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

while without any gravity. However, we now know what it would be
like to settle in space for long periods. It's neither easy nor pleasant.

And yet, NASA is still committed to putting people in space.
They're not quite sure why people should go there, nor what people
will do in space once they're there, but they are bound and determined
to do this despite all obstacles.

If there were big money to be made from settling people in
space, that would be a different prospect. A commercial career in
free-fall would probably be safer, happier, and more rewarding than,
say, bomb-disposal, or test-pilot work, or maybe even coal-mining.
But the only real moneymaker in space commerce (to date, at least) is
the communications satellite industry. The comsat industry wants
nothing to do with people in orbit.

Consider this: it costs $200 million to make one shuttle flight.
For $200 million you can start your own communications satellite
business, just like GE, AT&T, GTE and Hughes Aircraft. You can join
the global Intelsat consortium and make a hefty 14% regulated profit
in the telecommunications business, year after year. You can do quite
well by "space commerce," thank you very much, and thousands of
people thrive today by commercializing space. But the Space Shuttle,
with humans aboard, costs $30 million a day! There's nothing you can
make or do on the Shuttle that will remotely repay that investment.
After years of Shuttle flights, there is still not one single serious
commercial industry anywhere whose business it is to rent workspace
or make products or services on the Shuttle.

The era of manned spectaculars is visibly dying by inches. It's
interesting to note that a quarter of the top and middle management
of NASA, the heroes of Apollo and its stalwarts of tradition, are
currently eligible for retirement. By the turn of the century, more than
three-quarters of the old guard will be gone.

This grim and rather cynical recital may seem a dismal prospect
for space enthusiasts, but the situation's not actually all that dismal at
all. In the meantime, unmanned space development has quietly

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continued apace. It's a little known fact that America's *military*
space budget today is *twice the size* of NASA's entire budget! This
is the poorly publicized, hush-hush, national security budget for
militarily vital technologies like America's "national technical means
of verification," i.e. spy satellites. And then there are military
navigational aids like Navstar, a relatively obscure but very
impressive national asset. The much-promoted Strategic Defence
Initiative is a Cold War boondoggle, and SDI is almost surely not long