经济学人下载:太空时代的结束

Yet none of this was the Space Age as envisaged by the enthusiastic “space cadets” who got the whole thing going. Though engineers like Wernher von Braun, who built the rockets for both Germany’s second-world-war V2 project and America’s cold-war Apollo project, sold their souls to the military establishment in order to pursue their dreams of space travel by the only means then available, most of them had their eyes on a higher prize. “First Men to a Geostationary Orbit” does not have quite the same ring as “First Men to the Moon”, a book von Braun wrote in 1958. The vision being sold in the 1950s and 1960s, when the early space rockets were flying, was of adventure and exploration. The facts of the American space project and its Soviet counterpart elided seamlessly into the fantasy of “Star Trek”（1） and “2001: A Space Odyssey”（2）. Other planets may or may not have been inhabited by aliens, but they, and even other stars, were there for the taking. That the taking would begin in the lifetimes of people then alive was widely assumed to be true.

然而没有这些推动太空事业发展的太空学员的满腔热情，太空时代便无法想象。工程师们为了实现遨游太空的梦想全身心地投入到军事机构中，这是唯一的可以获得使用的途径。比如工程师Wernher Braun，他为二战时期的德国V2计划和冷战时期的美国阿波罗计划分别建造了火箭。虽然他们中很多人是为了获得高额的奖金。工程师Wernher Braun在1958年的一本书中写道，第一个到达与地球同步轨道的人并没有得到第一个到达月球的人同样的花环。二十世纪五六十年代，当早期的意在探索冒险的太空火箭升空时，太空遨游的幻想就更热切了。事实上，美国的太空计划署和苏联的太空部门已经忽略了像“星际旅行”和“2001：太空冒险”这样的完美的幻想。

No longer. It is quite conceivable that 36,000km will prove the limit of human ambition. It is equally conceivable that the fantasy-made-reality of human space flight will return to fantasy. It is likely that the Space Age is over.
从此不再幻想。36,000公里成为人类抱负的极限，这件事会相当可信。人类太空飞翔的梦想成为现实，而退回想象也将变得同样可信。换言之，太空时代即将结束。

Bye-bye, sci-fi
再见，科学幻想

Today’s space cadets will, no doubt, oppose that claim vigorously. They will, in particular, point to the private ventures of people like Elon Musk in America and Sir Richard Branson in Britain, who hope to make human space flight commercially viable. Indeed, the enterprise of such people might do just that. But the market seems small and vulnerable. One part, space tourism, is a luxury service that is, in any case, unlikely to go beyond low-Earth orbit at best (the cost of getting even as far as the moon would reduce the number of potential clients to a handful). The other source of revenue is ferrying astronauts to the benighted International Space Station (ISS), surely the biggest waste of money, at $100 billion and counting, that has ever been built in the name of science.

毫无疑问，今天的太空学员们会强烈反对这个声称。他们尤其会提到希望以商业方式实现太空飞翔的个人冒险者，比如美国的Elon Musk和英国的Sir Richard Branson。这些计划冒险的人果真也会像太空学员们一样予以反对。但是这个市场似乎很小也很脆弱。一方面，太空旅行是一项奢侈的服务，不像冲出地球低轨道那么容易（这些如同与月球距离一般可观的巨额花费使潜在客人的数字减少到几个）。另外一方面，是把宇航员飞渡到蒙昧的国际太空站（ISS）所需要的资金来源，无疑是最大的浪费，已经花了千亿美金却还在增长，那个曾经是以科学的名义建立起来的。

The reason for that second objective is also the reason for thinking 2011 might, in the history books of the future, be seen as the year when the space cadets’ dream finally died. It marks the end of America’s space-shuttle programme, whose last mission is planned to launch on July 8th (see article, article). The shuttle was supposed to be a reusable truck that would make the business of putting people into orbit quotidian. Instead, it has been nothing but trouble. Twice, it has killed its crew. If it had been seen as the experimental vehicle it actually is, that would not have been a particular cause for concern; test pilots are killed all the time. But the pretence was maintained that the shuttle was a workaday craft. The technical term used by NASA, “Space Transportation System”, says it all.

上面提到的第二个理由也许将成为另外一个理由，即未来的历史书将把2011年视作太空学员梦想破灭的一年。它标志着美国航天计划的结束，该计划的最后使命是完成7月8日的发射。太空飞船被假设为一辆能重复使用的货车以期实现把人送往同步轨道的商业事宜。事实是它什么也没完成却带来了麻烦。它曾两次失事扼杀全部乘员（哥伦比亚号和挑战者号）。事实上它只是个试验性运输工具，要不它不应该有让人焦虑的特别理由；宇航员不时的被害。但是太空飞船只是一架普通飞机的假设需要维护。其使用的科学术语是NASA，其实它只是一个“太空运输系统”。