In a rediscovered 1963 interview, late British science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke predicts that the Soviet Union would win the Moon race by launching a manned mission to the Earth's natural satellite in 1968, The Guardian said.

In an episode of The Sky at Night, the world's longest running television science program, the writer says the Bolsheviks would send a manned mission to the Moon, probably on the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution.

The broadcast, thought to be lost without trace, has just resurfaced from a television station archive in Africa.

Clarke, who along with Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov makes up the "Big Three" of modern science fiction, said the United States would launch its manned mission to the Moon two years after the Soviet Union.

"The American moon project is a colossal thing, costing $10 million a day. I believe they will succeed in getting a man on the moon - and back again, which is equally important - not before 1970, but it will not be much after that," the writer said.

The statement was made two years after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to be sent into space on April 12, 1961, and six years before U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong made the first step on the Moon's surface on July 21, 1969.

© RIA Novosti.

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