It is with sadness that I recently learned of the death of a good friend, Claudio Maccone. He was born in 1948 and passed away in August 2025 at the age of 77 years. I first met Claudio in 2007 when I organised a major conference on the warp drive in London. Claudio presented a paper advocating for the use of general relativity tensor codes in analysing warp drive problems, and the need to put them on a consistent basis of comparison. He also participated in a documentary we had organised with the film maker Christian Darkin and that film was shown in some US cinemas and available on DVD.
Over the years I would bump into Claudio typically at a conference. This especially including meetings of the International Academy of Astronautics, since Claudio was very much involved in some of the committees, and in particular he was Chair of the permanent SETI committee from 2012 to 2021 and he was the chairman in some of my own speaking sessions.
We also went out for dinner a few times and toured museums. He was always very polite, with a thick Italian accent, and excellently dressed in his trade mark suits. I enjoyed his company. In 2013 myself and others organised a 65th birthday party for him at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop. He was very pleased as we gave him his cake. During that same trip we both presented at the NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville and toured the Goddard Rocket Center together afterwards. Below is a darkened picture of us both standing in front of a Saturn V.
I got the sense that Claudio was a lonely man, perhaps not with a big family, and I recall checking in on him during the Covid pandemic to make sure he was okay. As usual, he was busying himself with one problem or another. For his passions were wide and not just limited to SETI, but also to the idea of a telescope on the lunar far side. He also wrote several papers (and a book) on the gravitational lens and his work was instrumental in bringing greater awareness of the possibilities to a wider community.
One of the amazing things he did was when the JPL TAU mission study came to an end, he went out of his way to photocopy all of the papers and articles 10 times and distribute them among some of his close colleagues, predicting that one day we would need this work and build on from it. Indeed we did and when the JHAPL Interstellar Probe project came about I sent them a copy of Claudio’s paper package on TAU and this was a useful contribution.
For many years I had attempted to apply to be a member of the International Academy of Astronautics. The process for gaining entry is not easy, despite the fact that I had worked on a 200 AU mission proposal concept 3 study group many years ago with them. I pleaded with Claudio in 2024 to help me get the paper work done and he was assisting me with that. I had filled out all the forms and sent them to him. Alas, I doubt he submitted them before his passing and my membership of the Academy shall remain ever allusive.
Claudio was a likable fellow and I enjoyed his company and our many conversations. He was an excellent speaker, although amusingly always took liberties with the time and would often overrun - but then what do you expect from someone that had so much to say. Had he lived longer, I am sure he would have continued to contribute great work to the scientific enterprise of exploring space and finding intelligent life. He will be sadly missed, but not forgotten. Ciao my friend.
