Songs of distant satellites
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in People, Futures, Wireless on
Yesterday Sir Arthur C. Clarke died, on the far side of the world, a long way from the Somerset coast where he first dreamed of the stars.
We may think of him as the man behind the books and the films, as the bone spinning in the air shifts into a spaceship orbiting the earth, but it’s his ideas that have help shape our modern world - both from the engineers he inspired by his stories, and from his own scientific writings and papers.
It’s not many people who have a whole ring around the world named after them. The Clarke Orbit has become shorthand for geostationary orbit, home of the myriad communication satellites that bind our world together. It was his paper in Wireless World, back in 1945, that first suggested a network of satellites that could cover the world from an orbit that kept pace with the spinning globe below. He probably didn’t imagine that there’d be so many, or that there’d be so much traffic passing through them.
It’s these satellites that started the development of the globe spanning network we’ve come to know as the Internet, revolutionising the world. Satellite phones bring the most isolated village to your door, while TV images show us the faces our neighbours. Without communication satellites there’d have been no LiveAid - at least until after film and video of famine had spent weeks being trekked out of isolated refugee camps. The world has become a smaller place, but it’s also become a closer one.
Satellites aren’t Clarke’s only contribution to the world. During the Second World War he was one of the team of engineers that developed radio-beam controlled landing techniques. If you’ve been on an airliner landing at night - or in fog - you’ve benefited from his work (which he wrote about in his book Glide Path). He also was one of the first to suggest that satellites could be used to deliver information that could be used to improve weather forecasts, spotting weather hundreds of miles out to sea.
Clarke was an early user of email, and he published a book in 1984 of his email collaboration with Peter Hyams on the film of 2010, a fascinating document of the early days of a technology we now take for granted. Email and handhelds were a recurring feature of his novels (especially later works like Imperial Earth), and he regularly explored the theme of a highly connected communicating society - expressing the hope that it would finally bring down the barriers between people and nations.
Engineers were often the heroes of his stories, along with auditors and administrators. His was fiction for the makers and the doers, for the people who took the visions of his stories and started to build a better future. While SpaceShip One and the X-Prize owe a lot to US science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, it’s Clarke who inspired work on space elevators and on solar sails - efforts he hoped would be his lasting gift to the world.
I’m one of those who were inspired by his books. I started young, with his early works (which were what we’d now label Young Adult) and with his short fiction. I wrote my degree dissertation on communication satellites, and spent the first few years of my life working as an electronics engineer - first on radar systems, and then on the electromagnetic launch technologies he explored in stories like Earthlight. I was privileged to meet him once, in 1992 on what was one of his last visits to the UK, in his home town of Minehead.
Vale Sir Arthur.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Beth Fehlbaum - March 20, 2008 on 12:13 pm
Thank you for a fitting tribute to a pioneer.
Beth Fehlbaum
Comment by Nick Kotarski - March 28, 2008 on 1:41 am
Very nice tribute but a few mistakes I’m afraid.
You imply that Arthur C. Clarke invented geostationary satellites but it was in fact Herman Potočnik who first wrote about them in his 1928 book Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums - der Raketen-Motor. This book was only translated into English in 1999. Arthur C. Clarke was the first person to propose the idea of using geostationary orbit for communications satellites.
I think that saying that “It’s these satellites that started the development of the globe spanning network we’ve come to know as the Internet, revolutionising the world.” is a bit of a stretch. Firstly the ARPANET had been developing for four years before the first links outside of the continental USA. Secondly the delay introduced by the round trip was a problem. Geostationary satellites are much more suited to broadcast i.e. one way communication than two way communication. Apparently in 2006, 99 percent of the world’s long-distance voice and data traffic is carried over optical-fibre cables.
Arthur C Clarke wrote one of the best closing lines in an SF book that I have ever read in his 1972 novel Rendezvous with Rama.
And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one how he had woken from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes.
Nick Kotarski
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