（054）2015/3/5：拜科努尔航天基地荣光不再
Leaves译 2015/3/5 原文来源：纽约时报
On a sultry desert evening, as bats fluttered about this town’s riverfront park, a man emerged from a reedy marsh carrying a bundle of grass tied with twine.
一个闷热难耐的沙漠夜晚，蝙蝠在这座小城镇临河的公园里扑腾着翅膀，一个男人从芦苇沼泽中走出来，手里拿着一捆用麻线系着的草。
Setting it down to brush himself off, he explained that he was keeping a calf in the courtyard of an apartment building across town, where he had settled in recently after the previous occupants, engineers with the Russian space program, moved out.
他放下草，清理了一下身上的灰，解释说自己在城镇上一栋公寓楼的院子里养了头小牛。最近，随着之前的住户、俄罗斯太空项目的工程师搬出了公寓，他在那里安顿了下来。
Baikonur, in remote western Kazakhstan, was once the pride of the Soviet Union, the home of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the launching site of Sputnik, the dog Laika and the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. But today, nomadic herders from the nearby steppe are moving into abandoned buildings.
位于遥远西哈萨克斯坦的拜科努尔一度是苏联的骄傲。这里是巴克努尔航天发射场所在地，“伴侣号”人造卫星、“莱卡”狗和首个太空人就是在此地发射升空。但今天，附近草原上的牧羊人却正在搬进废弃大楼。
That is just one of the signs of the city’s long fade into the sunset of post-Soviet social and economic problems, which are all the more remarkable given that much of the world, including the United States, still relies on Baikonur for manned space launchings. The only other site for such liftoffs is in Jiuquan, in the Gobi Desert in China.
这仅仅是这座城市长久以来在后苏联时代社会和经济问题的余晖中逐渐衰退的标志之一，考虑到包括美国在内的世界上很多国家依然依靠拜科努尔开展载人航天发射，这种衰退尤为令人印象深刻。其它类似的航天发射地只有一个，位于中国戈壁滩的酒泉。
“It’s painful for me to think of my town,” Anna Khodakovskaya, the editor of the local newspaper, said of its glum state. The first cellphones appeared here in 2004; the first M.R.I. machine in 2011. “We are not ahead of the planet in anything but space,” she said.
当地一份报纸的编辑Anna Khodakovskaya谈到城镇目前的黯淡状况时说：“想到家乡我就心痛。”2004年，这里才第一次出现手机；核磁共振机是2011年。“除了航空，我们没有其它任何领先世界的东西。”
Today 70 percent of Baikonur’s residents are Kazakh citizens, but the town remains a Russian enclave rented from the Kazakh government and administered under Russian jurisdiction. At the time of the Soviet breakup, the ratios were reversed: it was only about one-third Kazakh.
今天，拜科努尔70%的居民为哈萨克斯坦人，但这座这座城镇依然是俄罗斯向卡萨克斯坦政府租借的飞地，管辖权属于俄罗斯。苏联解体时，当地人口比例发生了逆转：当时哈萨克斯坦人只占三分之一。
Along with the squatting herders, day laborers and market traders stroll the streets, with only the occasional aging Russian engineer visible.
临时工与市场商贩和那些将公寓楼据为己有的牧羊人在大街上闲逛，偶尔还能看到几个上了年纪的俄罗斯工程师。
It is a dusty town, where many sidewalks are sandy tracks but nearly every building is decorated with a mosaic of a rocket, a spacewalking cosmonaut or stars and fanciful renderings of planets. In fountains, water bubbles from spouts shaped like rockets, and signed portraits of astronauts adorn the walls of cafes, where coffee is served in the Turkish style with grounds in the cup.
在这个灰蒙蒙的城镇上，很多人行道都遍布沙尘，但几乎每栋建筑都装饰着马赛克图案，内容有火箭、太空行走宇航员或者星星，外加式样夸张的地球；在人工喷泉处，水从火箭形状的喷嘴里喷涌而出；咖啡屋的墙上装饰着宇航员的签名肖像画，那里供应土耳其风格的咖啡，杯子里有咖啡沉淀物。
It is a loose end from the breakup of the Soviet Union that has, strangely, become extraordinarily important for every manned space program except China’s.
奇怪的是，对于全世界除中国以外的任何一个载人航天项目来说，正是这个苏联解体后的废弃之地突然变得意义极其重大起来。
NASA last month extended the contract for astronaut launchings for a year, until mid-2017, for an additional $424 million. For now, every American astronaut blasts off from this town, the stand-in for Cape Canaveral during a gap in funding for manned missions in the United States.
上个月，美国航空航天局（NASA）将载人飞船发射合同延长了一年，新合同价值4.24亿美元，到2017年年中。眼下，每名美国宇航员都从这里升空。由于美国载人航天项目资金出现缺口，这座城镇就成了卡纳维尔角（美国航空海岸，位于弗洛里达州——译注）的临时替代。
Because of this dependency, NASA now requires all its astronauts in training to achieve proficiency in Russian before graduating to the astronaut corps.
由于这种依赖性，现在NASA要求它名下所有试训宇航员在毕业加入正式宇航员队伍前都要熟练掌握俄语。
The space agencies of the European Union, Japan and Canada also launch from here on Russian rockets, under an agreement with NASA to repurchase about half of the six seats NASA buys annually from the Russians.
欧盟、日本和加拿大的航天机构同样在这里用俄罗斯的火箭进行发射。根据和NASA签订的协议，NASA每年从俄方购买6个发射位置，其中约一半转售给它们。
From all this, Baikonur may sound like a prosperous hub of space activity. But the state of affairs is only temporary — every nation including Russia, which is building a replacement launchpad on its own territory in the Far East, called Vostochny, views this state of affairs as temporary. As a result, the city of Baikonur has been ignored, and it is falling apart.
所有这些使拜科努尔听起来像是一个繁荣的宇航活动枢纽地。但目前的情况只是暂时性的，所有国家都这么认为，包括俄罗斯。俄罗斯正在位于远东的本国领土修建新的发射台来代替这里，名字叫“东方港”。因此，拜科努尔这座城镇被忽视了，它正在陷入崩溃。
“Russia will not be able to roll up the roads and take them away when it leaves,” Ms. Khodakovskaya said.
Khodakovskaya说：“俄罗斯方面撤离的时候是没办法把路卷起来带走的。”
Social problems typical of Central Asia today, like abuse of heroin smuggled from Afghanistan, labor migration and growing Islamic fundamentalism, are creeping into the city. A few years back, the police arrested men in Tura-Tam, a Kazakh village just outside Baikonur’s guarded fence, for distributing leaflets for Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a fundamentalist Islamic group.
今日中亚地区独有的问题正在悄然侵袭这座城镇，比如滥用从阿富汗走私进来的海洛因、劳动力流失以及愈演愈烈的伊斯兰原教旨主义。几年前，警方在哈萨克斯坦的Tura-Tam村逮捕了一名男子，罪名是分发伊斯兰原教旨团体“伊扎布特”的传单。这个村子就在拜科努尔的警戒圈外围。
The town is a low boil of ethnic tension, too, as Russians hold nearly all the high-paying space jobs. In 2011, young Kazakh men ran in a mass down a central street yelling, “The head is a dog,” a reference to the Russian mayor.
所有和航空相关的高收入工作几乎都由俄罗斯人把持，因此这座城镇的民族紧张情绪也是一触即发。2011年，一大群哈萨克斯坦年轻人在一条中央道路边跑边喊：“领导是条狗。”他们指的是俄罗斯籍的市长。
At the outdoor market, behind heaps of apricots and tomatoes, traders flash gold-toothed smiles and hawk Central Asian pottery glazed with crudely drawn rockets, or the smiling face of Yuri Gagarin in a helmet. Flies sampled the savory pies of mutton and pumpkin on display.
在露天市场，商贩在一摊摊杏仁和西红柿后亮出金牙，笑着叫卖画有粗劣火箭的中亚瓷器，以及印着尤里·加加林笑脸的头盔。摊位上还陈列着美味的羊肉南瓜饼，苍蝇在上面大快朵颐。
Even President Vladimir V. Putin, in a speech on Cosmonaut Day on April 12, referred to Baikonur as “physically aged.”
就连弗拉基米尔·V·普金总统也在4月12日“宇航员日”当天的一次讲话中将拜科努尔形容为“廉颇老矣”。
“These people are putting up rockets, but the town itself is like a third-world country,” said Jene Ragan, a software engineer from Bethesda, Md., who came as a tourist to watch a liftoff in May, swatting at flying ants out on the steppe while watching the rollout of a rocket.
5月份，一位马里兰州贝赛斯达的软件工程师杰内·雷根以游客身份到这里参观火箭发射。他一边看着火箭展示一边挥手赶走草原上的飞蚁，说：“这些人在造火箭，不过这个城镇本身就像个第三世界国家。”
Alarmed at the state of Baikonur, the head of Kazakhstan’s space agency, Talgat Musabayev, in December suggested canceling the rental agreement with Russia; Kazakhstan charges Russia $115 million a year for the town. “The agreement has run its course,” Mr. Musabayev said.
拜科努尔的状况引起了哈萨克斯坦航空局局长塔尔加特·穆萨巴耶夫的警觉，他在12月份建议取消和俄罗斯签订的租赁协议；哈萨克斯坦向俄罗斯一年收取收取1.15亿美元租金。穆萨巴耶夫说：“这份协议已经完成了它的使命。”
The Kazakhs bristle at Russia’s efforts to keep Kazakh squatters out of abandoned buildings, which are formally Kazakh property, noting the housing shortage in the region. They complain of debris falling on their territory from jettisoned rocket stages.
俄方正在将占据废弃大楼的哈萨克人赶出去，哈萨克人对此怨气不小，因为这些楼之前是他们的财产。他们强调在这个地区住房很紧张，还抱怨废弃火箭部件的残骸落到了自己的土地上。
In response, the Russians threatened to simply pull out entirely in 2018 when Vostochny is ready for manned launchings, Izvestia reported.
据《消息报》报道，俄方对此的回应是威胁在2018年“东方港”建成后彻底从拜科努尔撤离。
On a sultry desert evening, as bats fluttered about this town’s riverfront park, a man emerged from a reedy marsh carrying a bundle of grass tied with twine.
一个闷热难耐的沙漠夜晚，蝙蝠在这座小城镇临河的公园里扑腾着翅膀，一个男人从芦苇沼泽中走出来，手里拿着一捆用麻线系着的草。
Setting it down to brush himself off, he explained that he was keeping a calf in the courtyard of an apartment building across town, where he had settled in recently after the previous occupants, engineers with the Russian space program, moved out.
他放下草，清理了一下身上的灰，解释说自己在城镇上一栋公寓楼的院子里养了头小牛。最近，随着之前的住户、俄罗斯太空项目的工程师搬出了公寓，他在那里安顿了下来。
Baikonur, in remote western Kazakhstan, was once the pride of the Soviet Union, the home of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the launching site of Sputnik, the dog Laika and the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. But today, nomadic herders from the nearby steppe are moving into abandoned buildings.
位于遥远西哈萨克斯坦的拜科努尔一度是苏联的骄傲。这里是巴克努尔航天发射场所在地，“伴侣号”人造卫星、“莱卡”狗和首个太空人就是在此地发射升空。但今天，附近草原上的牧羊人却正在搬进废弃大楼。
That is just one of the signs of the city’s long fade into the sunset of post-Soviet social and economic problems, which are all the more remarkable given that much of the world, including the United States, still relies on Baikonur for manned space launchings. The only other site for such liftoffs is in Jiuquan, in the Gobi Desert in China.
这仅仅是这座城市长久以来在后苏联时代社会和经济问题的余晖中逐渐衰退的标志之一，考虑到包括美国在内的世界上很多国家依然依靠拜科努尔开展载人航天发射，这种衰退尤为令人印象深刻。其它类似的航天发射地只有一个，位于中国戈壁滩的酒泉。
“It’s painful for me to think of my town,” Anna Khodakovskaya, the editor of the local newspaper, said of its glum state. The first cellphones appeared here in 2004; the first M.R.I. machine in 2011. “We are not ahead of the planet in anything but space,” she said.
当地一份报纸的编辑Anna Khodakovskaya谈到城镇目前的黯淡状况时说：“想到家乡我就心痛。”2004年，这里才第一次出现手机；核磁共振机是2011年。“除了航空，我们没有其它任何领先世界的东西。”
Today 70 percent of Baikonur’s residents are Kazakh citizens, but the town remains a Russian enclave rented from the Kazakh government and administered under Russian jurisdiction. At the time of the Soviet breakup, the ratios were reversed: it was only about one-third Kazakh.
今天，拜科努尔70%的居民为哈萨克斯坦人，但这座这座城镇依然是俄罗斯向卡萨克斯坦政府租借的飞地，管辖权属于俄罗斯。苏联解体时，当地人口比例发生了逆转：当时哈萨克斯坦人只占三分之一。
Along with the squatting herders, day laborers and market traders stroll the streets, with only the occasional aging Russian engineer visible.
临时工与市场商贩和那些将公寓楼据为己有的牧羊人在大街上闲逛，偶尔还能看到几个上了年纪的俄罗斯工程师。
It is a dusty town, where many sidewalks are sandy tracks but nearly every building is decorated with a mosaic of a rocket, a spacewalking cosmonaut or stars and fanciful renderings of planets. In fountains, water bubbles from spouts shaped like rockets, and signed portraits of astronauts adorn the walls of cafes, where coffee is served in the Turkish style with grounds in the cup.
在这个灰蒙蒙的城镇上，很多人行道都遍布沙尘，但几乎每栋建筑都装饰着马赛克图案，内容有火箭、太空行走宇航员或者星星，外加式样夸张的地球；在人工喷泉处，水从火箭形状的喷嘴里喷涌而出；咖啡屋的墙上装饰着宇航员的签名肖像画，那里供应土耳其风格的咖啡，杯子里有咖啡沉淀物。
It is a loose end from the breakup of the Soviet Union that has, strangely, become extraordinarily important for every manned space program except China’s.
奇怪的是，对于全世界除中国以外的任何一个载人航天项目来说，正是这个苏联解体后的废弃之地突然变得意义极其重大起来。
NASA last month extended the contract for astronaut launchings for a year, until mid-2017, for an additional $424 million. For now, every American astronaut blasts off from this town, the stand-in for Cape Canaveral during a gap in funding for manned missions in the United States.
上个月，美国航空航天局（NASA）将载人飞船发射合同延长了一年，新合同价值4.24亿美元，到2017年年中。眼下，每名美国宇航员都从这里升空。由于美国载人航天项目资金出现缺口，这座城镇就成了卡纳维尔角（美国航空海岸，位于弗洛里达州——译注）的临时替代。
Because of this dependency, NASA now requires all its astronauts in training to achieve proficiency in Russian before graduating to the astronaut corps.
由于这种依赖性，现在NASA要求它名下所有试训宇航员在毕业加入正式宇航员队伍前都要熟练掌握俄语。
The space agencies of the European Union, Japan and Canada also launch from here on Russian rockets, under an agreement with NASA to repurchase about half of the six seats NASA buys annually from the Russians.
欧盟、日本和加拿大的航天机构同样在这里用俄罗斯的火箭进行发射。根据和NASA签订的协议，NASA每年从俄方购买6个发射位置，其中约一半转售给它们。
From all this, Baikonur may sound like a prosperous hub of space activity. But the state of affairs is only temporary — every nation including Russia, which is building a replacement launchpad on its own territory in the Far East, called Vostochny, views this state of affairs as temporary. As a result, the city of Baikonur has been ignored, and it is falling apart.
所有这些使拜科努尔听起来像是一个繁荣的宇航活动枢纽地。但目前的情况只是暂时性的，所有国家都这么认为，包括俄罗斯。俄罗斯正在位于远东的本国领土修建新的发射台来代替这里，名字叫“东方港”。因此，拜科努尔这座城镇被忽视了，它正在陷入崩溃。
“Russia will not be able to roll up the roads and take them away when it leaves,” Ms. Khodakovskaya said.
Khodakovskaya说：“俄罗斯方面撤离的时候是没办法把路卷起来带走的。”
Social problems typical of Central Asia today, like abuse of heroin smuggled from Afghanistan, labor migration and growing Islamic fundamentalism, are creeping into the city. A few years back, the police arrested men in Tura-Tam, a Kazakh village just outside Baikonur’s guarded fence, for distributing leaflets for Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a fundamentalist Islamic group.
今日中亚地区独有的问题正在悄然侵袭这座城镇，比如滥用从阿富汗走私进来的海洛因、劳动力流失以及愈演愈烈的伊斯兰原教旨主义。几年前，警方在哈萨克斯坦的Tura-Tam村逮捕了一名男子，罪名是分发伊斯兰原教旨团体“伊扎布特”的传单。这个村子就在拜科努尔的警戒圈外围。
The town is a low boil of ethnic tension, too, as Russians hold nearly all the high-paying space jobs. In 2011, young Kazakh men ran in a mass down a central street yelling, “The head is a dog,” a reference to the Russian mayor.
所有和航空相关的高收入工作几乎都由俄罗斯人把持，因此这座城镇的民族紧张情绪也是一触即发。2011年，一大群哈萨克斯坦年轻人在一条中央道路边跑边喊：“领导是条狗。”他们指的是俄罗斯籍的市长。
At the outdoor market, behind heaps of apricots and tomatoes, traders flash gold-toothed smiles and hawk Central Asian pottery glazed with crudely drawn rockets, or the smiling face of Yuri Gagarin in a helmet. Flies sampled the savory pies of mutton and pumpkin on display.
在露天市场，商贩在一摊摊杏仁和西红柿后亮出金牙，笑着叫卖画有粗劣火箭的中亚瓷器，以及印着尤里·加加林笑脸的头盔。摊位上还陈列着美味的羊肉南瓜饼，苍蝇在上面大快朵颐。
Even President Vladimir V. Putin, in a speech on Cosmonaut Day on April 12, referred to Baikonur as “physically aged.”
就连弗拉基米尔·V·普金总统也在4月12日“宇航员日”当天的一次讲话中将拜科努尔形容为“廉颇老矣”。
“These people are putting up rockets, but the town itself is like a third-world country,” said Jene Ragan, a software engineer from Bethesda, Md., who came as a tourist to watch a liftoff in May, swatting at flying ants out on the steppe while watching the rollout of a rocket.
5月份，一位马里兰州贝赛斯达的软件工程师杰内·雷根以游客身份到这里参观火箭发射。他一边看着火箭展示一边挥手赶走草原上的飞蚁，说：“这些人在造火箭，不过这个城镇本身就像个第三世界国家。”
Alarmed at the state of Baikonur, the head of Kazakhstan’s space agency, Talgat Musabayev, in December suggested canceling the rental agreement with Russia; Kazakhstan charges Russia $115 million a year for the town. “The agreement has run its course,” Mr. Musabayev said.
拜科努尔的状况引起了哈萨克斯坦航空局局长塔尔加特·穆萨巴耶夫的警觉，他在12月份建议取消和俄罗斯签订的租赁协议；哈萨克斯坦向俄罗斯一年收取收取1.15亿美元租金。穆萨巴耶夫说：“这份协议已经完成了它的使命。”
The Kazakhs bristle at Russia’s efforts to keep Kazakh squatters out of abandoned buildings, which are formally Kazakh property, noting the housing shortage in the region. They complain of debris falling on their territory from jettisoned rocket stages.
俄方正在将占据废弃大楼的哈萨克人赶出去，哈萨克人对此怨气不小，因为这些楼之前是他们的财产。他们强调在这个地区住房很紧张，还抱怨废弃火箭部件的残骸落到了自己的土地上。
In response, the Russians threatened to simply pull out entirely in 2018 when Vostochny is ready for manned launchings, Izvestia reported.
据《消息报》报道，俄方对此的回应是威胁在2018年“东方港”建成后彻底从拜科努尔撤离。
