2015考研英语阅读太空时代的结束_大学英语阅读

2015考研英语阅读太空时代的结束

　　Viewed this way, the Earth is quite a lot larger than the traditional textbook answer. Andviewed this way, the Space Age has been a roaring success. Telecommunications, weatherforecasting, agriculture, forestry and even the search for minerals have all been revolutionised.So has warfare. No power can any longer mobilise its armed forces in secret. The exactlocation of every building on the planet can be known. And satellite-based global-positioningsystems will guide a smart bomb to that location on demand.

　　从这个方面看，地球比传统的教科书上的回答其实要大很多。这样看来，太空时代已经有了相当的成功。电信业，天气预测，农业，林业，甚至是在矿藏搜寻方面都有了彻底变革。战争也同样如此，再也没有政府能秘密地调兵遣将。这颗星球上的每一幢建筑物的位置都能被精确掌握。基于卫星的全球定位系统能按要求指引智能炸弹到达目标。

　　Yet none of this was the Space Age as envisaged bythe enthusiastic space cadets who got the wholething going. Though engineers like Wernher vonBraun, who built the rockets for both Germanyssecond-world-war V2 project and Americas cold-warApollo project, sold their souls to the militaryestablishment in order to pursue their dreams ofspace travel by the only means then available, mostof them had their eyes on a higher prize. First Mento a Geostationary Orbit does not have quite thesame ring as First Men to the Moon, a book vonBraun wrote in 1958. The vision being sold in the 1950s and 1960s, when the early spacerockets were flying, was of adventure and exploration. The facts of the American spaceproject and its Soviet counterpart elided seamlessly into the fantasy of Star Trek and2001: A Space Odyssey. Other planets may or may not have been inhabited by aliens,but they, and even other stars, were there for the taking. That the taking would begin in thelifetimes of people then alive was widely assumed to be true.