The Dead Astronaut
- Authors
- J. G. Ballard
- Publisher
- Playboy Press
- Tags
- science fiction; american , science fiction; english , space flight to the moon
- Date
- 1971-03-15T00:00:00+00:00
- Size
- 0.07 MB
- Lang
- en
"Cape Kennedy has gone now" (67). In this of Ballard's worlds, Florida has been
long since abandoned by NASA and Cape Kennedy has become a crash-zone, a place
where the orbiting satellites home-in on their return to earth and literally
crash. In addition to the unmanned satellites in orbit, "a dozen astronauts had
died in orbital accidents, their capsules left to revolve through the night sky
like the stars of a new constellation" (69). One of these dead astronauts,
Robert Hamilton, had become an obsession of Judith and Philip, ex-NASA employees
who had only briefly known the astronaut: