精美英文欣赏:普通人的太空行(上)（在线收听）

Space Voyage for the Average Joe and Mary

普通人的太空行

Forty-one years after the original space race began with the launch of the Russian Sputnik, the world's first satellite, a new race has emerged.

四十一年前，俄罗斯发射世界上第一颗人造卫星，开始了最早的太空竞赛，一种新的竞赛出现了。

Its goal is to make space flight accessible to the average Joe or Mary—by offering a $10 million cash prize to the first person to design a spaceship that can take three passengers into space and back.

它的目标是让普通人也能行走于太空——通过提供了一千万美金的作为对第一个设计出能够承载三名乘客进入太空并返回的宇宙飞船的设计师的奖励。

It will do for space flight what PCs did for computers—take it out of the control of governments and very big companies and put it in the hands of average people.

这种竞赛对于太空飞行就好比个人电脑对于计算机——不再受控于政府和非常大的公司，而是让普通人也有乘坐宇宙飞船的机会。

"The biggest obstacle to opening up space flight is money," says the CEO of the X Prize Foundation, a non-profit organization that's putting up the X Prize money.

“展开太空飞行的最大障碍就是金钱，”非盈利组织，提供X奖金的X奖基金会总裁如是说道。

Since the beginning of the space age, the cost of space flight hasn't changed much, and that's because there hasn't been enough flights to force the cost down.

太空时代以来，太空飞行费用并没有改变多少，那是因为没有足够的航班迫使成本降低。

So, in an effort to stimulate less expensive spaceship designs, the Foundation has organized a competition: Ten million dollars will go to the first person or team that designs a spaceship capable of launching three passengers to an altitude of 100 km.

因此，为了刺激设计时减少飞船设计费用，该基金会组织了一场竞赛：将奖励第一位设计出能够承载三名乘客到100千米高空的宇宙飞船的设计师一千万美元。

At that altitude, passengers would get to experience about four minutes of weightlessness and get a view of the Earth.

在那个高度，乘客能够体验到大约四分钟的失重状态，并且能够看到地球的面貌。

The emphasis of the competition is on the spaceship's reusability, an ideal that was not quite reached by the current NASA space shuttle, whose fuel tanks are tossed in midflight as are its rocket boosters which are partly reusable.

竞赛强调飞船的重复使用性，当今美国宇航局的航天飞机还没有达到这一理想状态，油箱会在半途摇荡，火箭助推器只有部分可重复使用。