In 1968, a film premiered that was to shape a generation's vision of the future - 2001: A Space Odyssey. On the eve of 2001, Andrew Doyle, Tim Furniss, Julian Moxon, Guy Norris and Graham Warwick compare the vision with the reality.
For those of us who saw the future unfold in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, space programmes seem frustratingly earthbound on the eve of that milestone year. Where are the winged spaceliners, orbiting hotels, thriving moonbases and interplanetary spaceships?
The answer is - they are coming. As we count down to 2001, the future of spaceflight looks brighter - and more feasible - than at almost any time since the last man left the surface of the moon in 1972.
The first multi-national crew is aboard the International Space Station, Alpha; the internet is invigorating the satellite communications market, and there are launch vehicles on the horizon that will cut the cost of space access and pave the way for exploration and development of Earth's neighbourhood and beyond.
The government-led, politically motivated space race of the Apollo era has slowed to a more measured, industry-led, commercially oriented approach to space development.
The final frontier has proved far more difficult, and expensive, to conquer than film-maker Stanley Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C Clarke could have envisioned in the mid-1960s, when they collaborated to create 2001. When the film premiered in 1968, the first manned landing on the Moon was just a year away and there were plans for human flights to Mars by the 1980s. Instead, the end of the Cold War, the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, and a string of technical and financial failures have slowed the race into space.
More than 40 years after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, on an intercontinental ballistic missile, spaceflight remains a risky business - a reality underlined by last year's groundings of several of the world's workhorse boosters and the highly public failure of two of NASA's Mars missions.
At the same time, dramatic images of deep space from the Hubble orbiting telescope, tantalising traces of past water on the surface of Mars and the long-awaited in-orbit assembly of the International Space Station are helping rekindle public interest in space.
Political interest is increasing also, as it becomes obvious that public-private partnerships will be necessary to develop the infrastructure necessary for routine operations in Earth orbit and beyond.
Practical application
Even author Arthur C Clarke may have come down to Earth, as he believes the near-term future of spaceflight will be "motivated by the development of applications". He is no stranger to the practical uses of space.
Clarke came to fame in 1945, when he suggested in a letter to the UK's Wireless World magazine that satellites in geostationary orbit could "give TV and microwave coverage to the entire planet". In 1951, he wrote about satellites being used to "send mail" - presaging the internet explosion which is now driving the satellite communications market.
It was Clarke's 1948 short story The Sentinel which formed the basis for Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Together they created the vision of a near future in which humans could travel seamlessly from the Earth's surface to Jupiter's orbit. There was the sleek Pan Am spaceliner Orion; the wheel-like space station with its Hilton and Howard Johnson hotels; the lunar shuttle Aries; and, finally, the exploration spacecraft Discovery and HAL, its artificial-intelligence computer.
Today 2001 remains perhaps the most realistic space film yet made- so realistic that NASA uses the original poster artwork showing Orion leaving the space station to illustrate its concept for a fourth-generation reusable launch vehicle (Shuttle being the first). Significantly, NASA does not expect such a vehicle, which would offer airliner-like space launch operations, to enter service before 2040.
"Why didn't other things like Mars flights happen? Well, I'll tell you - Vietnam, Watergate and the ending of the Cold War. The space programme was politically motivated," Clarke says. "The film was not an attempt to predict the future, but was more of a plausible view of what may or could happen. Remember in 1964 [the year Clarke wrote the book] when Apollo was being developed, there were serious US plans for human flights to Mars in the 1980s."
What has changed are the politics, Clarke says: "The political ambience has gone. What dates the movie most are the economics and politics - not the technology."
On the eve of 2001, what has emerged is "an applications-motivated [space] programme which is slightly less ambitious in terms of the "'sci-fi' ideas", Clarke says. If man goes back to the Moon and lands on Mars, "which could be possible in 2020 to 2030", he believes it will be technology-led and therefore slower than the politically motivated Apollo moon rush.
Getting Neil Armstrong on to the Sea of Tranquility within eight years was an extraordinary human achievement, but it required $25 billion at 1960s prices. "[Today] it is a case of 'when can we do it?', rather than 'it must be done'," Clarke says. With the development of new technology - and the will - it should be possible "to go to the Moon at the same price as it costs to fly around the world," he contends.
Clarke is far from unhappy things did not turn out as envisioned in 2001: "In fact, more has happened than I ever dreamed of. For example, I never imagined that we would have pictures of all the planets in the solar system" - including Pluto, unvisited by a spacecraft but imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope.
"Things have gone beyond anything I ever imagined," says Clarke, now 75, who once "didn't believe I would live to see men on the Moon". But he also never believed "we would go there and abandon it after five years". Nevertheless, he remains optimistic about mankind's future in space, quoting scientist Carl Sagan, who wrote: "In the long term, every civilisation must be spacefaring otherwise it will die."
Sagan also said: "The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space programme". And Clarke believes the threat of an asteroid or cometary collision with Earth - thought to have caused the dinosaurs' extinction - "is the biggest single reason now for developing space technology, so we can destroy or divert an approaching object."
Protecting the Earth from an asteroid crash may not be high on the agenda of any country's space programme at the moment, but Clarke has proved correct more than once before. Meanwhile, the vision of the future that he and Stanley Kubrick created in 2001 continues to guide the community towards its goal of safe, efficient and above all routine use of space.
Source: Flight International
