British Interplanetary Society

The British Interplanetary Society (BIS) was founded in Liverpool in 1933 by Philip E. Cleator. Its aim is exclusively to support and promote astronautics and space exploration. The BIS was one of 13 national space societies who together founded the International Astronautical Federation in 1951. In 1978, the society published a starship study called Project Daedalus, which was a detailed feasibility study for a simple uncrewed interstellar flyby mission to Barnard's Star using present-day technology and a reasonable extrapolation of near-future capabilities. In 2008, the BIS published the academic journal Journal of the British Spaceflight. This was a gift of the independent science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, a well-known former chairman of the society. The society was presented with the first Special Award, from the Sir Arthur Clarke Society, for the Best Written Presentation in the category of Spaceflight, in the 2005 Sir Clarke Awards. The latest in this series of short-reaching studies produced in 2007 was the Project Boreas report, which designed a crewed station for the Martian North Pole.