The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [111]
Six years earlier A. R. Collar and J. W. Flower had come to essentially the same conclusions in their paper “A (Relatively) Low Altitude 24-hour Satellite” in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 22, pp. 442–457, 1969. They were looking into the possibility of suspending a synchronous communications satellite far below the natural thirty-six-thousand-kilometer altitude, and did not discuss taking the cable all the way down to the surface of the Earth, but this is an obvious extension of their treatment.
And now for a modest cough. Back in 1963, in an essay commissioned by UNESCO and published in Astronautics for February 1964, “The World of the Communications Satellite” (now available in Voices from the Sky), I wrote: “As a much longer term possibility, it might be mentioned that there are a number of theoretical ways of achieving a low-altitude, twenty-four-hour satellite; but they depend upon technical developments unlikely to occur in this century. I leave their contemplation as an exercise for the student.”
The first of these “theoretical ways” was, of course, the suspended satellite discussed by Collar and Flower. My crude back-of-an-envelope calculations, based on the strength of existing materials, made me so skeptical of the whole idea that I did not bother to spell it out in detail. If I had been a little less conservative—or if a larger envelope had been available—I might have been ahead of everyone except Artsutanov himself.
As this book is, I hope, more a novel than an engineering treatise, those who wish to go into technical details are referred to the now rapidly expanding literature on the subject. Recent examples include Jerome Pearson’s “Using the Orbital Tower to Launch Earth-Escape Payloads Daily” (Proceedings of the 27th International Astronautical Federation Congress, October 1976) and a remarkable paper by Hans Moravec, “A Non-Synchronous Orbital Skyhook” (American Astronautical Society Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 18–20 October 1977).
I am much indebted to my friends the late A. V. Cleaver, of Rolls-Royce, Dr. Ing. Harry O. Ruppe, Professor of Astronautics at the Technical University of Munich’s Lehrstuhl für Raumfahrttechnic, and Dr. Alan Bond, of the Culham Laboratories, for their valuable comments on the Orbital Tower. They are not responsible for my modifications.
Walter L. Morgan (no relation to Vannevar Morgan, as far as I know) and Gary Gordon, of the COMSAT Laboratories, as well as L. Perek, of the United Nations Outer Space Affairs Division, have provided most useful information on the stable regions of the synchronous orbit. They have pointed out that natural forces, particularly sun-moon effects, would cause major oscillations, especially in the north-south directions. Thus “Taprobane” might not be as advantageous as I have suggested; but it would still be better than anywhere else.
The importance of a high-altitude site is also debatable, and I am indebted to Sam Brand, of the U.S. Naval Environmental Prediction Research Facility, Monterey, California, for information on equatorial winds. If it turns out that the tower could be safely taken down to sea level, then the Maldive island of Gan (recently evacuated by the Royal Air Force) may be the twenty-second century’s most valuable piece of real estate.
Finally, it seems a very strange—and even scary—coincidence that, years before I ever thought of the subject of this novel, I myself should have unconsciously gravitated (sic) toward its locale. The house I acquired a decade ago on my favorite Sri Lankan beach (see The Treasure of the Great Reef and The View from Serendip) is at precisely