Space Elevator Journal

The Right Way to Get to Space

Sir Arthur C. Clarke Dies

The father of the space elevator has passed on with out seeing his creation built. Let's hope some of us will.

The announcement from his web site said;

"Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the epic film '2001: A Space Odyssey' and raised the idea of communications satellites in the 1940s, died Wednesday at age 90, an associate confirmed. Clarke died early Wednesday at a hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since the 1950s, said Scott Chase, the secretary of the nonprofit Arthur C. Clarke Foundation. 'He had been taken to hospital in what we had hoped was one of the slings and arrows of being 90, but in this case it was his final visit,' Chase said."

Clarke had a rich relationship with Wired Magazine which had this to say;

His writing, both fiction and nonfiction, established Clarke as a visionary. In a paper titled "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?" published in 1945 , Clarke floated the idea of using geosynchronous satellites for communications long before such technology changed our world. As a result, geostationary orbit is now sometimes known as the Clarke orbit.

That's just one of the many innovative concepts Clark is credited with unleashing. From the electrosecretary transcription machine to the space elevator, Clarke laid out his visionary ideas in more than 100 fiction and nonfiction books.

Despite his track record as a futurist, Clarke remained humble about his work when he was interviewed for a 1993 Q&A with Wired magazine.

"I've never predicted the future," Clarke said. "Or hardly ever. I extrapolate. Look, I've written six stories about the end of the Earth; they can't all be true!"

Clarke picked his book The Songs of Distant Earth as his favorite personal writing, saying, "It's got everything in it that I ever wanted to say."

I was privileged to share a publication with him in The Liftport Book