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Space odyssey dreams live on

Arthur C. Clarke, the prophet of the space age, is no more. His magical prose transported readers across the globe on epic voyages to worlds far way and to environments difficult to conquer. Long before the Sputnik was launched, his writing made human spaceflight appear necessary and inevitable. What gave his books their special quality, their appeal to specialists and lay people alike, was the way he crafted dreams on foundations of high-quality science. In his novel Glide Path, Clarke obliquely acknowledges how his years in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, when he worked on radars with an American team led by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis W. Alvarez, led him to study science seriously. His ability to combine sound science with visionary thinking resulted in a now-famous paper published in 1945: it proposed that spacecraft orbiting the earth at a distance of about 36,000 km above the equator would appear to be stationary from the ground and could therefore serve as space-based relays for radio signals. Today, this geostationary orbit, which has been named the Clarke Orbit by the International Astronomical Union, is crowded with the communication satellites of many countries. Clarke was a strong supporter of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s pioneering effort to reach TV programmes to remote villages via satellite, the ‘Satellite Instructional Television Experiment’ (SITE) of the mid-1970s ; he hailed it as the “greatest communication experiment in history.”

His books propose that it is manifest human destiny, the destiny of any advanced civilisation, to conquer space. In the classic science-fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, on which film-maker Stanley Kubrick and he worked together, a team of astronauts is sent to look for the advanced beings who left a crystalline pyramid on the Moon at a time when early humans were just emerging. Much to Clarke’s disappointment, the success of the Apollo programme of putting men on the Moon did not lead to further manned exploration of the solar system. He was nevertheless confident that human space travel and colonisation of other celestial bodies would take place. “An age may come,” he wrote, “when Project Apollo is the only thing by which most men remember the United States — or even the world of their ancestors, the distant planet Earth.” His words may yet come true: the International Space Station is progressing rapidly; the U.S. is thinking of Moon bases and then going on to Mars; Russia and China have ambitious plans for manned exploration; and India, which is likely to launch its own manned space programme, may well follow suit. Arthur Clarke’s dreams thus live on.

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