HOUSTON (Reuters) - Arthur C. Clarke will not be on board himself and the timing might be off by a couple of years, but a message penned by the science fiction writer and a DNA sample extracted from his hair will set off on a space odyssey in 2003.

The 83-year-old author of 2001 - A Space Odyssey is one of 55,000 people who have signed up to take part in a project organized by Houston-based Encounter 2001 LLC to send a message into deep space for anybody out there who may be interested.

"It's like a cosmic message in a bottle, an archive of humanity," said Encounter 2001 spokesman Chris Pancheri.

The spacecraft is tentatively scheduled for launch by an Ariane V rocket in French Guiana in the third quarter of 2003.

Pancheri said the project will cost about $25 million, which Encounter 2001 hopes to recoup through sponsorship deals.

The idea has proved popular among schoolchildren, he said, who view it as a new twist on the practice of burying time capsules so that they can be discovered by future generations.