Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)
There are so few gentle geniuses left. One more has passed: a man who could not only dream magnificent new things could come about, but who had the competence to actually make his dreams reality.
When most people I know think of Arthur C. Clarke, they think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and almost immediately, they conjure images and sounds of HAL the computer, spaceships landing in overlit, white parlor rooms, dancing orangutans, Johann Strauss music intertwined with Richard Strauss music, and innocent young fetuses hanging in space. That's generally when I say they're confusing Clarke for Stanley Kubrick.
A much more practically minded, ironically "down-to-earth" free thinker on the topic of exploring the cosmos, passed yesterday after a long bout with polio -- strangely not at all like the metaphorical, allegorical man the movie most associated with him would have you believe Arthur C. Clarke was. I was introduced to Clarke in my youth as someone who had brought about, from the envisioning stage to the engineering stage, one of humanity's greatest achievements: the global satellite telecommunications system.
In 1951, over six years before the Soviets would try it themselves, Clarke -- then working as an assistant editor for the house organ publication of the forerunner of the IEEE, and inspired by the response to a 1950 treatise on interplanetary travel he's published there -- wrote the simple book that served as the blueprint for the world's space program: The Exploration of Space. There, he connected the dots between the multi-stage rockets the US had acquired from having captured Werner von Braun's V-2 team, and the mechanism necessary to take men to the moon for the first time.
It would have a massive booster for escaping the Earth's field of gravity, but mostly in order to carry into orbit the fuel load required to blast the landing craft to the moon. That craft would be a surprisingly non-aerodynamic structure designed to help brake its descent.
It is rather natural to imagine that a rocket descending tail first in this manner would be a highly unstable affair and liable to "topple." But it must be remembered that, as far as the automatic controls are concerned, there is no fundamental difference between a 1-g vertical landing and 1-g vertical take-off. If the gyroscopes and steering devices can deal with the one case -- as they already do in the V.2 rocket -- they can deal just as well with the other.
It was not exactly a snapshot of Apollo. But for many scientists and laypersons, it was their first exposure to the concept of "G-force" -- a term some say Clarke may have coined, though he'd deny it -- as the resistance we experience whenever we attain such a velocity that we broach the idea of leaving the ground behind. And it was the first time anyone had actually, realistically drawn a picture of a lunar voyage, using the "figure-8" diagram that became affixed in our minds through the 1960s and early '70s, as a real-world map rather than a fantasy drawing.
The Exploration of Space was noteworthy for one other very important contribution: It was the very first published treatise anywhere on the idea that an orbital satellite could achieve a velocity that placed it at geo-station with the Earth below: that a device could be fixed in orbit. That led Clarke to conclude immediately that it could be used as a permanent, worldwide communications relay.
The global telecommunications network as it exists today was germinated, quite literally, in the mind of Arthur C. Clarke.
The obvious orbit for this purpose would be the twenty-four-hour one, 22,000 miles above the Equator. Any point on the Earth's surface would then have at least one station permanently visible in the sky -- and moreover, fixed in the sky, unlike those wayward bodies the Sun, Moon and stars.
Perhaps the most exciting prospect raised by the relay chain is that it would make a world-wide system of television practicable. It is, indeed, almost impossible to imagine any other way in which this could be done, since the curve of the Earth limits the range of all surface transmitters, no matter how powerful, to less than a hundred miles. Three stations in space, linked to each other by microwave beams, could provide a television service over the whole planet for no more power than one of today's larger transmitters.
...High-frequency waves...would make possible an almost unlimited number of interference-free communication channels, and would provide navigation and air safety services beyond anything in prospect today. A world society must possess a fast and reliable system of communications. The use of radio relays in space could provide this on a scale quite impossible by any other means, and at very great economy.
Next: The view from space...