Prelude to Space

To my friends in the
British Interplanetary Society—
who, by sharing this dream, helped
to make it come true.

Post-Apollo Preface

Part One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Part Two

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Part Three

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Epilogue

On July 20, 1969, all the countless science-fiction stories of the first landing on
the Moon became frozen in time, like flies in amber. We can look back on them now
with a new perspective, and indeed with a new interest—for we know how it was really
done, and can judge the accuracy of the predictions.

Now—contrary to a general belief—prediction is
not
the main purpose of science-fiction writers; few, if any, have ever claimed “this
is how it will be.” Most of them are concerned with the play of ideas, and the exploration
of novel concepts in science and discovery. “What if…?” is the thought underlying
all writing in this field. What if a man could become invisible? What if we could
travel into the future? What if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe?
These are the initial grains around which the writer secretes his modest pearl. No
one is more surprised than he is, if it turns out that he has indeed forecast the
pattern of future events.

Yet it must be admitted that the stories of space travel form an exception to this
general rule. Although the earliest works, such as Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyages to
the Moon and the Sun, were pure fantasy, most of the tales written in the past hundred
years were based as far as possible upon accurate science and foreseeable technology.
Their writers did believe that they were predicting the future, at least in general
terms. More than that, the pioneers of astronautics used fiction in a deliberate attempt
to spread their ideas to the general public. Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and von Braun all
wrote space fiction at one time or another. In so doing, they were not merely predicting
the future, they were creating it.

I must confess that I had similar propagandists ideas in mind when planning this book.
It was written in July, 1947, during my summer vacation as a student at King’s College,
London. The actual composition took exactly twenty days, a record I have never since
approached. This speed was largely due to the fact that I had been making notes on
the book for more than a year; it was already well organized in my head before I set
pen to paper. (“Pen” is correct; the original manuscript was handwritten in a series
of school exercise books which were a relic of my Royal Air Force days).

In the twenty-two years between the writing of this book and the actual landing on
the Moon, our world has changed almost beyond recognition. The following pages may
serve as a useful reminder of the way in which the public attitude toward space travel
has also been transformed, particularly in the United States. In 1947, it seemed quite
reasonable to base an Interplanetary Project in London; as one of my English characters
remarks, “You Americans have always been a bit conservative about space flight, and
didn’t take it seriously until several years after us.” That statement was still true
a decade after I had finished the book—when Sputnik I was launched in October, 1957.
It is now very hard to realize that right into the late 1950s many American engineers
in the rocket field itself
pooh-poohed the idea of space flight. With a few notable exceptions, the banner of
astronautics was borne by Europeans—or former Europeans like Willy Ley, who, alas,
died only a few days before Apollo 11 vindicated his dreams of more than forty years.

The modest amounts of money with which I assumed space research could be conducted
will now cause some rueful amusement. No one could have imagined, in 1947, that within
twenty years not merely millions, but
billions
, of dollars would be budgeted annually for space flight and that a lunar landing
would be a primary objective of the two most powerful nations on Earth. Back in the
1940s it seemed most unlikely that governments would put any money into space before
private enterprise had shown the way.

I can claim a few successes as a minor prophet. I placed the first lunar impact in
1959, and Luna II hit the Mare Imbrium at 21:01 GMT on September 13, 1959. I was watching
hopefully through my Questar telescope in Columbo as the Moon sank into the Indian
Ocean, but saw nothing.

Prelude to Space
was written just two years after my 1945 paper on synchronous communications satellites
and was, therefore, the first work of fiction in which the idea of “comsats” was advocated.
I have reason to believe that it had some influence on the men who turned this dream
into reality.

The book appeared originally as a paperback (Galaxy Novel No. 3, February 1951) and
was thus my first novel to achieve independent publication. The first hard-cover edition
appeared in June 1953 (Gnome Press), together with a paperback edition by Ballantine
Books. Another publisher, now deservedly extinct, later issued two editions with a
change of title, despite my express orders. (For the record, these titles, were
Master of Space
and
The Space Dreamers
.) I am now happy to see the return of the Ballantine imprint; the current hard-cover
edition is published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

One prediction which gives me much pleasure is that contained in the sentence “Oberth—now
an old man of eighty-four—had started the chain reaction which was to lead in his
own lifetime to the crossing of space.” A reviewer who discussed Oberth’s proposals
in a leading scientific journal of the 1930s once scoffingly conceded that they might
be realized “before the human race became extinct.” I am happy to report that Herman
Oberth, as a not-so-old man of seventy-five, watched Apollo 11 being launched from
Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969.

While writing this novel, I had the great advantage of access to calculations which
my colleagues A.V. Cleaver and L.R. Shepherd (later manager of the Rolls-Royce Rocket
Division, and chief executive of the “Dragon” High Temperature Reactor Project) were
making on the subject of nuclear rocket propulsion. These were published in their
classic paper “The Atomic Rocket,” in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society
for September 1948–March 1949, which pioneered this field of studies.

Fifteen years later, atomic rockets of the type they proposed were successfully ground-tested
by the A.E.C., and although “Project Rover” was canceled before flights were achieved,
some form of nuclear propulsion will be available when we are ready to go to Mars.

In this story I assumed the use of orbital rendezvous techniques, and particularly
of reusable boosters which could be flown over and over again. My imagination failed
to conceive of multi-million-dollar vehicles like the lunar module and the Saturn-V
launcher, which would be discarded after a single mission. But the future of space
flight lies with such concepts as those described here; politics, and not economics,
has shaped our present systems, and history will soon pass them by. The Space Shuttle
will, hopefully, be the first
practical
space transportation vehicle of the 1980s; like my “Beta,” it will be winged and
fully reusable, capable of making scores of flights.

My little jibe at the late Dr. C.S. Lewis subsequently resulted in an amicable correspondence
and a meeting at Oxford’s famed Eastgate pub, where Val Cleaver and I tried to demonstrate
to Dr. Lewis (and his companion, Professor J.R.R. Tolkien) that all would-be astronauts
were not like the malevolent Weston in
Out of the Silent Planet
. Lewis cheerfully compromised with the observation that though we were probably very
wicked people, the world would be an awfully dull place if everyone was good.

Although I am well aware that propaganda is the enemy of art, I am still proud of
the fact that this novel’s main theme is the absurdity of exporting national rivalries
beyond the atmosphere. In 1947, I summed up this concept in the phrase, “We will take
no frontiers into space.” Exactly twenty years later, the United Nations Space Treaty
prohibited territorial claims on any celestial bodies.

That treaty was signed just in time. Only two years later, Neil Armstrong and Edwin
Aldrin unveiled the plaque which reads:

Yet when, in 1947, I set this novel exactly thirty years in the future, I did not
really
believe that a lunar landing would be achieved even by that distant date; I was optimistically
whistling in the dark—and perhaps trying to give myself a sixtieth birthday present.
I would never have dared to imagine that by 1977 a dozen men would have walked on
the Moon, and twenty-seven would have orbited it. Still less could I have imagined
that the first nation to reach the Moon would so swiftly abandon it again….

In one sense, the Apollo Project was indeed a Prelude to Space. Now there will be
a short interlude; and sometime in the 1980s, the real story will begin.

The hiatus does not disappoint me, for I have already seen achievements beyond my
wildest dreams. I have shaken the hands of the first man to orbit the earth, the first
man to step out into space, and the first to walk upon the Moon.

In the long perspectives of history, it will not matter that two of them were Russian
and one was American.

Arthur C. Clarke,
September 1975

For five miles straight as an arrow, the gleaming metal track lay along the face of
the desert. It pointed to the northwest across the dead heart of the continent and
to the ocean beyond. Over this land, once the home of the aborigines, many strange
shapes had risen, roaring, in the last generation. The greatest and strangest of them
all lay at the head of the launching track along which it was to hurtle into the sky
.

A little town had grown out of the desert in this valley between the low hills. It
was a town built for one purpose—a purpose which was embodied in the fuel-storage
tanks and the power station at the end of the five-mile-long track. Here had gathered
scientists and engineers from all the countries of the world. And here the “Prometheus,”
first of all spaceships, had been assembled in the past three years
.

The Prometheus of legend had brought fire from heaven down to earth. The Prometheus
of the twentieth century was to take atomic fire back into the home of the Gods, and
to prove that Man, by his own exertions, had broken free at last from the chains that
held him to his world for a million years
.

No one seemed to know who had given the spaceship its name. It was, in actuality,
not a single ship at all but really consisted of two separate machines. With notable
lack of enterprise, the designers had christened the two components “Alpha” and “Beta.”
Only the upper component, “Alpha,” was a pure rocket. “Beta,” to give it its full
name, was a “hypersonic athodyd.” Most people usually called it an atomic ramjet,
which was both simpler and more expressive
.

It was a long way from the flying bombs of the Second World War to the two-hundred-ton
“Beta,” skimming the top of the atmosphere at thousands of miles an hour. Yet both
operated on the same principle—the use of forward speed to provide compression for
the jet. The main difference lay in the fuel. V.1 had burned gasoline; “Beta” burned
plutonium, and her range was virtually unlimited. As long as her air-scoops could
collect and compress the tenuous gas of the upper atmosphere, the white-hot furnace
of the atomic pile would blast it out of the jets. Only when at last the air was too
thin for power or support need she inject into the pile the methane from her fuel
tanks and thus become a pure rocket
.