A "few strands" of the late Arthur C Clarke's hair are due to travel on Nasa's "first ever solar sail mission into deep space".
The craft will be named the Sunjammer, after the story written by Clarke in 1964 about a race in space using solar sails. "The enormous disc of sail strained at its rigging, already filled with the wind that blew between the worlds," wrote the novelist almost 50 years ago. "The immense sail was taut, its mirror surface sparkling and glittering gloriously in the Sun … Something so huge, yet so frail, was hard for the mind to grasp. And it was harder still to realise that this fragile mirror could tow him free of Earth merely by the power of the sunlight it would trap."
The voyage, scheduled to launch at the end of 2014, is being organised by Celestis, which runs "memorial spaceflights" offering families the chance to send cremated remains into space (joining Clarke on board the Sunjammer would cost upwards of £8,000). Development of the solar sail has been led by Nasa, along with aerospace companies including Celestis's parent company Space Services Holdings.
Charles Chafer, chief executive of Space Services Holdings, said he first met Clarke in 1982 at the UN conference in Vienna on outer space. "I was/am a lifelong fan and attribute much of my interest in space to the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey," said Chafer. "In 2000, when we were first planning a solar sail mission to deep space we approached him about donating a hair sample containing his DNA for launch. A partner at the time journeyed to Sri Lanka to his home where he obtained the sample."
In a note accompanying the sample, said Chafer, Clarke wrote: "Here are a few strands, I would give you more but I don't have any to spare." The author died in 2008 at the age of 90, leaving behind more than 100 books ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Rendezvous with Rama.
Clarke's deep space voyage next year follows the last journey of Hunter S Thompson, whose ashes were fired from a rocket across his Colorado farm. The late Iain Banks has also expressed a wish for some of his ashes to be fired from a rocket over the Forth. So Clarke is not the first author to go beyond the bounds of Earth – although, with the Sunjammer set to journey three million kilometres towards the sun, he is likely to travel the furthest.
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