"Bruce Sterling. Outer Cyberspace (F&SF-01) {angl., new}" - читать интересную книгу автора

lag). These micro-rovers, crammed with cheap microchips and laser
photo-optics, are so exquisitely monitored that one can actually *feel*
the Martian grit beneath their little scuttling claws. Piloting one of
these babies down the Valles Marineris, or perhaps some unknown
cranny of the Moon -- now *that* really feels like "exploration." If
they were cheap enough, you could dune-buggy them.

No one lives in space stations, in this scenario. Instead, our
entire solar system is saturated with cheap monitoring devices. There
are no "rockets" any more. Most of these robot surrogates weigh less
than a kilogram. They are fired into orbit by small rail-guns mounted
on high-flying aircraft. Or perhaps they're launched by laser-ignition:
ground-based heat-beams that focus on small reaction-chambers and
provide their thrust. They might even be literally shot into orbit by
Jules Vernian "space guns" that use the intriguing, dirt-cheap
technology of Gerald Bull's Iraqi "super-cannon." This wacky but
promising technique would be utterly impractical for launching human
beings, since the acceleration g-load would shatter every bone in their
bodies; but these little machines are *tough.*

And small robots have many other advantages. Unlike manned
craft, robots can go into harm's way: into Jupiter's radiation belts, or
into the shrapnel-heavy rings of Saturn, or onto the acid-bitten
smoldering surface of Venus. They stay on their missions,
operational, not for mere days or weeks, but for decades. They are
extensions, not of human population, but of human senses.

And because they are small and numerous, they should be
cheap. The entire point of this scenario is to create a new kind of
space-probe that is cheap, small, disposable, and numerous: as cheap
and disposable as their parent technologies, microchips and video,
while taking advantage of new materials like carbon-fiber, fiber-
optics, ceramic, and artificial diamond.

The core idea of this particular vision is "fast, cheap, and out of
control." Instead of gigantic, costly, ultra-high-tech, one-shot efforts
like NASA's Hubble Telescope (crippled by bad optics) or NASA's
Galileo (currently crippled by a flaw in its communications antenna)
these micro-rovers are cheap, and legion, and everywhere. They get
crippled every day; but it doesn't matter much; there are hundreds
more, and no one's life is at stake. People, even quite ordinary people,
*rent time on them* in much the same way that you would pay for
satellite cable-TV service. If you want to know what Neptune looks
like today, you just call up a data center and *have a look for
yourself.*

This is a concept that would truly involve "the public" in space
exploration, rather than the necessarily tiny elite of astronauts. This
is a potential benefit that we might derive from abandoning the
expensive practice of launching actual human bodies into space. We