Today, Arthur Clarke is remembered as a writer of science fiction and the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Clarke was also a serious futurist and one of the first writers to suggest that rockets could be used for communication, not just military purposes.
In the 1962 essay reprinted below, Clarke made extraordinary predictions about the coming communications revolution.
During World War II Clarke had served in the Royal Air Force as a physicist working on early-warning radar defense. In 1945 he wrote a seminal essay in Wireless World pointing out that a German rocket could get into orbit around the earth with a little more fuel (and no heavy bomb). "It will be possible in a few more years to build radio-controlled rockets which can be steered into orbits beyond the limits of the atmosphere and left to broadcast scientific information back to the earth." Subsequently, he wrote a number of books on the subject including Interplanetary Flight(1950) and The Exploration of Space (1951).
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