IEEE Spectrum has published the last interview with the late, great Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Spectrum editor Harry Goldstein emailed me, "In January, we sent Saswato Das to Sri Lanka to interview Clarke, who was in the hospital at the time. We were planning on putting the article and the audio up tomorrow anyway. Eerie timing." From Das's Spectrum article:
I started our interview sessions with geostationary satellites–those in orbit above Earth's equator that have the remarkable property of matching the period at which Earth rotates. As a result, these satellites look stationary to someone on Earth. They are extremely useful for communications, because transmitting and receiving antennas on Earth don't have to track them. In a 1945 article, “Extra-terrestrial Relays,” published in Wireless World, Clarke proposed that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. I asked Clarke whether he'd ever suspected that these satellites would one day prove to be so valuable to telecommunications.
He laughed. “I'm often asked why I didn't try to patent the idea of communications satellites. My answer is always, ‘A patent is really a license to be sued.' ”
