ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S DINNER SPEECH


The X PRIZE
by Arthur C. Clarke

Hello, my name is Arthur C. Clarke and I am speaking to you from my home in Sri Lanka. It is my pleasure to address this historic gathering of Astronauts and St. Louis business leaders, at this founding of the X Prize. I would like to send my fondest greetings to my old friends Buzz Aldrin and Peter Diamandis. I recently had the pleasure of entertaining Peter along with my new friends Colette Bevis and Al Kerth, who explained to me the tremendous level of commitment you all made towards launching a new era of private space travel.

Thirty years ago, Stanley Kubrik and I filmed 2001: A Space Odyssey, and predicted that by that date there'd be a flourishing business of space tourism, allowing anyone with enough money to go into orbit or even to the moon. Unfortunately, we were a little wrong about the timing, but it will happen, and I hope that the X Prize will make it possible, sooner rather than later.

While I'm revising my predictions, let me address two others that we made in the movie. First of all, it will be TWA rather than Pan Am that makes the first commercial flights. And second maybe you in St. Louis would've preferred the date 2004 to 2001.

When I first heard about the X Prize two years ago, I realized: What better launch pad could you have than the home of the famous Spirit of St. Louis which inaugurated the age of civil aviation. In 1987, the 60th anniversary of the Lindbergh flight, I was the proud recipient of the Lindbergh Medal, which I have here with me. It's perhaps sufficient to say, but the $25,000 investment made in St. Louis 69 years ago had a financial and publicity payoff far beyond anything those original ten backers could possibly have imagined.

It's always been our nature as humans to explore our surroundings, to push the limits of our understanding and to turn frontiers into future homes. Now, Space beckons. During the birth of the Space Age, it was the powerful force of competition between the Soviet Union and the United States that drove us so far, so fast. It's hard to realize that from Yuri Gagarin's first flight in 1961 to the landing on the moon was only eight years. The X Prize will reintroduce, in a constructive fashion, this element of competition. And for this reason, I'm happy to support it. It's perhaps the first small, but crucial step towards the opening up of Space. To quote from Charles Lindbergh himself, "The important thing is to start: to lay a plan, and then follow it step by step no matter how small or large each one by itself may seem."

I hereby invite teams from every nation in the world to lay their plans and begin the competition for the X Prize. May the best team win.

This is Arthur Clarke signing off from Sri Lanka, wishing you an enjoyable evening in St. Louis, now to be known as the Gateway to the Stars.


X PRIZESM and NEW SPIRIT OF ST. LOUISSM are service marks of The X PRIZE Foundation, Inc.