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Arthur C Clarke |
Heads Up - BBC Radio 4
5th Oct
Sixty years ago this month, in October 1945, the magazine Wireless World
published an article by a relatively unknown writer and rocket enthusiast.
Its title was: "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations
Give World Wide Radio Coverage?" Today, the author's name is
known throughout the world. He is the science fiction writer Arthur C
Clarke, and his prediction of satellite communications has come true in
ways even he never imagined. To mark the anniversary, Heather Couper travels
to Arthur C Clarke's home in Sri Lanka to hear his own story.
Arthur C. Clarke: The Science and the Fiction
Wednesday 5th October
11.00am BBC Radio 4
Today it is sometimes still referred to as the Clarke Orbit. It's that
orbit in space, 36,000 Km above the equator, where a satellite takes exactly
24 hours to orbit the Earth. So the satellite orbits at the same rate
as the planet itself spins, seeming to hover over the same place on the
equator.
Thus it makes possible radio communications with fixed receivers on
the ground such as the satellite TV dishes springing up on millions of
homes. Yet Clarke made his prediction before TV became widespread, before
the
invention of the transistor and long before the first space rocket.
Clarke, then in his twenties and still without a science degree, spent
the second World War working on the use of radar. He'd become an early
member of the British Interplanetary Society, a group of enthusiasts who
had
realised the potential of space flight long before rockets first left
the atmosphere. He says: "Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor.
I want to know what's over the next hill. You know, people can live longer
without food than
without information. Without information, you'd go crazy".
In 1945 Clarke envisaged his radio relay rockets being built from the
technology of the day - vacuum tubes or 'valves'. They are big, power-hungry
and unreliable. So Clarke imagined his satellites as vast orbiting space
stations, manned by teams of engineers performing maintenance and
regularly supplied by rocket flights from Earth. The miniaturisation that
became possible with the transistor, he says, took him by surprise.
By the 1950s, Clarke's curiosity had driven him beyond science fact and
into fiction; the genre that brought him fame with books and films such
as 2001, A Space Odyssey. But he has always been careful to keep the science
in
his fiction as an accurate if imaginative extension of the science we
already know. It was also in the 1950s that he discovered the pleasures
of scuba diving. Realising that he might not get to fly in space himself,
he found diving to be the next best thing - a chance to explore a new
and wonderful world in an approximation to weightlessness.
So it was for the coral reefs and diving that he moved to Sri Lanka where
he still lives, though contracting polio in 1962 has limited his diving.
It is in Sri Lanka that he set another of his novels, The Fountains of
Paradise, based around the
construction of a space elevator as a means for reaching his 'Clarke Orbit'
without rockets. When he wrote it, he says, it seemed fantasy, but soon
afterwards, the discovery of the form of carbon known as buckminsterfullerene
made possible, at least in theory, the super-strong materials needed.
In this programme, Heather Couper hears Arthur's own story and meets
with family, fans and fiction writers he has influenced. His younger brother
Fred remembers their childhood on a Somerset farm: Arthur was building
telescopes and launching home-made rockets. Did the other children join
in their brother's activities? "No!", recalls Fred with a shudder.
"We kept away from the dangerous blighter".
Heather Couper is a well-known writer and broadcaster on astronomy and
space. She has also been Gresham Professor of Astronomy and sits on the
Millennium Commission.
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