“I BET Arthur has forgotten this,” British astronomer Patrick Moore tells me before launching into a story about Arthur C. Clarke, his old friend from the heyday of the British Interplanetary Society. In those cold-war times, a group such as the BIS – which advocated space travel and collaboration with the Russians – was the object of official suspicion, not to mention derision from scientists working for the establishment. (In 1956, no less a figure than Richard Woolley, the UK’s astronomer royal, asserted: “All this writing about going to the moon is utter bilge.”)
Moore recalls that around 1950, Clarke went…
