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Arthur C Clarke, satellites and democracy

By Barry York - posted Friday, 30 October 2015


In October 1945 an article titled ‘Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can rocket stations give world-wide radio coverage?’ appeared in the leading communications buffs’ technical journal, Wireless World. It was written by Arthur C Clarke, at that time a fairly unknown writer.

Today, Clarke is best known for ‘2001 – a space odyssey’, which he wrote as a book while Stanley Kubrick was making the film. But he deserves also to be remembered for the Wireless World paper.

There had been earlier speculation about the possibility of artificial satellites but Clarke’s contribution was to see the potential for global telecommunications. His thinking on this developed during the Second World War, when he was a radar specialist with the Royal Air Force. He speculated about how the technology behind Germany’s powerful V-2 rockets might be used for peaceful purposes after the war. He argued that with further development, rocket technology could be used to send satellites into space and that, if stationed at the right distance from the Earth’s centre, the satellites would be geostationary relative to the planet’s rotation and could be used to relay communications to points across the globe.

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He worked out the distance required for this at 42,000 kilometres from the centre (or 36,000 kms above sea level). Today, that distance in space is known as ‘the Clarke Orbit’.

Clarke was born in England in 1917 and died in Sri Lanka in 2008. (He migrated to Sri Lanka in 1956). He was an amazing human being: science writer, science fiction writer, physicist, mathematician, inventor, futurist and undersea diver and explorer. He was also a great optimist who saw science as a way of empowering humanity.

Clarke wrote of the geostationary satellite that ‘it would remain fixed in the sky of a whole hemisphere and unlike all other heavenly bodies would neither rise nor set’. A thing of beauty as well as function.

As is so often the case, the dividing line between science fiction and science fact was soon breached, and in 1957 the first artificial satellite was sent into orbit by the Soviet Union. I remember as a child standing in the street at night with my parents and neighbours in Melbourne hoping to gain a glimpse of the ‘Sputnik’.

In 1962, the US launched ‘Telstar’, which was the first active, direct-relay communications satellite relaying television, telephone and high-speed data communications.

Today, 70 years on, there are more than 1,300 operational satellites orbiting the Earth and the technology has advanced enormously. Yet we take them for granted.

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They have become vital to our lives: in humanitarian efforts, television, Internet access in remote areas, telephony, navigation, international business and finance, meteorology, environmental and climate monitoring, safety, land stewardship, economic development in poor countries and space science.

And they are also vital to democracy and democratic aspiration.

Satellites and democracy

Satellite television signals can go directly to our homes and we can see events as they happen on the other side of the world. During 2011, I used to get up at 4.30 each morning to watch the live relays from Tahrir Square showing Egypt’s unfolding democratic revolution. Individuals in the crowds were interviewed randomly by reporters and I could see and hear their explanations for the risks they were taking, and their new-found hope in the absence of fear.

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This article was first published by the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, Canberra.



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About the Author

Barry York is an historian and writer who blogs at C21st Left. He rejects the current pseudo-left and regards himself as a leftist influenced by Marxism.

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