Ashtyn was born in 1929, in London, the youngest son of R. A. Smith (Sky at Night Feb 2003 at 4minutes 30seconds), the early space pioneer and Founder Member of the British Interplanetary Society. As a boy Ashtyn watched his father construct the prototype of the first navigational instrument ever made by the hand of Man that was designed specifically to be used in outer space. The instrument was named a ‘coelostat’ and its function was to enable an astronaut to look out of a rotating spaceship and see the star field as a stationary image. The device was later demonstrated to the public at the Science Museum in Kensington.
Early pre-war meetings of the BIS were held at ‘Smithy’s’ house in North London, and Ashtyn took a lively interest in everything they did..
Evacuated at the outbreak of WWII at the age of nine he rejoined his family four years later and was delighted to find his father still seriously planning Mankind’s way to the Moon.
While evacuated he had passed a scholarship exam and was admitted to the Royal Grammar School at High Wycombe. He studied seamanship in the town’s Sea Cadets and was simultaneously an enthusiastic member of the School’s Air Training Corps. As an ATC cadet he spent a lot of time hiking around wartime England obtaining flights on his own initiative in twenty-six types of aircraft. There were many exciting and amusing incidents including one very brief entanglement over Southampton in a dogfight between a German FW-190 and a British Typhoon.
In the winter of 1944, on his fifteenth birthday, Ashtyn was receiving a rocketry lecture from Ralph on the usual subject of travelling to the Moon. Ralph explained that using fuel and oxidant combinations then known it was not possible to get a useful payload to the Moon in a single shot. He pointed out that it was inefficient to carry half empty fuel tanks all the way there and back, for example. The answer, he proposed, was to fire a number of rockets into a low Earth orbit, each one having a useful payload of fuel, and then assemble and fuel a single vehicle to make the relatively easy cislunar transition, orbit around the Moon and return to low Earth orbit for another orbital refuelling for the descent to the Earth’s surface.
After that explanation Ashtyn commented that surely what was required would be a service station in orbit, a ‘space station’ in permanent orbit around the Earth. That moment was the beginning of artificial satellite technology and Ashtyn was, as far as is known, the first person to suggest it! An all night ‘blue sky session’ followed during which many applications of the artificial satellite were proposed. A deep-looking orbital telescope was discussed, as was the need for a shuttle vehicle. Global communication, Earth observation, weather forecasting and zero-G science were all discussed
Excited by the ideas that were suggested by the artificial satellite concept, Ralph began illustrating his concept of the engineering approach and made his first design sketches of a feasible permanent manned solar-poweered space station with an orbital telescope incorporated in the structure.
In the spring of 1945 with the war in Europe over, Ralph and Ashtyn took a holiday touring around the West of England and called in on fellow pre-war BIS member, the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke. Clarke was very excited to be told about the impact upon communications, meteorology, Earth surveillance and so forth, that the satellite concept would bring and he immediately wrote an article that was published in “Wireless World” soon after. Regrettably Clarke neglected to mention in the article his source of information about the satellite concept, although he did acknowledge ‘overhearing some BIS people talking about it’ when he was asked directly on “This is your life” if he was indeed the ‘inventor of the satellite’.
An article about Smith’s Space Station and a picture of the design was published in the “Daily Telegraph” in 1947. Ashtyn took the clipping in to show his classmates, and received the kind of ribbing one might expect at a typical English school.
Ashtyn obtained an Oxford School Certificate in 1945 and went on in the Science Sixth form to take Higher School Certificate in 1947 with Scholarship Physics, Chemistry, Pure Maths, Applied Maths and English.
Two years of National Service in the Royal Air Force followed, of which ten months was spent studying airborne radar. He served on the Berlin Airlift and with the British Air Force of Occupation with a squadron of Mosquitoes.
Demobilised in the spring of 1950 he worked briefly in Whitehall, but soon found intelligence work less interesting than the science fiction stories he was writing at home. On his twenty-first birthday, Arthur C. Clarke gave him a typewriter and offered him a job as an assistant. For a few weeks he was a plot writer, proof-reader and photographer in return for board and lodging and coaching in writing skills. He contributed the concept of the alien ‘Sentinel’, a device left on Earth to alert and inform an alien civilisation that intelligent life had evolved. This became the ‘black slab’ of “2001 A Space Odyssey”. Ashtyn also contributed the basic plot of “Childhood’s End”, in particular the idea that the human race is about to undergo a really fundamental evolutionary step forward. He also gravely informed Clarke that he intended to write a rational Great Unification Theory by the year 2000 – by which time he would be seventy.
He worked for three years as a technician in the thermionic valve factory that Ralph had designed as a ‘shadow factory’ during the war. He renewed his interest in Physics and Maths by taking ‘A-levels’, and collaborated closely with his father throughout 1953 on the creation of fifty=two pictorial representations of all the phases of a future exploration of the Moon. Ralph was content to have Ashtyn write the explanatory texts to describe each picture. The pictures were all finished, and the text of the book was half completed when Clarke’s literary agent found a publisher, and suggested that the text should preferably be written by a well-known author. Arthur got the job, and now lists R A. Smith’s “Exploration of the Moon” as his own work, without reference to the actual author!
Naturally disappointed by this outcome, Ashtyn rejoined the scientific civil service and worked in the Guided Weapons Department at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough until 1958. While at the RAE he took an HNC course in Applied Physics, followed by an Advanced Physics and Maths course for graduateship of the Institute of Physics. He was delighted to discover how much remains to be discovered about physics. No one yet knows how gravity or electromagnetic forces work. Consciousness is not understood. The Big Bang theory is obvious nonsense. The true nature of matter and light is a mystery. How the cosmos operates is pure conjecture. All of these questions are an excellent challenge, and his desire to find the answers grew.
After the first firing of the Black Knight rocket on the Isle Of Wight he accepted an offer from a Canadian company and emigrated with his first wife and first two children.
The Canadian job on the Sparrow II, an air-to-air weapon, was cancelled in favour of an American system, and the entire team of missile engineers was contracted by Boeing Seattle. The whole group, some one hundred and sixty engineers with their families and cars travelled across Canada by special train, arriving in Seattle just before Christmas 1958.
Six years of missile system work followed at Boeing locations in Seattle, New York, Niagara Missile base, Vandenberg AFB California, Wright-Patterson AFB Dayton Ohio, Montgomery Air Defence Sector, Eglin AFB Florida, and Marshall Spaceflight Centre Huntsville Alabama ..
During his time at Vandenberg in September 1961 Ashtyn wrote to Bertrand Russell, who was at the time leader of the Committee of One Hundred, with a situation analysis that advanced the view that war should be brought to an end by a system that he named ‘Pacific Defence’. Two years later a garbled version of the idea was presented to the public in a grossly distorted way by the “Dr Strangelove” movie made by Stanley Kubrick as ‘the Doomsday Machine’. This experience was frustrating but also informative. He began at last to realise something that a child would guess, that an end to war was the very last thing that would ever be wanted by the industry. It is not a grave obligation to be reluctantly undertaken by those capable to do it. The weapon makers rely upon continuing competition in destructiveness to ensure their future earnings. If they are intelligent enough to do this work they ought to realise that they should not do it merely to oblige the obscenely greedy ones amongst us.
Ashtyn’s final job at Boeing was to be one of a small group of senior engineers whose task it was to provide Boeing management with analysis of future business possibilities for Boeing launch vehicles twenty-five years on.. Finding little probability that there would be any large scale scientific effort on the Moon in the near future, he looked into the possible military uses of the Moon, and considered the possibility of deploying a future large aperture phased laser weapon on the Earth-turned face of the Moon. Such a weapon would, of course, be an economically viable ultimate weapon. It would be able to attack almost any point on the Earth’s surface within a single day. As that fact sank in, Ashtyn became increasingly reluctant to devote any further effort to the creation of new weapon systems. He was happy to spend some time specifying mission abort criteria for the manned landing phases of the Apollo missions.
He had estimated the transport cost of the operation to build a base and weapon on the Moon at sixty billion 1964 dollars. That figure was for many years misquoted as being an estimate of the total cost of a city on the Moon. Every successive president has renewed keep-alive funding appropriations for the system that Ashtyn named Damocles, but which is better known as SDI.
Three years were then spent at IBM’s Federal Systems Division , Huntsville Alabama, writing Instrument Unit system specifications for The Saturn V launch vehicle, followed by two years working on the telemetry system for the deep-space Voyager and Explorer missions.
TV coverage of the Vietnam war eventually persuaded Ashtyn to return permanently to England and he spent the next five years in non-military work while he agonized over the problem posed by the global military industrial complex. He realized the stark truth that given sufficient time, an ultimate weapon would undoubtedly arrive, and lead to the probability of a global tyranny of unprecedented scale and duration.
In 1975 the concept of a global second order macrobeing came into focus, and Diagram Twelve was painted, although the physics to support such an event was still a long way off, not even in sight.
Finally, in 1994, while explaining to an old friend, Michael Haig, exactly why he did not accept the “Big Bang” explanation of the Red Shift, he hit upon a crucial concept. Space clearly has properties. It portrays position and distance and movement, and it transmits forces and radiation. It also supports the existence of sentience, light and matter. If space is simply nothing, how does it achieve such a spectacular repertoire of behavior? Surely there can be no ‘behavior’ without ‘structure’?
By November 1995 a first version of a hypothesis was written, and was very tentatively submitted to the Astronomer Royal at the Institute of Physics. He did not feel able to comment, and recommended that Ashtyn should try another Professor. London, Cambridge, Bristol and Oxford were all tried, but as one might expect, no-one made even the slightest comment. The theory of structured energetic space though rather badly written and somewhat chaotic appeared to cover all the important aspects of reality so neatly it seemed impossible to ignore it. But that is what happened, and so it became clear that another way must be found. Fortunately the long wait for a global network came to an end about then, and as the 20th century closed, the Internet blossomed.
