The Best Is Yet to Come

By Arthur C. Clarke

No science writer in modern times has done more to capture the excitement and significance of space exploration than British-born Arthur C. Clarke. Author of more than 40 works of fiction and non-fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous with Rama), the prolific futurist has also had the pleasure of seeing some of his imaginative ideas come true, including the establishment of worldwide communications satellites, which he forecast in 1945. Clarke, who is chancellor at the University of Sri Lanka at Moratuwa, last appeared in the pages of TIME a decade ago, when man was about to take his first steps on the moon. Here he assesses the future:

When Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the Sea of Tranquility, the science-fiction writers had already been there for 2,000 years. But history is always more imaginative than any prophet. No one had ever dreamed that the first chapter of lunar exploration would end after only a dozen men had walked upon the moon.

Yet it was not the first time that ambition had outrun technology. In the Antarctic summer of 1911-12, ten men reached the South Pole, and five returned. They used only the most primitive of tools and energy sources--snowshoes, dog sleds, their own muscles. Once the pole had been attained, it was abandoned for nearly half a century. And then, in the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year, men came back with all the resources of modern technology. Aircraft and snow cats carried the new explorers swiftly and safely over the frozen hell where Robert Falcon Scott perished with his companions. For 20 years now, summer and winter, men and women have been living at the South Pole.

So it will be with the moon. When we go there again, it will be in vehicles that will make the Saturn 5--for all it's staggering complexity and its 150 million horsepower--look like a clumsy, inefficient dinosaur of the early space age. And this time, we will stay.

In 1969 the giant multistage rocket, discarded piecemeal after a single mission, was the only way of doing the job. That the job should be done was a political decision, made by a handful of men. As William Sims Bainbridge pointed out in his 1976 book The Spaceflight Revolution; a Sociological Study, space travel is a technological mutation that should not really have arrived until the 21st century. But thanks to the ambition and genius of Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev, and their influence upon individuals as disparate as Kennedy and Khrushchev, the moon--like the South Pole--was reached half a century ahead of time.

We have bequeathed the solar system to our children, not our great-grandchildren, and they will be duly thankful. At the very least, this gift will enable them to look back on such transient crises as energy and material shortages with amused incredulity.

For the resources of the universe that is now opening up are, by all human standards, infinite. There are no limits to growth among the stars. Unfortunately, there is a tragic mismatch between our present needs and our capabilities. The conquest of space will not arrive soon enough to save millions from leading starved and stunted lives.

Thus it is all the more urgent that we exploit to the utmost the marvelous tools that space technology has already given us. Even now, few Americans realize that the skills, materials and instruments their engineers devised on the road to the moon have paid for themselves many times over, both in hard cash and in human welfare.

Never again will hurricanes smite without warning, after building up their strength unnoticed in the open sea. Every storm that moves upon the face of the globe is now watched by meteorological satellites, to which thousands already owe their lives.

Thanks to communications satellites, the "global village" is no longer a figure of speech. Yet the "comsat" revolution has barely begun. In a few decades it will have solved traffic congestion and rotting cities by making possible a world in which people can live anywhere they please, doing 90% of their business electronically, at the speed of light.

From their perches in orbit, Landsats and Seasats allow us to look at our planet with new eyes, surveying instantaneously all its agricultural, mineral and hydrological resources. And, equally important, monitoring their misuse.

The rockets that launched all these systems will soon be replaced by the space shuttle, which will reduce the cost of reaching orbit to a fraction of today's figures. Though the shuttle is only a modest first step, the story of aviation will repeat itself beyond the atmosphere. Many of you now reading these words will be able to buy a ticket to the moon at a price equivalent to a round-the-world jet flight today.

But the moon is only the offshore island of earth. We now know, thanks to our robot explorers, that the other children of the sun are more fantastic places than we had ever dreamed. The Voyager reconnaissance of Jupiter's giant moons has revealed what is virtually a whole new solar system of baffling complexity.

Man has always found a use for new lands, however hostile. A century before Apollo, Secretary of State William Seward was being castigated for wasting $7.2 million to buy a worthless, frozen wilderness. Today, most Americans would consider Alaska quite a bargain, at 2-c- an acre.

We will not have to buy the planets from anyone. The main expense will be getting to them. And now there has appeared on the horizon an idea that may ultimately make space transport so cheap that if a million people a day want to commute to the moon, they can do so.

It is nothing less (don't laugh) than a space elevator. First conceived by a Leningrad engineer, Yuri Artsutanov in 1960, it was reinvented by a group of American scientists a decade later. There is no doubt that in theory at least it would work.

Today's comsats demonstrate how an object can remain poised over a fixed spot on the equator by matching its speed to the turning earth, 22,320 miles below. Now imagine a cable, linking the satellite to the ground. Payloads could be hoisted up it by purely mechanical means, reaching orbit without any use of rocket power. The cost of operations could be reduced to a tiny fraction of today's values.

We could not build such a cable today. But materials that could do the job have been produced, though so far only in microscopic quantities--as were the first samples of penicillin, and of plutonium. When anything is needed badly enough, man finds ways of making it.

Ten years ago, it was my privilege to write the epilogue to Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins' own account of their mission, First on the Moon. I would like to repeat now the closing words:'It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars."

-- Arthur C. Clarke

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