He suggests I wander around his study for half an hour 'Bed Air con,' he informs one of his servants, who prepares the bedroom before wheeling him inside. 'Read this,' he orders - and then immediately decides he wants to have a lie down. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sarong, and in a wheelchair, he hands me, by way of greeting, the manuscript of a book that includes a passing anecdotal reference to him.
When I am ushered in to see him, he is nursing a stiff neck from watching the previous week's solar eclipse through one of his telescopes. In the meantime, while NASA conducts its trials on his fictional prototype, the world's best-selling science- fiction writer contents himself with sponsoring the capital's traffic lights.
For a while, he had the island's only satellite dish, which picked up television signals from 'Clarke's orbit' more recently, he has proposed that a space elevator, a carbon-fibre cable car to the stars, should be 'tethered' to Sri Lanka's highest point, Adam's Peak. He is chancellor of Colombo's university and director of a new technology park a bronze bust of him stands in the foyer of the old colonial Galle Face hotel.
#MAN ON THE MOON MOVIE INDIA MIRACLE TV#
He is accorded unique tax-free status by a government permanently sandbagged against terrorism ('After all,' he argues later, with characteristic humility, 'I bring in millions, just from visitors, friends, TV crews and so on'). The island nation's only celebrity expatriate lives, as he says, the life of a failed recluse. 'Ah,' he said, grinning, 'you go to see the man in the moon'.Īrthur Clarke, of Minehead, Somerset, now 82, has long enjoyed a special status in Sri Lanka.
#MAN ON THE MOON MOVIE INDIA MIRACLE DRIVER#
When we finally came to a stop outside Clarke's walled compound, just up the road from the parliament building, next door to the Iraqi embassy, the tuk-tuk driver acknowledged that we had entered a different world. Colombo looks more like a city out of Mad Max than 2001. The motorbike-taxi weaved through the monsoon-rutted dirt roads of Sri Lanka's capital, past oxen carts and re-reconditioned Hondas and old men swerving on knackered bicycles, past women at the side of the road drying leaves and dyeing cloth and men pimping massages ('Nice girls, nice boys'), past teenage soldiers toying with machine guns, and barefoot children flying kites, and shacks selling tyres and Cokes and mangoes. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed only the image & headline may have been reworked by took a tuk-tuk to Sir Arthur C Clarke's house. The other experienced members on the list include Kjell Lindgren, Anne McClain and Scott Tingle, all former space station residents.Īmong those yet to rocket into space: Kayla Barron, Raja Chari, Matthew Dominick, Woody Hoburg, Jonny Kim, Nicole Mann, Jasmin Moghbeli, Frank Rubio and Jessica Watkins.
Only two - Joe Acaba and Stephanie Wilson - flew on NASA's old space shuttles. It's a fairly young group, with most in their 30s or 40s. The two astronauts who performed the world's first all-female spacewalk last year made the cut: Christina Koch and Jessica Meir. Two are at the International Space Station right now: Kate Rubins and Victor Glover. Half of the NASA astronauts have spaceflight experience. The upcoming change in administration also adds uncertainty. The space agency is aiming for a moon landing by 2024, although the chances of that happening are growing increasingly dim. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine stressed there would be more astronauts joining the group. “He spent the rest of his natural life advocating for America to go back to the moon, and we are going to honor Gene Cernan’s memory," Pence told the small crowd, seated several feet apart from one another.įive of the astronauts - the only ones in attendance - walked onto the stage, waving and wearing masks. Cernan's final lunar footsteps were on Dec. Pence noted that the last of the 12 men to walk on the moon, the late Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan, wanted nothing more than to remove “last” from his title. The announcement was made at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, beneath one of only three remaining Saturn V moon rockets from the 1960s and 1970s Apollo program. Vice President Mike Pence introduced the astronauts Wednesday at the close of his final meeting as chairman of the National Space Council. The first woman and next man on the moon will come from this elite group. NASA has named the 18 astronauts - half of them women - who will train for its Artemis moon-landing program.
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