经济学人下载:太空时代的结束

But the shuttle is now over. The ISS is due to be de-orbited, in the inelegant jargon of the field, in 2020. Once that happens, the game will be up. There is no appetite to return to the moon, let alone push on to Mars, El Dorado of space exploration. The technology could be there, but the passion has gone—at least in the traditional spacefaring powers, America and Russia.

太空飞船事业即将结束。到2020年，ISS将被重设轨道（这个领域的不雅的术语）。事情一旦发生，游戏就将终结。再也没有重返月球的欲望，更不用谈火星推进计划，太空探险的El Dorado计划。技术仍然存在，但是激情已然消失—至少就传统的太空强国，美国和苏联而言。

The space cadets’ other hope, China, might pick up the baton. Certainly it claims it wishes, like President John Kennedy 50 years ago, to send people to the surface of the moon and return them safely to Earth. But the date for doing so seems elastic. There is none of Kennedy’s “by the end of the decade” bravura about the announcements from Beijing. Moreover, even if China succeeds in matching America’s distant triumph, it still faces the question, “what next?” The chances are that the Chinese government, like Richard Nixon’s in 1972, will say “job done” and pull the plug on the whole shebang.

太空学员们的另一个希望之地，中国，也许将拾起接力棒。确定中国就像50年之前的约翰肯尼迪一样宣布并希望要把人类送达月球表面并安全返回地球。但完成这一愿望的日期看起来是有弹性的。来自北京的宣告缺乏肯尼迪的坚信“到这个年代末”。（阿波罗11号在1969年7月20日登陆月球）。而且，即使中国成功地对接了美国的遥远的胜利，它仍需面对这个问题，“接下来怎么样？”属于中国领导人的那一时刻，是否会像1972年的尼克松一样说“任务完成了”然后拔下整个系统的插头呢。

No bucks, no Buck Rogers（3）
没有激情，也没有太空英雄

With luck, robotic exploration of the solar system will continue. But even there, the risk is of diminishing returns. Every planet has now been visited, and every planet with a solid surface bar Mercury has been landed on. Asteroids, moons and comets have all been added to the stamp album. Unless life turns up on Mars, or somewhere even more unexpected, public interest in the whole thing is likely to wane. And it is the public that pays for it all.

好在针对太阳系的机器探测仍将持续。但即便如此，风险犹存，因为回报越来越少。现在太阳系中的每颗行星都已经被侦察过，每一颗表面是固体的行星，使者Mercury都已经登陆过。小行星，卫星和彗星已经增加到集邮册里。除非火星上出现生命，或者出现未曾预料之地，公众对探索宇宙的兴趣可能越来越弱。而为它买单的依然是广大的民众。

The future, then, looks bounded by that new outer limit of planet Earth, the geostationary orbit. Within it, the buzz of activity will continue to grow and fill the vacuum. This part of space will be tamed by humanity, as the species has tamed so many wildernesses in the past. Outside it, though, the vacuum will remain empty. There may be occasional forays, just as men sometimes leave their huddled research bases in Antarctica to scuttle briefly across the ice cap before returning, for warmth, food and company, to base. But humanity’s dreams of a future beyond that final frontier have, largely, faded.

那么，未来看来要被限制在地球的新的外边界之内，即同步轨道。在这层空间里，各种活动的嗡嗡声将继续增长而充满了整个空间。这部分空间将被人类驯服，就像在过去物种驯服了这么多的荒野。而36,000之外的空间仍将是空的。可能也会有偶尔的突袭，就像在南极考察的人们有时为了温暖、食物和朋友离开他们的扎堆而设的研究基地，在返回之前，这些基地早已沉没在南极洲的冰盖之下。但人类想超越领域最前沿的未来梦想已经，褪色很多。

1） Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise.

2） 2001: A Space Odyssey is a science-fiction narrative, produced in 1968 as both a film, directed by Stanley Kubrick, and a novel, written by Arthur C. Clarke. Arthur C. Clarke was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist

3） Anthony Rogers is a fictional character that first appeared in Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan in the August 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. A sequel, The Airlords of Han, was published in the March 1929 issue.