"Benford-AntarcticaMars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

GREGORY BENFORD

ANTARCTICA AND MARS

Recently I was mulling over my favorite authors, and it struck me that often a
writer's essential flavor can be summed up by one of his book titles. Charles
Dickens, Great Expectations. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.
Hemingway, In Our Time.

At least it's an amusing game. I picked The Stars My Destination for Alfred
Bester, Star Maker for Olaf Stapledon, Childhood's End for Arthur C. Clarke.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Word for World is Forest. Poul Anderson, Time and Stars.

Then I thought of that ceaseless advocate of the space program, Robert Heinlein.
Surely his mood and attitude is captured by The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Space
as gritty, huge, hard, real.

Which depressed me a bit, for today the space program's spirit is anything but
that. A diffuse unreality pervades NASA. Similarly, James Gunn's definitive
treatment of the radio search for intelligent life, The Listeners-- not a bad
title choice for his essential theme, since Gunn is one of our best social
critics -- now seems quite optimistic, since Congress recently killed the
program (though the Planetary Society plans to carry on, using public
donations). Were all these hopeful outlooks in sf simply naive?

I reflected back on my own involvement with space, from the freckled kid reading
Willy Ley and Arthur Clarke describing how rockets worked, to a consultant for
NASA and the Planetary Society. Somehow a lot of the zip has gone out of space
for a lot of us, and for the public, too. Why?

We went wrong just after Apollo, I think. James Fletcher was NASA Administrator
from 1971 to 1977, when the Shuttle was being proposed, designed and checked out
-- or rather, not checked out. He convinced Congress that this nifty little
reusable rocket-cum-space-plane gadget would get magically cheaper and cheaper
to fly, eventually delivering payloads to orbit for a few hundred dollars a
pound.

The cost now is over $5000 a pound, and still climbing as missions get delayed
and services shrink. A twenty-fold increase, allowing for inflation. The Nixon
administration bequeathed to us an econo-ride Shuttle (and Jimmy Carter signed
the appropriations bill for it). They also axed the remaining Apollo missions
and the 1970s version of the space station, though they weren't vital. Their
killing the long-range research for a Mars mission had great effects, however,
because we now have no infrastructure developed for large deep space missions.

Then came the Challenger disaster, with Fletcher in charge again. In the
Challenger commission report he allowed as how "Congress has provided excellent
oversight and generous funding and in no way that I know of contributed to the