access to space has gotten easier…not just are the numbers of launches going up, but the numbers of satellites on each launch are also increasing…and so I see that congestion just growing in the future, and that’s something that we are obviously working to help mitigate that growing strain.

我看到了这种趋势。如果你观察一下正在发射数量，发射数量增加绝大多数原因是因为发生成本下降。所以，进入太空变得容易了……并不仅仅是发射数量增加，同时单次发射卫星的数量也在增加……所以我预测，未来的太空拥堵会继续增加，很显然我们正在努力减轻这种日益增长的压力。

“The other thing that’s happening in space is that we are becoming more contested. I think it’s clear that space is a war-fighting domain just like air, land and sea. And we are seeing threats across the spectrum, everything from low-end reversible jamming of GPS satellites all the way up to high-end kinetic destruction, which we saw in 2007 when China shot down their weather satellite.

“在太空中发生的另一件事是，竞争越来越激烈。”我认为很明显，太空是一个竞争领域，就像空气、陆地和海洋一样。我们看到了各种各样的威胁，从GPS卫星的低端可逆干扰到高端的动能破坏。

“And then the last thing, and I wouldn’t say it’s concerning by any means, is the increased competitive nature of space. I think that’s a good thing. I think there’s some huge opportunities here to leverage a growing commercial space market…I think as costs of launch go down and as technology allows for smaller satellites I think we’ll be able to leverage those for a wide variety of missions.”

然后最后一件事，不是关于任何方式，而是空间竞争力在增加。我认为这是好事。这为提升日益增长的商业空间市场提供了很多机会……我认为发射成本降低以及技术允许发射更小的卫星，我们可以利用这些来完成各种各样的任务。。