Star Points for April, 2008; by Curtis Roelle Clarke: The Passing of a Visionary Mind Last month's passing of Sir Arthur Charles Clarke marked the loss of one of the most prolific writers of science fiction and non- fiction since the end of World War II. At the time of his death Clarke was 90 years old and living in Sri Lanka, his home since 1956. He is best known for his collaboration with movie director Stanley Kubrick in the classic 1968 MGM motion picture "2001: A Space Odyssey." Although Clarke authored a 1968 novel by the same name the movie was based on a short story entitled "The Sentinel" which was first published in 1951 as part of a collection of stories entitled "The Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader." Unlike the rectangular (with dimensions 1x4x9) alien monolith featured in the movie, the sentinel was a sleek and shiny small pyramid "twice as high as a man" planted on the moon's Mare Crisium by an ancient space faring civilization. When its force field was finally breached following its discovery the monolith ceased transmitting and thus its creators, whoever they were and with whatever intentions they had in leaving it, were automatically notified that contact had been made. "[W]e have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but wait," wrote Clarke. The Space Odyssey novel published 17 years later was "based on the screenplay" of the film instead of the other way around. However, unlike the movie, which concluded at the planet Jupiter, the novel ended at Saturn. Yet when Clarke published the 1982 sequel "2010: Odyssey Two" the author mysteriously continues where the movie left off back at Jupiter and never bothered in explaining the obvious disconnect between the two novels! It was only after discovering his science fiction that I began to appreciate the extraordinary vision in Clarke's non-fiction. For example, in a fascinating epilog he wrote for the 1970 book "First Men on the Moon" about the Apollo 11 moon journey, Clarke appears to forecast the impact of the internet and world wide web more than a quarter century before either became commonplace: "[E]very home could have a display console on whose screen could be flashed instantly any picture or text stored in any library on earth. 'Orbital Newspapers,' updated every hour, could be available on a global basis...The telephone transformed business and social life, at the beginning of this century; the forthcoming home console will have an even greater impact, because it will allow men to meet effectively face to face, to exchange any type of information, to converse with their computers and consult information banks - without ever leaving home, unless they wish to do so." Clarke was nominated for the Nobel prize for predicting the value of launching satellites into "geostationary" orbits where they seem to hang motionless in the sky 22,240 statute miles (35,786 km) above a point on the equator as the earth revolves beneath. The advantage of placing a satellite there is that an earth-based antenna pointed toward it can track it while pointing in a fixed direction. It is not necessary for the antenna to move at all to follow the satellite in such a "Clarke orbit" as they are sometimes known. Another book in my Clarke collection is "The Exploration of Space" (1951). In Figure 18 Clarke depicts a system of three radio relay satellites in geostationary orbit. This configuration is similar to NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). The first TDRS was launched more than 30 years after the book in 1983. TDRSS is the cornerstone of America's space communications used for supporting satellite missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and manned missions including the space shuttle and the international space station (ISS). Always forward looking, Clarke concluded "The Exploration of Space" with a summary of the 20th century as seen through the lens of time by a historian 1,000 years in the future: "With the landing of the first spaceship on Mars and Venus, the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began."