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No longer catatonic after prolonged exposure to the rigors of deep space isolation, Venture Flight Commander John Cost surveys the impact of his disappearance on the Kennedy Space Center. It wasn’t supposed to be this bad. KSC is blasted, its amenities now support a growing refugee camp. Somewhere in the wake of having disappeared along with his shuttle and its entire crew, Cost returns to find not only the landscape, but the dream of spaceflight destroyed. Yet Cost returns with wondrous news, he and the crew of the Venture have made first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. The Venture itself has been retrofitted with science-fictional technologies that allow for super-lightspeed exploration of the galaxy. And he has returned to Earth to ensure humanity takes a permanent step into space. Yet Cost now confronts a humanity that has forgotten how to look up.
In a moving Foreword, writer Warren Ellis sets out the project of Orbiter. ‘This is a book about returning to space in the face of fear and adversity. It’s a book about glory. About going back to space, because it’s waiting for us, and it’s where we’re meant to be. We can’t allow human space exploration to become our history.
‘Human spaceflight remains experimental. It is very dangerous. It demands great ingenuity. But we are old enough, now, to do these things. Growing up is hard. But we cannot remain children, standing on the shore or in front of the TV set’.
The eloquence of hope contrasted starkly with death of the dream of spaceflight, Orbiter speaks to our dreams for a better world, and our responsibility to keeping those dreams alive. Forty years ago, to the day, our species landed human beings on an alien soil using simpler technology than iPhone. It is time to reclaim our heritage, and recall the words of President John F Kennedy: ‘We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard’.
