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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，俄羅斯發射世界上第一顆人造衛星，開始了最早的太空競賽，一種新的競賽出現了。
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.
它的目標是讓普通人也能行走于太空——通過提供了一千萬美金的作為對第一個設計出能夠承載三名乘客進入太空并返回的宇宙飛船的設計師的獎勵。
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.
這種競賽對于太空飛行就好比個人電腦對于計算機——不再受控于政府和非常大的公司，而是讓普通人也有乘坐宇宙飛船的機會。
"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.
“展開太空飛行的最大障礙就是金錢，”非盈利組織，提供X獎金的X獎基金會總裁如是說道。
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.
太空時代以來，太空飛行費用并沒有改變多少，那是因為沒有足夠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，為了刺激設計時減少飛船設計費用，該基金會組織了一場競賽：將獎勵第一位設計出能夠承載三名乘客到100千米高空的宇宙飛船的設計師一千萬美元。
At that altitude, passengers would get to experience about four minutes of weightlessness and get a view of the Earth.
在那個高度，乘客能夠體驗到大約四分鐘的失重狀態，并且能夠看到地球的面貌。
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.
競賽強調飛船的重復使用性，當今美國宇航局的航天飛機還沒有達到這一理想狀態，油箱會在半途搖蕩，火箭助推器只有部分可重復使用。
