Since it's so close to the equator, Sri Lanka actually sits in a favorable spot to anchor the space elevator, and Clarke had suggested that if it is built, Sri Lanka should be used as a base. “The chief expense of space travel when you build the space elevator is entertainment and in-flight movies,” he joked.

We talked about how private entrepreneurs are getting interested in space exploration. He believed that they could not substitute for governmental support. “It can never be fully private, because it is so expensive. Aircraft initially were funded by governments, and the same for the space elevator. I don't know if the Wright brothers realized how quickly aircraft would pay for themselves.”

* * *

Clarke was born in western England in 1917 and became interested in space as a youngster. He was a fan of American science-fiction magazines, reading as many as he could get his hands on. They would cross the Atlantic as ballast on ships, and he would buy them at the local Woolworth's. “These magazines cost the astronomical sum of thruppence, or three pennies,” he said. “I couldn't always afford that. They had a tremendous influence on me, of course.”

He was so moved by the stories that he contacted some of the authors, including Willy Ley, a German-American who, in addition to being a pioneer in rocket science, wrote science fiction. Clarke probably still had most of the correspondence, he said.

Although he loved reading about rockets and space, he had a bad experience the first time he encountered one, as he once described: “My first encounter with rockets was not an auspicious one….It must have been November 5, Fireworks Day….Perhaps I was 10 years old; it could not have been any more. I was standing in the village square at Bishops Lydeard, just outside the little post office in which I was to spend so many hours as mail sorter and night telephone operator, when some idiot launched a rocket horizontally, so that it shot along the ground. It hit the toe of my shoe, was deflected up inside my shorts, and wandered around for awhile before burning its way through the back of my shirt. Mirabile dictu, I was not badly hurt.”

After high school, unable to afford a university education, he decided to join the British Civil Service in 1936, at the age of 19. His main motivation: he wanted a job that allowed him plenty of leisure time to devote to writing and other pursuits that might interest him. He ended up doing very well in the examination, ranking 26th among approximately 1500 applicants. Because he aced his arithmetic exam, he was advised to take a job in the exchequer and audit department. He was given the task of auditing teachers' pensions, which took him no more than an hour or so per day.

Clarke published his first story, “Travel by Wire!” in 1937, the following year. He continued working in the British Civil Service, until the Second World War intervened. Clarke then became a radar specialist in the Royal Air Force. It was during this time that the idea of geostationary satellites and their use in communications first came to him.

Clarke was always very optimistic about space travel. Right after the war, he became heavily involved with the British Interplanetary Society, which was instrumental in popularizing ideas of rocket travel among the public. He was even the society's president for a while. He remembered those days.

“I don't know if the society ever enrolled a hundred members. In fact, I am not sure if it still exists.” He laughed. Clarke had previously said that “we space cadets of the British Interplanetary Society spent all our spare time discussing space travel. We didn't imagine it lay in our own near future.”

We talked about those heady days in the 1940s and 1950s, when space exploration was firing up Clarke's imagination. And of course we talked about Sputnik I, which changed things forever when it launched in 1957. Clarke was at a conference in Barcelona when the news of Sputnik came through. Reporters started calling him for comment. I asked him if he remembered the day.