British Interplanetary Society

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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.