Clarke sketched geostationary relays years before Sputnik
Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) did not invent the geostationary orbit, but in 1945 he argued that satellites parked there would make ideal radio relays. The orbit 36,000 kilometres above the equator now officially bears his name, and his 1951 book helped persuade Kennedy that the Moon was reachable.
Born in Minehead, Somerset, and raised on a farm near Bishops Lydeard, Clarke stargazed, collected fossils after finding dinosaur cigarette cards, and credited a 1928 issue of Amazing Stories and Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men with turning him to science fiction. As a teenager he wrote an astronautics column for the journal Urania and in 1934 joined the British Interplanetary Society, which he later chaired twice. In London flat-share days, fellow writers nicknamed him Ego.
From 1941 to 1946 he served in the RAF as a radar specialist, mostly on ground-controlled approach radar, which saw little wartime use but proved vital to the 1948–49 Berlin Airlift; his novel Glide Path drew on it. Afterwards he took a first-class degree in mathematics and physics at King’s College London. His relay idea circulated among Society members in 1945 and appeared in Wireless World that October, and the International Astronomical Union now calls the orbit the Clarke Orbit. Wernher von Braun used The Exploration of Space to convince President Kennedy a Moon landing was possible.
He co-wrote the screenplay of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), commentated on the Apollo 11 landing for CBS, and with Heinlein and Asimov formed science fiction’s Big Three. A record three-book deal produced Rendezvous with Rama in 1973, which swept the genre’s awards. UNESCO gave him the Kalinga Prize in 1961.
In 1956 he moved to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, for its diving, found the submerged ruins of the original Koneswaram Temple at Trincomalee, and stayed for life. Polio contracted in 1962 returned as post-polio syndrome in 1988, leaving him mostly in a wheelchair. His knighthood, awarded in 1998, was conferred in Colombo in 2000 after a tabloid accusation that Sri Lankan police found baseless.
Source: Arthur C. Clarke
