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

Whether this scenario is "realistic" isn't clear as yet. It's just a
science-fictional dream, a vision for the exploration of space:
*circumsolar telepresence.* As always, much depends on
circumstance, lucky accidents, and imponderables like political will.
What does seem clear, however, is that NASA's own current plans are
terribly far-fetched: they have outlived all contact with the political,
economic, social and even technical realities of the 1990s. There is no
longer any real point in shipping human beings into space in order to
wave flags.

"Exploring space" is not an "unrealistic" idea. That much, at
least, has already been proven. The struggle now is over why and
how and to what end. True, "exploring space" is not as "important"
as was the life-and-death Space Race struggle for Cold War pre-
eminence. Space science cannot realistically expect to command the
huge sums that NASA commanded in the service of American political
prestige. That era is simply gone; it's history now.

However: astronomy does count. There is a very deep and
genuine interest in these topics. An interest in the stars and planets is
not a fluke, it's not freakish. Astronomy is the most ancient of human
sciences. It's deeply rooted in the human psyche, has great historical
continuity, and is spread all over the world. It has its own
constituency, and if its plans were modest and workable, and played
to visible strengths, they might well succeed brilliantly.



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The world doesn't actually need NASA's billions to learn about
our solar system. Real, honest-to-goodness "space exploration"
never got more than a fraction of NASA's budget in the first place.

Projects of this sort would no longer be created by gigantic
federal military-industrial bureaucracies. Micro-rover projects could
be carried out by universities, astronomy departments, and small-
scale research consortia. It would play from the impressive strengths
of the thriving communications and computer tech of the nineties,
rather than the dying, centralized, militarized, politicized rocket-tech
of the sixties.

The task at hand is to create a change in the climate of opinion
about the true potentials of "space exploration." Space exploration,
like the rest of us, grew up in the Cold War; like the rest of us, it must
now find a new way to live. And, as history has proven, science fiction
has a very real and influential role in space exploration. History
shows that true space exploration is not about budgets. It's about
vision. At its heart it has always been about vision.