Heads Up - BBC Radio 4 - 5th Oct

Sixty years ago this month, in October 1945, the magazine Wireless World
published an article by a relatively unknown writer and rocket enthusiast.
Its title was: "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World Wide
Radio Coverage?" Today, the author's name is known throughout the world. He
is the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, and his prediction of
satellite communications has come true in ways even he never imagined. To
mark the anniversary, Heather Couper travels to Arthur C Clarke's home in Sri
Lanka to hear his own story.

Arthur C. Clarke: The Science and the Fiction

Wednesday 5th October

11.00am BBC Radio 4

Today it is sometimes still referred to as the Clarke Orbit. It's that orbit
in space, 36,000 Km above the equator, where a satellite takes exactly 24
hours to orbit the Earth. So the satellite orbits at the same rate as the
planet itself spins, seeming to hover over the same place on the equator.
Thus it makes possible radio communications with fixed receivers on the
ground such as the satellite TV dishes springing up on millions of homes. Yet
Clarke made his prediction before TV became widespread, before the invention
of the transistor and long before the first space rocket.

Clarke, then in his twenties and still without a science degree, spent the
second World War working on the use of radar. He'd become an early member of
the British Interplanetary Society, a group of enthusiasts who had realised
the potential of space flight long before rockets first left the atmosphere.
He says: "Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what's over
the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without
information. Without information, you'd go crazy".

In 1945 Clarke envisaged his radio relay rockets being built from the
technology of the day - vacuum tubes or 'valves'. They are big, power-hungry
and unreliable. So Clarke imagined his satellites as vast orbiting space
stations, manned by teams of engineers performing maintenance and regularly
supplied by rocket flights from Earth. The miniaturisation that became
possible with the transistor, he says, took him by surprise.

By the 1950s, Clarke's curiosity had driven him beyond science fact and into
fiction; the genre that brought him fame with books and films such as 2001, A
Space Odyssey. But he has always been careful to keep the science in his
fiction as an accurate if imaginative extension of the science we already
know. It was also in the 1950s that he discovered the pleasures of scuba
diving. Realising that he might not get to fly in space himself, he found
diving to be the next best thing - a chance to explore a new and wonderful
world in an approximation to weightlessness. So it was for the coral reefs
and diving that he moved to Sri Lanka where he still lives, though
contracting polio in 1962 has limited his diving. It is in Sri Lanka that he
set another of his novels, The Fountains of Paradise, based around the
construction of a space elevator as a means for reaching his 'Clarke Orbit'
without rockets. When he wrote it, he says, it seemed fantasy, but soon
afterwards, the discovery of the form of carbon known as buckminsterfullerene
made possible, at least in theory, the super-strong materials needed.

In this programme, Heather Couper hears Arthur's own story and meets with
family, fans and fiction writers he has influenced. His younger brother Fred
remembers their childhood on a Somerset farm: Arthur was building telescopes
and launching home-made rockets. Did the other children join in their
brother's activities? "No!", recalls Fred with a shudder. "We kept away from
the dangerous blighter".

Heather Couper is a well-known writer and broadcaster on astronomy and space.
She has also been Gresham Professor of Astronomy and sits on the Millennium
Commission.

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Best wishes,
Liz Hyder

Elizabeth Hyder/Alison Potts
Publicist (jobshare) - BBC Radio 4
Room 122, Henry Wood House
London W1B 3DF
Tel: 020 7765 3210
www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice
www.bbc.co.uk/radio4
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