（外文电子版资料）Gregory Benford - Antartica and Mars.pdf

GREGORY BENFORD ANTARCTICA AND MARS Recently I was mulling over my favorite authors, and it struck me that often a writers 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 its an amusing game. I picked The Stars My Destination for Alfred Bester, Star Maker for Olaf Stapledon, Childhoods 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 programs spirit is anything but that. A diffuse unreality pervades NASA. Similarly, James Gunns 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 missio