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  • The time is coming when the human race

  • will get to the moon,

  • with rockets!

  • Private companies won't want to do this,

  • how are they gonna make money?

  • By charging for the ride.

  • Those crazy billionaires competing with each other.

  • Modern day rocket man wants to send you to Mars.

  • Difficult.

  • Dangerous.

  • Good chance you will die.

  • The private industry's space race

  • it's on.

  • We tend to think that space exploration and

  • human space flight is all about

  • governmental agencies like NASA.

  • But it wasn't really always like that.

  • Some of the very first steps by

  • the early rocketry pioneers were funded by the private sector.

  • In the U.S. it begins with the University of Clark professor

  • Robert Goddard.

  • It’s 1920 and he publishes

  • "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes

  • mentioning that rockets could be used

  • to carry payloads to the moon.

  • They called him the "Moon Man" and laughed.

  • The Times editorial writer

  • implied that your husband didn’t even know high school physics.

  • He did not let such things deter him from his experiments.

  • In 1926 Goddard successfully launches the first liquid-fueled rocket.

  • Money from the family of the mining magnate Daniel Guggenheim soon follows.

  • They provided him funding in today's dollars

  • at the scale of tens of millions of dollars.

  • What's interesting is that at the very start of this period of the 1920s

  • there was actually a great amount of enthusiasm

  • and a great amount of belief

  • in the potential for these private rockets to go to space.

  • The German war machine gets under way.

  • The Second World War gives rockets a whole new meaning.

  • And then the knowledge of rocketry became critical to the Cold War.

  • And in the ‘50s and ‘60s rocketry was almost exclusively a governmental affair.

  • The private sector, in terms of companies, was essentially working as contractors to

  • the U.S. government.

  • It’s not until 1982, that a serious effort is made to build a privately funded rocket.

  • The idea comes from a Texas businessman, David Hannah Jr.

  • Conestoga 1 is pieced together from a repurposed ballistic missile.

  • It may not have had the majesty of an Apollo, or the thunder of a Shuttle

  • but it flew and that’s what counts.

  • Everything speeds up at the turn of the millennium

  • when freshly minted millionaires take interest.

  • One of them is Jeff Bezos.

  • I don’t actually hold out great hopes.

  • But If I could do anything,

  • I would like to go help explore space.

  • A few months later he sets up Blue Origin.

  • Then Elon Musk starts SpaceX.

  • And yet another tech millionaire

  • Anousheh Ansari and her family

  • promise to foot the bill for XPrize.

  • This is a $10 million award for reaching the industry’s holy grail -

  • a reusable manned space vehicle.

  • In 2004 SpaceShipOne wins the prize.

  • There it is, a craft that has been to space and back, today right in front of you.

  • Richard Branson buys the rights, turns it into Virgin Galactic

  • and in the same year starts accepting commercial reservations for future suborbital flights.

  • Although we are seeing a lot of billionaires have interest in space flight,

  • their investments still pale in comparison to governmental investments.

  • And they have now managed to partner in many cases with U.S. government agencies.

  • NASA for example is in most years SpaceX's primary customer.

  • But there are setbacks.

  • Local company's mission for NASA explodes into a ball of fire and debris.

  • Deadly crash involving Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo.

  • A SpaceX rocket bringing supplies for the International Space Station

  • as you can see there, it exploded!

  • Eventually, in 2015 Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket

  • becomes the first to take off and land vertically after reaching space.

  • Shortly after SpaceX goes even further, sending its Falcon 9 to orbit altitude.

  • The other major milestone will be the first tourists on commercial suborbital vehicles.

  • And I'm not gonna predict who's gonna be there first but

  • the hope is that by having

  • more competition amongst commercial companies

  • and by leveraging advanced technologies that we're gonna be able to

  • reduce the cost of going into space.

  • 2019 is the year that SpaceX and Boeing are gearing up to finally take astronauts

  • up to the International Space Station.

  • The first private lunar lander is on its way to the Moon

  • and Chinese companies are joining the space race as well.

  • For well over a hundred years, people have been dreaming and thinking and planning

  • for a future for humanity beyond this planet.

  • And that includes a future for humanity on the surface of the moon,

  • a future for humanity on Mars

  • and even farther still.

  • And as long as we have a social goal of continuing to expand our knowledge of the cosmos,

  • then the ambitions and dreams of individuals

  • are gonna be an important part of realizing those goals.

The time is coming when the human race

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B1 中級

數十年來億萬富翁一直在資助太空旅行。 (Billionaires Have Funded Space Travel For Decades)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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