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Westfahl谈神舟
2005/10/21 幻想的边疆
加州大学河边分校教授、著名科幻评论家Westfahl对神舟六号的成功所表达的看法，非常值得一读。
The Chinese manned spaceflights represent tremendous scientific accomplishments, and as such they should be heartily celebrated by all nations. However, as I have explained elsewhere, I am not persuaded that this is the right moment in human history for an extensive conquest of space, so that China's ventures into space arouse both concerns and hopes.
Clearly, current levels of technology allow humanity to do what the Americans and Russians did in the 1960s and the 1970s, and what the Chinese are doing now: namely, to send small manned vehicles on missions of limited duration to orbit the Earth or to travel as far as the Moon. Unfortunately, American efforts to exceed these achievements with larger vehicles and payloads then inspired the creation of the space shuttle and the International Space Station, which can now be recognized as enormous boondoogles that unnecessarily risked the lives of crew members and led to few significant accomplishments. America's space agency, NASA, has now admitted as much by announcing a new space program, beginning in a few years, that will amount to little more than a return to the Apollo model of space exploration.
My concern, therefore, is that the Chinese space program will emulate NASA's mistakes by following their successes with unwise and overly ambitious initiatives like the space shuttle and International Space Station that will only waste their resources and lead to no genuine progress in expanding the human presence in space. My hope is that China will learn from NASA's mistakes and will limit their future plans to missions that stay within the boundaries of current technology. This is not, as some have charged, an agenda of defeatism, but simply a recognition that today we lack the means to effectively and economically achieve such dreams as an orbital city in space, a permanent lunar colony, or a mission to Mars, and that premature efforts to accomplish such goals will only result in tragedy and failure.
I welcome China's ventures into space because as more nations develop expertise in this area, it becomes more likely that we will achieve the needed breakthroughs to fully realize the expansive dreams of space conquest long celebrated in science fiction. I personally suspect that such breakthroughs are far in the future, but I would be very happy indeed to be proven wrong.
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