Arthur Clarke - The Lost Worlds of 2001

"I see-TMA-l itself."

"Exactly, sir. There may be no pyramid-builders-there may only be pyramids. They may be our super-intelligences."

"That would be disappointing," said the Vice-President. "I don't know what I expect you to find out on Jupiter, but I hope it's more exciting than that."

"l don't," interjected Mrs. Kelly. Then she began to laugh.

After a while she pulled herself together, obviously with an effort.

"I've just had the most hilarious idea," she said. "Suppose you're right, and they send back an ambassador. Can you imagine that welcoming parade down Fifth Avenue– and the President sharing his Cadillac with a large, black pyramid?"

The Vice-President began to grin, and very quickly the grin spread right across his face. He made no comment, but everyone remembered the stories of his occasional disagreements with the Chief Executive.

It was quite obvious that he could imagine that parade; and that, on the whole, he rather liked the idea.

It was a glorious night; there had been rain earlier in the day, and the freshly washed sky was unusually dark. Bowman had never seen so many stars above Washington ; and now, soon after midnight, the brightest of them all was rising in the east.

"Look, Mr. Vice-President," he said, as they took their final leave. "Our target-eight months from now."

They all stood in thoughtful silence, wholly forgetting the other guests, not even hearing the soft background of music from the band inside the house. Around them was the sleeping city, dominated by the floodlit bubble of the Capitol dome. And over that ghostly white hemisphere, Jupiter was rising.

Like everything else in 2001, the good ship Discovery passed through many transformations before it reached its final shape. Obviously, it could not be a conventional chemically propelled vehicle, and there was little doubt that it would have to be nuclear-powered for the mission we envisaged. But how should the power be applied? There were several alternatives-electric thrusters using charged particles (the ion drive); jets of extremely hot gas (plasma) controlled by magnetic fields, or streams of hydrogen expanding through nozzles after they had been heated in a nuclear reactor. All these ideas have been tested on the ground, or in actual spaceflight; all are known to work.

The final decision was made on the basis of aesthetics rather than technology; we wanted Discovery to look strange yet plausible, futuristic but not fantastic. Eventually we settled on the plasma drive, though I must confess that there was a little cheating. Any nuclear-powered vehicle must have large radiating surfaces to get rid of the excess heat generated by the reactors-but this would make Discovery look somewhat odd. Our audiences already had enough to puzzle about; we didn't want them to spend half the picture wondering why spaceships should have wings. So the radiators came off.

There was also a digression-to the great alarm, as already mentioned, of the Art Department –into a totally different form of propulsion. During the late 1950's, American scientists had been studying an extraordinary concept ("Project Orion") which was theoretically capable of lifting payloads of thousands of tons directly into space at high efficiency. It is still the only known method of doing this, but for rather obvious reasons it has not made much progress.

Project Orion is a nuclear-pulse system-a kind of atomic analog of the wartime V-2 or buzz– bomb. Small (kiloton) fission bombs would be exploded, at the rate of one every few seconds, fairly close to a massive pusherplate which would absorb the impulse from the explosion; even in the vacuum of space, the debris from such a mini-bomb can produce quite a kick.

The plate would be attached to the spacecraft by a shock-absorbing system that would smooth out the pulses, so that the intrepid passengers would have a steady, one gravity ride-unless the engine started to knock.

Although Project Orion sounds slightly unbelievable, extensive theoretical studies, and some tests using conventional explosives, showed that it would certainly work– and it would be many times cheaper than any other method of space propulsion. It might even be cheaper, per passenger seat, than conventional air transport-if one was thinking in terms of million-ton vehicles. But the whole project was grounded by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and in any case it will be quite a long time before NASA, or anybody else, is thinking on such a grandiose scale. Still, it is nice to know that the possibility exists, in case the need ever arises for a lunar equivalent of the Berlin Airlift….

When we started work on 2001, some of the Orion documents had just been declassified, and were passed on to us by scientists indignant about the demise of the project. It seemed an exciting idea to show a nuclear-pulse system in action, and a number of design studies were made of it; but after a week or so Stanley decided that putt-putting away from Earth at the rate of twenty atom bombs per minute was just a little too comic. Moreover– recalling the finale of Dr. Strangelove-it might seem to a good many people that he had started to live up to his own title and had really learned to Love the Bomb. So he dropped Orion, and the only trace of it that survives in both movie and novel is the name.

As has already been indicated by the frantic entries in my log, the story line took a couple of years of hard labor to pin down. We had the beginning and (approximately) the end; it was the center portion which refused to stay in one place. I sometimes felt that we were wrestling with a powerful and uncooperative snake, anchored at both ends.

The six members of the crew made their departures from Earth as quietly as possible, on separate and unannounced flights-some from the Kennedy Spaceport, some from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. They had all said goodbye to their families and friends, and had given countless interviews. They wanted no publicity during their last moments on Earth, and most of them managed to avoid it.

The actual launch date was still a week ahead. They would need all that amount of time to become accustomed to working and living as a team aboard Discovery under actual flight conditions-conditions which could never be completely simulated on Earth. The "Orbital Shakedown" could be carried out safely yet realistically with Space Station One hovering only a few miles away ready to provide immediate help in case of emergency

That preflight week was also essential for medical reasons. As Dr. Poole expressed it, with concise accuracy, "It gives us a chance to share our germs." The ship would be rigorously quarantined; its inhabitants would catch no diseases from outside, and if they developed any allergies to each other, something could still be done about it.

There were countless little problems, but no major ones-at least, of a technical nature. However, Bowman was distracted from more important matters by one annoying piece of bureaucratic ineptitude

From the earliest days, the financial rewards of astronauts had always been the subject of controversy. Everyone agreed that they should be paid well-but how well?

After a long series of policy changes in which both the Space Agency and the individual astronauts had come in for much criticism, general rules had been worked out to everyone's satisfaction. On this mission, where every man except Dr. Poole was an Astronaut, First Class, all crew members would receive the standard basic pay for that grade, which worked out at $34,945 per annum. By special arrangement with the Federal Health Insurance Agency which had somehow got into the act, Dr. Poole's salary was supposed to be made up to that of his colleagues. For reasons that no one even attempted to understand, he actually received $35,105.