"Bruce Sterling - Outer Cyberspace (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

need for this particular tournament in 1992, because the Soviet
opposition is in abject ruins. The Americans won the Cold War. In
1992, everyone in the world knows this. And yet NASA is still running
space-race victory laps.

What's worse, the Space Shuttle, one of which blew up in 1986,
is clearly a white elephant. The Shuttle is overly complex, over-
designed, the creature of bureaucratic decision-making which tried to
provide all things for all constituents, and ended-up with an
unworkable monster. The Shuttle was grotesquely over-promoted,
and it will never fulfill the outrageous promises made for it in the '70s.
It's not and never will be a "space truck." It's rather more like a Ming
vase.

Space Station Freedom has very similar difficulties. It costs far
too much, and is destroying other and more useful possibilities for
space activity. Since the Shuttle takes up half NASA's current budget,
the Shuttle and the Space Station together will devour most *all* of
NASA's budget for *years to come* -- barring unlikely large-scale
increases in funding.

Even as a political stage-show, the Space Station is a bad bet,
because the Space Station cannot capture the public imagination.
Very few people are honestly excited about this prospect. The Soviets
*already have* a space station. They've had a space station for years
now. Nobody cares about it. It never gets headlines. It inspires not
awe but tepid public indifference. Rumor has it that the Soviets (or
rather, the *former* Soviets) are willing to sell their "Space Station
Peace" to any bidder for eight hundred million dollars, about one
fortieth of what "Space Station Freedom" will cost -- and nobody can
be bothered to buy it!

Manned space exploration itself has been oversold. Space-
flight is simply not like other forms of "exploring." "Exploring"
generally implies that you're going to venture out someplace, and
tangle hand-to-hand with wonderful stuff you know nothing about.
Manned space flight, on the other hand, is one of the most closely
regimented of human activities. Most everything that is to happen on
a manned space flight is already known far in advance. (Anything not
predicted, not carefully calculated beforehand, is very likely to be a
lethal catastrophe.)



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Reading the personal accounts of astronauts does not reveal
much in the way of "adventure" as that idea has been generally
understood. On the contrary, the historical and personal record