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Are we going?
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US astronaut Tim Kopra taking a spacewalk on July 18. REUTERS
WHEN Neil Armstrong stepped down from the lunar lander on July 20, 1969, an estimated 500 million people on Earth crowded around their TVs and radios.
"Who, in 1969, could have imagined that we would not have regular travel to and from moon bases by the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11?" said Leroy Chiao, 49, former NASA astronaut, in an article for The Guardian.
But those dreams have been rudely brought down to earth. Four decades after the first moon landing and 20 years after Chiao joined NASA, only 12 men, all Americans, have walked on the moon. The last to set foot there was way back in 1972 at the end of the Apollo missions.
"Those 20 years have passed, and the nation"s space program is in an uncertain time," said Chiao. "So, where should we go in the next 20 years?"
Chiao is not the only one wondering whether this "giant leap for mankind" 40 years ago could really lead us anywhere. But still, they say, it is the toughness of the mission that inspires the continuing work.
In the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, the US was spurred on by the Soviet launch in 1957 of the Sputnik satellite and its later launch of Yuri Gagarin into space.
Nevertheless, the scientific legacy is often criticized because Apollo cost the equivalent of more than a trillion of today"s dollars without any consumer products as a spin-off.
After the end of the Cold War, neither the first President Bush"s initiative to set up a moon base nor the second Bush"s vision of a crewed return to the moon by 2020 materialized. Money was always the reason.
Now the ambitious plans to put US astronauts on the moon by 2020 to establish bases for further space exploration to Mars are increasingly in doubt.
America should abandon extensive plans to re-explore the moon and should establish a Mars colony, the second astronaut to set foot on the moon said on Monday: "A race to the moon is a dead end."
So, why are humans still eyeing the moon? The moon turned out to be an empty planet. This is often given as a reason humans have no business being there. But according to experts, Antarctica was talked about in the same way around 1909. But by the end of that century, the environmental science growing out of polar exploration was central to efforts to save the planet.
According to Kevin Fong, a UK space expert, space science is great at producing the kind of people we need at this time. But people want stability in the economy, not some wild dreams of outer space.
"The problem is that vision and inspiration, of themselves, have no measurable value and, to the number-obsessed society we live in, they have no value at all," said Fong.
英语词汇解析
equivalent 等价物
initiative 主动性
phase 阶段
spacecraft 太空船
colony 殖民地
polar 两极的
fervor 热情
lunar lander 登月器
rover 月球车
spin-off 副产品
spur 刺激
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