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

for this world, in either budgets or rhetoric -- but both Navstar and
spy satellites have very promising futures, in and/or out of the
military. They promise and deliver solid and useful achievements,
and are in no danger of being abandoned.

And communications satellites have come a very long way since
Telstar; the Intelsat 6 model, for instance, can carry thirty thousand
simultaneous phone calls plus three channels of cable television.
There is enormous room for technical improvement in comsat
technologies; they have a well-established market, much pent-up
demand, and are likely to improve drastically in the future. (The
satellite launch business is no longer a superpower monopoly; comsats
are being launched by Chinese and Europeans. Newly independent
Kazakhstan, home of the Soviet launching facilities at Baikonur, is
anxious to enter the business.)

Weather satellites have proven vital to public safety and
commercial prosperity. NASA or no NASA, money will be found to
keep weather satellites in orbit and improve them technically -- not
for reasons of national prestige or flag-waving status, but because it
makes a lot of common sense and it really pays.

But a look at the budget decisions for 1992 shows that the
Apollo Paradigm still rules at NASA. NASA is still utterly determined
to put human beings in space, and actual space science gravely suffers
for this decision. Planetary exploration, life science missions, and
astronomical surveys (all unmanned) have been cancelled, or
curtailed, or delayed in the1992 budget. All this, in the hope of
continuing the big-ticket manned 50-billion-dollar Space Shuttle, and
of building the manned 30-billion-dollar Space Station Freedom.

The dire list of NASA's sacrifices for 1992 includes an asteroid
probe; an advanced x-ray astronomy facility; a space infrared
telescope; and an orbital unmanned solar laboratory. We would have
learned a very great deal from these projects (assuming that they

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk...ten/spaar/Bruce%20Sterling%20-%20Outer%20Cyberspace.txt (6 of 10)20-2-2006 23:34:32
 file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Bruce%20Sterling%20-%20Outer%20Cyberspace.txt

would have actually worked). The Shuttle and the Station, in stark
contrast, will show us very little that we haven't already seen.

There is nothing inevitable about these decisions, about this
strategy. With imagination, with a change of emphasis, the
exploration of space could take a very different course.

In 1951, when writing his seminal non-fiction work THE
EXPLORATION OF SPACE, Arthur C. Clarke created a fine
imaginative scenario of unmanned spaceflight.