Thirty years ago, people were walking on the moon. Back then, everyone assumed that Neil Armstrong's "one small step" was the first on a great journey that would soon take us to Mars and the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. We had grand dreams of discovering other worlds, landing with our spaceships and tramping proudly over the ground. None of that happened. Instead, the emphasis shifted to unmanned vehicles, because they were able to go farther and see more than people could. And so we sat in front of our televisions watching Star Trek, while our marvelous instruments in space- the Hubble Space Telescope and the Voyager and Galileo spacecraft- did the job of exploring for us. In this manner, the dreams of the 1960s died and, with them, our vision of why we had wanted to explore space in the first place.
展开▼