Professor Joseph Pelton of George Washington University in Washington will receive the annual Arthur C. Clarke Award at the Satellite 2000 conference on Feb. 3. The award will be presented by The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation of the United States. Pelton also will deliver an "award lecture."

In addition to his duties at George Washington, Pelton is the founding president of the Society of Satellite Professionals International, the former chairman of the board and dean of the International Space University and a full member of the International Academy of Astronautics. Pelton was chosen for the award "on the basis of his farsighted and visionary views on the future technology and applications of satellite communications in such books as Global Talk, Future Talk and Future View and his many hundreds of articles," Clarke foundation officials said.

The Clarke award is given in honor of Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the conceiver of the geosynchronous communications satellite and author of 2001: a Space Odyssey. The award has been presented six previous times. Other winners are: John McLucas, former administrator of the FAA, former undersecretary of the U.S. Air Force and executive vice president of the Comsat Corp. [CQ]; Harold Rosen of Hughes Aircraft [GMH], the designer of the world’s first communications satellite, Intelsat 1, known as Early Bird; Joseph Charyk, the first president and chairman of the board of Communications Satellite Corp.; John Pierce of AT&T Bell Labs, the designer of the Telstar satellite and communications experiments with the Echo satellite; Yash Pal, former director of the Indian Space Research Organization, head of the Indian High Education Foundation and trustee of the International Institute for Communications; and Olof Lundberg, the first director general of Inmarsat.

The Satellite 2000 conference, where the award will be presented, is sponsored by Phillips International Inc. of Potomac, Md., publishers of Satellite Today and numerous other space and satellite publications. The conference is being held from Feb. 2-4 at the Washington Convention Center.