General Jay Raymond, Commander of Air Force Space Command, talks about keeping watch over space and cyber. “There’s three strategic trends that I see in space.”

空军空间司令部司令杰伊·雷蒙德将军就空间和网络管理发言： “我认为有三大战略问题在限制太空的发展。”

撰文/播音：史蒂夫·米尔斯基（Steve Mirsky）

翻译：曲荟龙

审校：许楠

General Jay Raymond, Commander of Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs. He recently visited Scientific American to talk about Space Command, which is responsible for space and cyber for the Air Force.  

科罗拉多斯普林斯空军空间司令部司令杰伊·雷蒙德将军最近做客《科学美国人》，就美军的太空管理发表了自己的看法。美军的太空管理包括由空军负责的空间和网络管理。

“One is space is congested…we track 23,000 objects in space. We provide the conjunction assessment warning, if you will, so for every object in space we do the analysis on every other object in space to see if there’s a potential collision. And if there’s a potential collision we make the warning for satellite operators around the world to maneuver their satellites to keep that collision from happening…

“其中一个问题是太空拥堵。在太空中，我们追踪到了23000个物体。我们提供碰撞评估警告系统——如果客户有意愿，我们可以对太空中任何一个物体进行分析，看其是否有可能和太空中的其他物体发生碰撞。如果确有碰撞的几率，我们会对世界各地的卫星操作者发出警告，以使他们操控卫星避免碰撞的发生。

“I see the trends of that growing. If you look at the numbers of launches that are occurring, the numbers of launches are up largely because the cost of launch has gone down. So the access to space has gotten easier…not just are the numbers of launches going up, but the numbers of satellites on each launch are also increasing…and so I see that congestion just growing in the future, and that’s something that we are obviously working to help mitigate that growing strain.

“此外，太空拥堵还有加重的趋势。对现阶段的发射次数进行观察便不难发现，由于发射成本下降，发射的次数已大大增加。因此，进入太空变得更加容易。不仅仅是发射次数在增加，每次发射的卫星数量也在增加……所以我可以预见，未来太空拥堵会越来越严重，而我们正努力帮助缓解这种日益增长的压力。”

“The other thing that’s happening in space is that we are becoming more contested. I think it’s clear that space is a war-fighting domain just like air, land and sea. And we are seeing threats across the spectrum, everything from low-end reversible jamming of GPS satellites all the way up to high-end kinetic destruction, which we saw in 2007 when China shot down their weather satellite.

“另一个问题是太空竞争变得越来越激烈。太空和天空、陆地及海洋一样，都属于作战领域，我想这一点很明确。此外我们看到整个太空空间领域里都存在着威胁——数目众多的GPS卫星充斥在较低的太空领域，造成拥挤；而在较高的太空领域中，航天器的破坏正频频上演，比如在2007年，中国击落了自己的气象卫星。”

“And then the last thing, and I wouldn’t say it’s concerning by any means, is the increased competitive nature of space. I think that’s a good thing. I think there’s some huge opportunities here to leverage a growing commercial space market…I think as costs of launch go down and as technology allows for smaller satellites I think we’ll be able to leverage those for a wide variety of missions.”

“最后一个问题是空间竞争的增强，不过我认为这是一件好事。空间竞争会带来一些千载难逢的良机，我们恰恰可以利用这些机会来拓展日益增长的商业空间市场……发射成本不断降低，技术不断发展进步，小型卫星应运而生，我们可以充分利用它们完成各种各样的任务。”