Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)
The concept of telecommunications and weather forecasting satellites came about at exactly the right time in world history. The primordial forms of the space agencies in the US and UK consulted with him all through the decade, but also the private corporations which had a stake in the culmination of his work. In fact, the original concept for NBC's Today program in 1952 was devised by Sylvester "Pat" Weaver -- another free thinker -- after having consulted with Clarke on the idea of creating an on-air platform for the broadcast of news via satellite.
And as we now know, much of the Soviet program to launch the first orbital satellite, Sputnik (albeit far from a geostationary one) was driven not by any great need to build a telecommunications network before the Americans did, but because the Soviets believed such a network could shut them out of the communications age. Without the knowhow to build such a network for itself (the Soviet Union had rocket engineers and cosmonauts, but it didn't have a match for Clarke), its leaders came to the conclusion that the best way to stall an American effort was to break its will. Thus, Sputnik was very much brought about, if indirectly, by Arthur C. Clarke.
While Clarke was not an anti-religious person, he was not religious. He held no idols, not even some madly singing obelisk suspended in space holding the keys to the universe. In fact, he believed in the notion that everything that exists could be rationally explained, if only we were intelligent enough to do so. In a sense, that's faith, though I'm sure Clarke wouldn't have wanted to call it that.
In an essay published in the late 1950's called Where's Everybody?, Clarke openly pondered the question of intelligent life beyond Earth. He genuinely believed it existed, but that there were practical reasons why we haven't actually discovered it, or it discovered us, yet. Then what do you think, he'd be asked on the lecture circuit, all those UFOs are? His response would grow boilerplate over the years, and later by his own admission, almost tiresome:
A great deal of what people thought they may have known about "science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke" was presumed, even invented by the Hollywood fantasy machine. In truth, he was a great speculative thinker, and someone who could project legitimacy into a future timeframe with character and with plausibility.
So while popular media may choose to project the image of the glowing fetus staring longingly at Earth as a symbol of that place where the spirit of the man now resides -- a place I don't think he really believed in anyway -- it may be better to think of him in the place he truly projected for himself in his own work: the tales of everyday people in advanced, though believable, circumstances.
Down there on Earth the twentieth century is dying. As I look across at the shadowed globe blocking the stars, I can see the lights of a hundred sleepless cities, and there are moments when I wish I could be among the crowds now surging and singing in the streets of London, Capetown, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Madrid...Yes, I can see them all at a single glance, burning like fireflies against the darkened planet. The line of midnight is now bisecting Europe: in the eastern Mediterranean a tiny, brilliant star is pulsing as some exuberant pleasure ship waves her searchlights to the sky. I think she is deliberately aiming for us; for the past few minutes the flashes have been quite regular and startlingly bright. Presently I'll call the communications center and find out who she is, so that I can radio back our own greetings.
Passing into history now, receding forever down the stream of time, is the most incredible hundred years the world has ever seen. It opened with the conquest of the air, saw at its mid-point the unlocking of the atom -- and now ends with the bridging of space.