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5.0 out of 5 stars
The single volume on space exploration by Sir Arthur that everybody should read,
This review is from: The Promise of Space (Paperback)
Arthur C. Clarke
The Promise of Space Berkley, Paperback, 1985. 12mo. xv+316 pp. Introduction by Arthur Clarke, September 1967 [xi-xv]. First published, 1968. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction I. BEGINNINGS 1. Imaginary Voyages 2. From Fantasy to Science 3. "Nothing to Push Against" 4. Power for Space 5. Escape from Earth 6. Other Orbits, Other Moons 7. The Price of Speed II. AROUND THE EARTH 8. Moonrise in the West 9. Opening Skies 10. First Harvest 11. Man in Orbit 12. Islands in the Sky III. AROUND THE MOON 13. Voyagers to the Moon 14. The Birth of Apollo 15. The Vehicle 16. The Mission 17. The Moon 18. The Uses of the Moon 19. The Lunar Colony IV. AROUND THE SUN 20. The Trillion-Mile Whirlpool 21. Paths to the Planets 22. Children of the Sun 23. The Outer Giants 24. The Commerce of the Heavens 25. Tomorrow's Worlds V. AROUND THE UNIVERSE 26. Other Suns than Ours 27. Across the Abyss 28. To the Stars 29. Where's Everybody? 30. Concerning Means and Ends Bibliography Index =================================================' In the Introduction to this fabulous book, Arthur Clarke states that it replaces all his previous volumes on the subject, namely the fairly technical Interplanetary Flight (1950) and the deliberately non-technical The Exploration of Space (1951, Revised Edition 1959), both covering very much the same material of astronomy and astronautics, as well as the collection of "philosophical and cultural speculations" The Challenge of the Spaceship (1959). This is quite true. If you are not a Clarke completist and want but a single book of his about the past and the future of space exploration, this is the one to have. (Not mentioned in this introduction is the important collection of speculative essays Voices from the Sky, first published in 1965 with the telling subtitle "Previews of the Coming Space Age", but it too is largely superseded by The Promise of Space.) First published shortly before the Apollo 11 mission, when Clarke was 50 and very much engaged in the making of 2001 with Stanley, The Promise of Space is also his last non-fiction book entirely dedicated to space travel and space exploration, combining exemplary popular science with breathtaking futuristic speculations in the typically Clarkian manner. It may well be that, together with Profiles of the Future (1962, revised 1973, 1982, 1999), The Promise of Space is one of those books by Arthur Clarke that may be recommended to any intelligent layman who is not altogether indifferent to pictures bigger than his own personal world and time periods longer than his own life. Besides, if by some unfortunate circumstances you have never come across to any non-fiction by Arthur Clarke, these two volumes are just about the most perfect place to start. Since I have little more to say about this book than ''Read it!'', and that little I have already said in my attempts for reviews of the abovementioned books, I will briefly address here another interesting (at least for me) issue: repetitions. They are to be expected, and are indeed openly acknowledged by Arthur in the Introduction, but they shouldn't be made too much of. There are several chapters which have conspicuously identical titles with parts of The Exploration of Space (''The Moon'', ''The Rocket'', ''Other Suns than Others'', ''To the Stars'', ''Concerning Means and Ends''), but though the subject is of course the same, the treatment is significantly different. This is the case even with the first chapters of both books which, despite the different titles but again as acknowledged as in the Introduction, are the most highly repetitious part: apart from the last few paragraphs, the whole of ''The Shaping of the Dream'' is reprinted as a part of ''Imaginary Voyages'', though the latter is extended with new material. But the repetitions are often much more subtle than that - the final chapter, for instance, incorporates paragraphs from the essay ''The Challenge of the Spaceship'' and the last part of Interplanetary Flight (1950) - but, at any rate, it doesn't make much sense going into detail about them. Last but not least, ''Where's Everybody'' is an entirely different essay than the one with the same name in The Challenge of the Spaceship. The essential difference between this book and the aforementioned earlier ones is that here, at last, Clarke could concentrate on questions such as ''What'' and ''Why'', rather than ''How'' and ''If'' which in former times were used for defending space flight against its incredulous opponents. The background of astronautics, from escaping the Earth's gravity to the principle of rocket propulsion, is certainly solid enough, but the accent here is on space exploration. By the time of the first edition, the Space Age had already began in the earnest: a lot of space in the book is dedicated to the history of those heady for the astronautics times. The main question that we, more than forty years later, should answer is this: what happened? Why the enormous progress of the 1960s in terms of space exploration has so drastically been scaled down in the following decades? Is this a natural decline? Is there a way out of it? Were all those glorious achievements between April 12, 1961, and July 20, 1969, merely a by-product of the political tension between two super powers? Although it is up to us, with the benefit of hindsight, to supply some plausible answers to these tough questions, Clarke was not at all unaware of them back in the late 1960s and he by no means shies away from suggesting some answers: A list of the outstanding events in the first half decade of manned space flight (page 107) gives a good idea of the remarkable rate of progress. The nationalities involved have been carefully omitted; if any reader finds it hard to remember who did what, it may occur to him that, perhaps, it may not be as important as he had imagined. [This table on page 107 is one those beautiful ones that are both highly informative and extremely illuminating. I still find it hard to believe that just a little over eight years passed between the first man in orbit and the first man walking on the Moon - but no fewer than ten major achievements lie between these epoch-making dates. And what of that Moon landing...] If human beings were logical entities, controlled by reason instead of emotion, these or similar ideas would probably have been developed in an orderly manner, rendezvous techniques would have been perfected, and we would have been ready to land on the Moon some time around the end of the century. But once again politics and astronautics combined, with results that no historian could ever have predicted. On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy announced that a manned lunar landing ''in this decade'' was a prime national objective of the United States. [...] The verdict of history may well be that the United States made the correct decision, even if from dubious motives. But is it, really? I very much hope so. I should like to believe that there are other reasons - say, financial ones - for our space quest to have become kind of stuck in the last decades. For if the reason is lack of incentive, this would certainly be fatal. The whole thing may well have started as a political competition, but the deeper, and far more significant in the long run, motive must have been the eternal urge of the human beings to explore the world, its ultimate frontiers and our true place in it. Or is this just a wishful thinking? Arthur would certainly say that it isn't. I hope he was right and the current lull is a natural one that has an end some time in the future. I hear that NASA is planning the first lunar observatory for 2024 - 55 years after the first landing! - but better late than never, that's for sure. One interesting continuity problem, by the way. The first edition of this book was published in April 1968, more than a year before that ''small step for the man but a giant leap for mankind'' occurred, yet the first Moon landing is mentioned several times in past tense. There is no indication in this Berkley edition that the book was revised after the first edition, yet this certainly happened, though, most probably before the end of 1971 as the epoch-making Mariner 9 mission is not mentioned at all. In this respect the book, of course, is dated but this, needless to say, does not in the least diminish its value: there is a good deal of history inside, but it is never the main theme. As for the first Moon landing, it is covered in great detail (''The Mission'') and, together with the previous three chapters that chronicle the history of our remote lunar reconnaissance, makes one of the most fascinating parts of the book. I can imagine few things more awesome than Saturn V and even fewer more awe-inspiring than manned landing on the Moon. Just like the table of contents, the writing style here is a hybrid between the wonderfully readable and amusing popular science of Exploration of Space and the far more technical (to be read ''quantitative'') analyses of Interplanetary Flight. This concise but powerful, yet lively and engaging, writing style has become a kind of Clarkian trademark actually. You might just be surprised how absorbing some dry subjects like celestial mechanics or the subtleties of rocketry may be in the right hands. As for Clarke's speculations about the future (which are not ''predictions'', mind you), they are as science-based, stirring,... Read more ›
4 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Right up there with Cosmos,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Promise of Space (Paperback)
Arthur C. Clarke's The Promise of Space is right up there with Cosmos. Written in 1968, it's quite dated. For example, it says that we could have a manned mission to Mars by 1975. This, unfortunately, never happened. In 1975, we had Apollo-Soyuz. It also says that we can get to the closest star, Alpha Centauri, in ten thousand years. I'm not a scientist but in my layman's opinion, if we could put a man on the moon, we could probably build a starship capable of traveling faster-than-light to take us there. Orion could probably be converted to go faster than the speed of light. Although according to Einstein, this is impossible, it shouldn't stop us. If we can develop a drive system capable of taking us to the nearest stars. The so-called "experts" say it's impossible to go on a star trek. These are the same "experts" who said: "If God had intended for man to fly, He would have given him wings." World War II, more than anything, got us to the Moon. It was the V-2 that got us there. The progression was V-2, Atlas, Titan, and the Saturn V. Still the tallest rocket ever built. We must build starships capable of FTL travel. Space travel's been a staple of science fiction since the 1930s. The Promise of Space starts with a history of the space program up until 1968. It ends with speculation about the future. Read this book. Then read Carl Sagan's Cosmos and this is important for you high school students, drop me an e-mail book report, don't worry. You won't be graded on it. I'm not a teacher.
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