The Dead Astronaut

✍ Scribed by J. G. Ballard

• Book ID: 106877752
• Publisher: Playboy Press
• Year: 1971
• Tongue: en-GB
• Weight: 10 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

"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: