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when Astounding Stories published his novella Rescue Party in
its September 1945 issue. Still, he was hardly earning enough
money from his writing at this point to consider it a full-time
career. His old civil service job was waiting for him, but he
decided that he definitely did not want to spend the rest of his
life as an auditor, despite the security such a position offered. He
wanted to finally attend a university in order to fill the remain-
ing gaps in his scientific education, and therefore resigned from
the civil service before being mustered out of the RAF. But that
step proved to be something of a catch-22. Because he had re-
signed from the civil service, he was denied a government schol-
arship. Fortunately, he had won an RAF essay contest with an
article called The Rocket and the Future of Warfare, which
attracted the attention of a young member of Parliament, Capt.
Raymond Blackburn. Blackburn pulled some strings and got
Clarke a scholarship to King s College at the University of Lon-
don, which he attended from 1946 to 1948, taking degrees in
both physics and pure and applied mathematics.
Although he had written his communications satellite article
while very much an amateur, he could now call himself a pro-
fessional mathematician. During 1949 and part of 1950 he was
employed as the assistant editor of Physics Abstracts, published by
the Institute of Electrical Engineers, but it was beginning to
look as though he could indeed make a living as a writer. He
completed his first novel, Prelude to Space, during his 1947 sum-
mer vacation. He also became the chairman of the British Inter-
planetary Society, and in that capacity gave a speech in 1947
called The Challenge of the Spaceship, which was widely re-
printed and made its way into a collection of essays called British
Arthur C. Clarke 155
Thought, 1947, bringing him a number of commissions from
newspapers and magazines. Clarke even sent a copy of the essay
to the grand old man of British literature, George Bernard
Shaw, then ninety-one, who immediately sent back one of his
famous pink postcards asking how he could join the Interplane-
tary Society. Shaw remained a member for the remaining three
years of his life.
As the 1950s began, Clarke s writing career took off in a big
way. In 1951, both the novel Prelude to Space and the nonfiction
book The Exploration of Space attracted much attention, with the
latter being selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. The novel
Islands in the Sky appeared in 1952, and 1953 brought his classic
Childhood s End, which is still being purchased by thousands of
new readers every year. Clarke has ruefully remarked that an
annoyingly large number of people still consider it my best
novel. Now an established writer, publishing a book of fiction
(sometimes a novel, sometimes a collection of short stories) as
well as a nonfiction book almost every year, Clarke was in a
position to do what he wanted and go where he wished. To the
surprise of some people, this advocate of space travel now
began exploring the world beneath the seas.
Introduced by Mike Wilson to skin diving in 1950, Clarke
became increasingly fascinated by underwater exploration. From
the mid-1950s on, with Wilson as his partner, Clarke spent more
and more time diving in the Indian Ocean and writing books
about his experiences. Wilson established a home in Colombo,
Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Clarke spent nearly six months of
the year with him and, later, Wilson s wife, Elizabeth. During the
decade, despite a great deal of traveling, Clarke notes, I appear
to have written 140 pieces of fiction and 211 of nonfiction, a
record never approached by me again. Many of the nonfiction
pieces, Clarke says, were ephemeral journalism. He wrote many
reviews, not only of science and science fiction books, but also of
the sudden spate of science fiction movies that began appearing
156 It Doesn t Take a Rocket Scientist
in the 1950s. He was greatly impressed by the documentary-like
George Pal movie of 1950, Destination Moon, but less happy with
the producer s next effort, 1951 s When Worlds Collide, because of
technical lapses and a sappy Hollywood script. Despite his objec-
tions, George Pal subsequently showed him around the set of
1953 s War of the Worlds. Ten years later, of course, Clarke would
co-author with Stanley Kubrick the script of what most critics
regard as the greatest of all science fiction films, 2001: A Space
Odyssey, based on Clarke s short story The Sentinel, an effort
for which the authors were rewarded with an Academy Award
nomination.
As Clarke s career prospered during the 1950s, reality was
beginning to catch up with his 1945 vision of satellites orbiting
Earth. While in Ceylon in 1954, Clarke first heard the news, on
shortwave radio, that the United States was preparing to launch
a satellite during the International Geophysical Year of 1957 58.
In October 1957, Clarke traveled to Barcelona as a member of
the British delegation to the International Astronautical Con-
gress. On the morning of October 4, he was wakened by a call
from London s Daily Express seeking his comments on the
launching of the first space satellite. The Americans had been
beaten to the punch by the Soviet Union s Sputnik 1.
Sputnik 1 weighed only 183 pounds (83 kg). Designed to
determine the density of the upper atmosphere, it had two radio
transmitters, but their signals lapsed after twenty-one days, and
the satellite itself, its orbit decaying, burned up in the atmosphere
after two months. The second Sputnik, launched on Novem-
ber 3, was six times as large, weighing 1,113 pounds (504 kg),
and carried the first live creature into space, a dog named Laika.
Biological data sent back to Earth for a week showed that Laika
was adapting to space, suggesting that manned missions could
be safely attempted. The technology for bringing a satellite back
to Earth did not yet exist, and Laika was put to sleep in space.
Sputnik 2 orbited the globe for 162 days before falling back into
the atmosphere.
Arthur C. Clarke 157
There was considerable shock in the United States and around
the world that the Soviets has gotten into space first. This was
not just a matter of scientific boasting rights it meant that the
Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in building rockets
capable of launching a satellite, and that in turn suggested that
they were ahead in terms of military rockets that could carry
atomic bombs. The United States was further embarrassed
when a Vanguard rocket developed by the U.S. Navy, carrying a
test satellite, exploded two seconds after liftoff on December 7,
1957, the sixteenth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor. Finally, on January 31, 1958, the United States success-
fully launched Explorer 1, which discovered the Van Allen radia-
tion belts, named for physicist James Van Allen, who was in
charge of the scientific aspects of the Explorer project. While
much smaller than the Sputniks, weighing only eighteen pounds
(8.2 kg), Explorer orbited Earth at a higher level, 2,000 miles
(3,219 km).
The space race was on. Congress, prodded by then Senate
Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, created NASA (National Aero-
nautics and Space Administration) in July 1958. Over the next few
years, the Soviet Union had more successes with their launches
than the United States, although some of their missions failed,
too. Vanguard rockets proved to be a particular problem, failing
again and again. But by the early 1960s, the U.S. effort was mov-
ing along well enough so that even the Vanguard failures could
be turned into jokes. A famous Mike Nichols and Elaine May
sketch centered on a telephone conversation between a mother
and her Vanguard engineer son who never seemed to find time
to call her. The mother noted in respect to the Vanguards, you
keep losing them, and voiced her concern that their cost would
be taken out of her son s paycheck. A mother worries, she said.
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