Clarke often spoke of Things to Come as his favorite movie of all time. But when the film appeared in English theaters during 1936, audiences would have seen it bookended by newsreels showing labor strikes, militarism in Germany and Japan, and the Italian Army at war in Ethiopia. A glimpse of a technologically advanced future that Clarke yearned for was envisioned on the movie screen, but Wells’s screenplay implied that rockets to the Moon would only happen after a devastating world conflagration and a second dark age.
The world was in crisis, but Arthur Clarke sustained his optimistic belief in a better future with a growing library of American science-fiction magazines. His network of science-fiction and rocketry enthusiasts continued to expand, and even Ley became one of his correspondents, not only offering firsthand information about recent rocketry development in Germany but also serving as Clarke’s American source for the latest magazines. No longer would he need to haunt the back tables at Woolworth’s.
The summer that Things to Come was playing in cinemas, Arthur Clarke moved to London to begin his professional life as a junior auditor for the board of education. He had aced the civil-service exam with a perfect math score. “I prided myself on having the fastest slide rule in Whitehall, so I was usually able to do all my work in an hour or so and devote the rest of the day to more important business.” The more important business was assuming an active role with the British Interplanetary Society, where he had risen to secretary/treasurer.
On a chilly winter morning a few months after his arrival in London, Clarke and a few friends caught a train out of St. Pancras station to attend a conference in Leeds. The event, held in the city’s Theosophical Hall, brought together a handful of young men interested in spaceflight and science fiction for what was later recognized as the world’s first scheduled science-fiction convention. The entire attendance was fewer than twenty people. They heard Clarke announce that the British Interplanetary Society planned to move its center of operations from Liverpool to a branch office in London, which shortly thereafter became the society’s official headquarters. The new London address was, in fact, a small flat that Clarke shared with the society’s publicity director, another aspiring science-fiction writer, William Temple.
© Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM 9A12591)
Eighteen-year-old Arthur C. Clarke photographed himself using an automatically timed camera shutter in his childhood home in southwest England. The shelves of one bookcase held his extensive collection of American science-fiction magazines.
But within a few months, the society suffered a major setback. Like their American counterparts, the British society occasionally conducted public demonstration launches of small experimental rockets. While these events proved an effective way to generate publicity, little attention had been given to safety, and during a demonstration in Manchester three spectators were hit by pieces of an aluminum rocket that exploded on the launchpad. Subsequently, all experimental rocket launches in England were subject to prosecution under a nineteenth-century explosives act. The society had to find a different way to capture media attention. Even though they had limited resources, they chose to shoot for the Moon.
It was a purely intellectual exercise but one that no one had attempted before. Working as a team, the core members of the society outlined the many scientific, engineering, and intellectual challenges that a group planning a piloted expedition to the Moon would need to address. They even tried to construct a few working instruments, including an inertial guidance system that would indicate the spaceship’s position in space. Assuming they had an unlimited budget, the society’s team proceeded to design a launch vehicle with a combined crew cabin and landing craft. The entire budget the society could actually allocate to their research project was roughly one hundred twenty dollars.
Undaunted, the society’s team exploited their available resources: youthful enthusiasm, free time, and a smattering of knowledge in a variety of professional disciplines. One member was an expert on turbine engineering; another was a chemist; a third an accountant. There was an interior designer, who envisioned the spacecraft’s living quarters. Not one was a full-fledged scientist, but several had some engineering experience. Clarke oversaw the necessary higher math and the astronomical calculations.
Once a week the society’s “technical committee” gathered in the evening to dissect details of the proposed two-week lunar mission, with a brief break for fish and chips from the local pub. For their launch system, they decided to use a series of six solid-fuel stages of diminishing size, which were designed to fire in sequence. The committee had ruled out using liquid propellants, having assumed that moving the fuel through a series of mechanical pumps would be nearly impossible in such a massive vehicle.
When the project was completed, the results were published in the January 1939 issue of their newsletter, the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. The entire print run for that issue filled two cardboard boxes, which Clarke retrieved from the printer and walked back to his flat. But their modest journal generated publicity that reverberated around the world. Initally Clarke and other society members were interviewed by London newspapers and on BBC radio. Next, the Journal received attention in the prestigious science magazine Nature, which summarily dismissed the moon ship as pure fantasy. The scientific community thought it necessary to silence these starry-eyed young troublemakers before someone took them seriously.
Undismayed, Clarke and his companions returned every instance of public criticism with pointed and sarcastic rebuttals—whenever the publications deigned to give them space to reply. The criticism from the scientific establishment inspired the creation of the first of Clarke’s Three Laws: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
News about the society’s rocket ship spread internationally. In the United States, Time magazine reported on the controversy, and English-language newspapers as far away as India included it in their world-news summary. The society’s journal noted with pride that one account “stole half the photo-news page of a national Sunday newspaper from Herr Hitler.” During the flurry of publicity surrounding their moon rocket, Clarke and Bill Temple met one foreign-language journalist who made an enduring impression. Early in the interview, Temple began to wonder whether the tall quiet-voiced German might be a Nazi spy, especially when he showed particular interest in their collection of clippings about rockets as weapons. Clarke and Temple agreed that in this instance it was probably wise to avoid impressing their visitor with their knowledge of astronautics. Instead, they pretended to be merely a couple of harmless science-fiction fanboys.
The best-informed members in both the American and British rocket societies continued to assume that all rocket-related research and development in Germany had come to an abrupt end following the rise of the Nazis. Living in the United States, Willy Ley had heard nothing from his homeland to make him believe otherwise. The Third Reich appeared more concerned with rearming its land army and rebuilding its air force than with funding scientific rocket research, which few believed had any practical application as a weapon of war. Ley logically assumed that transporting a small explosive payload via a rocket would be a waste of money, and he was certain that other military strategists would agree. Meanwhile, he hoped he might eventually find a full-time position with an American