British Interplanetary Society
The
British Interplanetary Society (BIS) founded in
1933 by Mr. P.E. Cleator, it is the oldest organisation in the world whose aim is exclusively to support and promote
astronautics and
space exploration. It is a
non-profit organisation with headquarters in
London and is financed by members' contributions. BIS publishes the academic journal
Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and the magazine
Spaceflight.
The BIS was preceded by the
American Interplanetary Society (founded
1930), the German
VfR, and Soviet rocket research groups, but unlike these it never became absorbed into a national industry.
When originally formed in January 1933, the BIS aimed not only to promote and raise the public profile of astronautics, but also to undertake practical experimentation into rocketry along similar lines to the organisations above. However early in 1936, the Society discovered this ambition was thwarted by the
Explosives Act of 1875, which prevented any private testing of
liquid-fuel rockets in the United Kingdom.
In the late 1930s, the group devised a project of landing people on the
moon by a
multistage rocket, each stage of which would be comprised of many narrow
solid-fuel rockets. Their lander was gumdrop-shaped but otherwise quite like the
Lunar Module. As it was considered that the cabin would have to rotate to provide artificial
gravity by
centrifugal force, the BIS is considered to have invented the first instrument for
space travel - a
navigation mechanism which would cancel out the rotating view.
In
1978, the Society published a
starship study called
Project Daedalus, which was a detailed feasibility study for a simple unmanned interstellar mission to
Barnard's Star using present-day technology and a reasonable extrapolation of near-future capabilities. Daedalus used a pellet driven nuclear-pulse
fusion rocket to accelerate to 12% of the
speed of light.
The science writer
Arthur C. Clarke is a well-known former Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society. The society won a
Sir Arthur Clarke Award.
*Professor
Archibald Low, one of the founder members of the BIS, and its President from 1936-1951.
*
BIS Homepage
