《英语流行话题阅读:语境识词3500》Unit 38 普通人的太空行

　　Unit 38

Space Voyage for the Average Joe and Mary

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. 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. 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.

"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.

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. So, in an effort to stimulate 1 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. At that altitude, passengers would get to  experience about four minutes of weightlessness and get a view of the  Earth.

The emphasis of the competition is on the spaceship's  reusability, an ideal that was not quite reached by the current NASA  apace shuttle, whose fuel tanks are tossed in midflight as are its  rocket boosters which are partly reusable. The reusability of this  next wave of spacecraft will help develop commercial markets, which is  believed to be space tourism.

The competition itself is actually modeled on the Orteig  International Prize of 1927, which promoted Charles Lindbergh's famous  non-stop flight from New York to Paris 71 years ago on the Spirit of  St. Louis. The $25,000 cash prize stimulated 2 nine attempts to cross  the Atlantic and the investment of $400,000 in aeronautic 3 design. The  prize was one of over 100 aviation prizes offered between 1905 and  1935, which created today's $250 billion aeronautics 4 industry. In an  effort to repeat history, after the X Prize is awarded to individuals  who have make the greatest contributions to commercial human space  flight.

Once the cost of putting something into space goes down, the  number of things you can afford to do goes up greatly. It's a new ear  of spacecraft design, in which spaceships can be treated more like  aircraft and the passengers won't be professional astronauts, but  adventure seekers or space enthusiasts 5.