Arthur C. Clarke's last interview
IEEE Spectrum has published the last interview with the late, great Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Spectrum editor Harry Goldstein emailed me, "In January, we sent Saswato Das to Sri Lanka to interview Clarke, who was in the hospital at the time. We were planning on putting the article and the audio up tomorrow anyway. Eerie timing." From Das's Spectrum article:
I started our interview sessions with geostationary satellites—those in orbit above Earth's equator that have the remarkable property of matching the period at which Earth rotates. As a result, these satellites look stationary to someone on Earth. They are extremely useful for communications, because transmitting and receiving antennas on Earth don't have to track them. In a 1945 article, “Extra-terrestrial Relays,” published in Wireless World, Clarke proposed that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. I asked Clarke whether he'd ever suspected that these satellites would one day prove to be so valuable to telecommunications.Link
He laughed. “I'm often asked why I didn't try to patent the idea of communications satellites. My answer is always, ‘A patent is really a license to be sued.' ”
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Nice portrait of the man in his last weeks; as active and involved as his condition allowed. It's sweet that he allowed interviews.
Clarke couldn't pinpoint the exact reference that got him thinking about geostationary satellites. “One of the moons of Mars, Phobos, is always in a stationary orbit,” he mused. “That probably got me thinking.”
This isn't correct; Phobos is actually below geosynchronous (or rather Mars-synchronous) orbit.
Phobos orbits Mars faster than Mars rotates. Which from the surface would make it appear to rise in the west and set in the east, even though it's really moving in the opposite direction.
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Of course, this brings to mind a quote from Ray Bradbury that Arthur C. Clarke referenced in one of his essays, that went something along these lines:
One perfectly horrid boy came up to me at a booksigning and said, "You know in THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES where you have Phobos rising in the east?"
"Yah." I said.
"Nah." he said.
So I hit him.
Phobos still could have clued Clarke in to the idea of geosynchronous orbits. Most natural satellites take more than one "day" to orbit their planet, but Phobos takes less than a day. Thinking about that, Clarke may have then realized that it's easy to calculate the altitude needed for a satellite to take one day to orbit its planet.
However, had he obtained a patent for use of a satellite in geosynchronous orbit as a communications relay in 1945, it would have expired 17 years later, in 1962, before the first communications satellite existed.
It's a good think he didn't die in 2001 that would have been to strange.