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Thinking Of Sir Arthur C. Clarke

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 16, 2017
Thinking Of Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Thinking Of Sir Arthur C. Clarke On His 100th Birthday
“Today would have been Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 100th birthday. Arthur C. Clarke has had more influence on me as a writer than just about anyone else has – and it started at a very early age. … In the early 1990s I was a NASA employee and served as Payload Accommodations Manager for the 2.5 meter Centrifuge Facility that we planned to attach to Space Station Freedom (you call it ISS now). Eventually it was dropped by the program. At every possible opportunity I would sneak in gag charts showing the crew of Discovery from the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” inside the “25 meter centrifuge” and then say “oops, wrong chart”.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

7 responses to “Thinking Of Sir Arthur C. Clarke”

  1. George Purcell says:
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    How much of the centrifuge ever got assembled? is it something that could eventually be finished and launched?

    • kcowing says:
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      Well, there was a shell and some generic support hardware. It is sitting in a parking lot in Japan. The Centrifuge itself was never built. Some of the lab hardware that would have been in the Centrifuge Accommodation module went elsewhere in the space station.

  2. ThomasLMatula says:
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    Sir Arthur Clarke, along with Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Willy Ley inspired the generation that took us to the Moon. That is why so many kids went into STEM. We need a new generation of writers like that to inspired to inspire this generation of kids to reach for the stars.

  3. Neal Aldin says:
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    Given what we have learned in the last year on eyesight changes resulting from brain fluid production and expansion, now artificial G experiments using, presumably, centrifuges, is supercritical for future long duration exploration. And yet some ISS manager, in order to save almost nothing out of a hundred and fifty billion $$, wrecked the opportunity to do specifically that kind of research. The shortsightedness is amazing.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      This is a somewhat sporadic effect with unclear risk factors and unconfirmed mitigation strategies. It’s premature to suggest that a specific countermeasure is needed or the artificial gravity would be an optimal countermeasure. It might be an effect of intense exercise, and just dropping the CSF pressure with diamox might be enough to prevent it.