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Lunar sight-seeing trips and orbiting space hotels am within roach, moon walk

游客2025-01-10  0
问题    Lunar sight-seeing trips and orbiting space hotels am within roach, moon walking astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin said last week, but some who favor space tourism worried about its "giggle factor".
   Thirty years after Aldrin and fellow astronaut Nell Armstrong made the first footprints on the lunar surface on July 30, 1969, Aldrin suggested that the tight budgets of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and a lack of boldness had mired human space exploration.
   "The achievements of Apollo (the NASA program that took Aldrin and others to the moon) were so bold and our subsequent efforts so timid that the energy of those years seems like a youthful dream," Aldrin told more than 100 participants at a space tourism conference.
   "Had we continued even with that moderate investment in space, about 1 percent of our national budget, we’ d have walked on Mars l0 years ago, or certainly 5 years ago," he said.
   Hartmut Muller, who is affiliated with the German-based Space Tours, said that as recently as 1997 there was a "giggle factor" whenever the topic of space travel for the ordinary citizen was mentioned.
   Two years ago, at the time of the first International Symposium on Space Travel in Bremen, Germany, Muller said, "There was no acceptance of space tourism at all." But after two such meetings were held and covered by the media, "In Germany, it’s an accepted topic. Now how do we realize it?"
   Both Aldrin and Muller envisioned orbiting space hotels--Muller even showed an early design of such a hotel that looked a bit like rite circular space station in the film "2001"--and looked for new ways to launch paying passengers into orbit.
   Aldrin also thought "sight-seeing trips around the moon and back" were feasible.
   Even if space tourists were lobbed aloft by a reconditioned space shuttle, the ticket price would be steep, with estimates starting at $ 25,000, according to Muller. And that is still far less than the $ 400 million to $1 billion each shuttle mission costs now.
   But the market for such travel exists. A study released by the NASA and the private Space Transportation Association (STA) this year found one-third of all American adults would like to spend two weeks in space and would pay more than $ 5,000 to do so.    Space tourism now--including visits to space musemns, space camps, rocket-launch recovery sites and government research and development centers, and even low-gravity aircraft trips--accounts for $1 billion each year, a sliver of the $ 400 tourism takes in annually, the NASA-STA report said.
   The report took the prospect of space travel for ordinary tourists seriously, and said the US government was committed to working with private industry to cut the cost of a ride in space from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, and to improving safety and reliability.
   "Private, high-priced ’ adventure’trips to space with greater than today’s commercial airline risk could become possible in the next few years,’the study said. "Much larger scale, lower-priced, orbital operations, could commence in the decade thereafter." [br] The underlined word "steep" (Para. 9 ) can best be replaced by ______.
选项 A、slopy
B、inexpensive
C、wide
D、unduly high
答案 D
解析 文章下文提到，据Muller估计，去太空旅行的票价的起价将为大约25 000美元。根据生活常识判断，这个票价是极高的；而这四个选择项中，slopy意为“倾斜的”，inexpensive意为“价钱不贵的”，wide意为“广阔的”，都与上下文不符，只有unduly high是“高得过分”的意思，符合题意，因此[D]为正确答案。
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