The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [110]
The character, motivation, and actual fate of Kasyapa have been the subject of much controversy, recently fueled by the posthumously published The Story of Sigiri (Lake House, Colombo, 1972), by the Sinhalese scholar Professor Senerat Paranavitana. I am also indebted to his monumental two-volume study of the inscriptions on the Mirror Wall, Sigiri Graffiti (Oxford University Press, 1956). Some of the verses I have quoted are genuine; others I have only slightly invented.
The frescoes which are Sigiriya’s greatest glory have been handsomely reproduced in Ceylon: Paintings from Temple, Shrine and Rock (New York Graphic Society/UNESCO, 1957). Plate V shows the most interesting—and the one, alas, destroyed in the 1960’s by unknown vandals. The attendant is clearly listening to the mysterious hinged box she is holding in her right hand. It remains unidentified, the local archaeologists refusing to take seriously my suggestion that it is an early Sinhalese transistor radio.
The legend of Sigiriya has recently been brought to the screen by Dimitri de Grunwald, in his production The God King, with Leigh Lawson as a very impressive Kasyapa.
The Space Elevator
This apparently outrageous concept was first presented to the West in a letter in the issue of Science for 11 February 1966, “Satellite Elongation into a True ‘Sky-Hook,’” by John D. Isaacs, Hugh Bradner, and George E. Backus, of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Allyn C. Vine of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Though it may seem odd that oceanographers should get involved with such an idea, this is not surprising when one realizes that they are about the only people (since the great days of barrage balloons) who concern themselves with very long cables hanging under their own weight. (Dr. Allyn Vine’s name, incidentally, is now immortalized in that of the famous research submersible Alvin.)
It was later discovered that the concept had already been developed, six years earlier, and on a much more ambitious scale, by a Leningrad engineer, Y. N. Artsutanov (Komsomolskaya Pravda, 31 July 1960). Artsutanov considered a “heavenly funicular,” to use his engaging name for the device, lifting no less than twelve thousand tons a day to synchronous orbit. It seems surprising that this daring idea received so little publicity; the only mention I have ever seen of it is in the handsome volume of paintings by Alexei A. Leonov and Andrei K. Sokolov, The Stars Are Awaiting Us (Moscow, 1967). One color plate (page 25) shows the “Space Elevator” in action. The caption reads: “. . . the satellite will, so to say, stay fixed in a certain point in the sky. If a cable is lowered from the satellite to the Earth you will have a ready cable-road. An ‘Earth-Sputnik-Earth’ elevator for freight and passengers can then be built, and it will operate without any rocket propulsion.”
Although General Leonov gave me a copy of his book at the Vienna “Peaceful Uses of Space” conference in 1968, the idea simply failed to register on me—despite the fact that the elevator is shown hovering exactly over Sri Lanka! I probably thought that Cosmonaut Leonov, a noted humorist, was just having a little joke. (He is also a superb diplomat. After the Vienna screening, he made quite the nicest comment on 2001 I’ve ever heard: “Now I feel I’ve been in space twice.” Presumably after the Apollo-Soyuz mission he would say “three times.”)
The Space Elevator is quite clearly an idea whose time has come, as is demonstrated by the fact that within a decade of the 1966 Isaacs et al. letter it was independently reinvented at least three times. A detailed treatment, containing many new ideas, “The Orbital Tower: A Spacecraft Launcher Using