Orbit, by Thomas Block
Published on May 15, 2009 at 1:17 pm.
2 Comments.
Filed under science fiction.
Final Exams are over! Final grades are now turned in! I can sort of relax for a short bit, now. I still have tons of things to accomplish, but at least the frantic final exams week is over.
Over the last week, I’ve been grading exams, papers, computing grades, etc. But, I tend to try to take some time for myself and read a chapter or two of a book when I go to bed to sort of calm down and get ready for sleep. This week, I’ve been reading Orbit, by Thomas Block.
The book is a bit dated, it was written in 1982. But, it was still very interesting. With the Endeavour sitting on the launch pad as a potential rescue shuttle mission, this book seemed an appropriate read. The premise of the book is that a commercial hypersonic airliner has an accident that sends it into orbit. According to the plot line, the hypersonic aircraft flies too high and too fast for jets, so it uses rockets and they go out of control and send the aircraft into orbit. They don’t have enough air to last, and they seem to be stuck. NASA happens to have a Space Shuttle about to launch, and so they decide to scramble to send it up to save the airliner (that was what made me think to read the book, now). The book is filled with behind-the-scenes interplay between the characters. There are NASA top officials who see this as purely a way to get publicity for NASA, with rescuing the stranded passengers an afterthought. An official with the company that built the aircraft discovers that the accident that sent the aircraft into orbit was an act of sabotage. On board the aircraft, the passengers and crew deal with injuries, accidents, and interpersonal strife. The story is actually quite riveting. I had picked the book up on the clearance rack of a local book store, and it had sat in my stack of unread books for several years. Other books have come and gone from that stack, but I kept overlooking this one. That was a mistake. It was actually a very fun book, and I wish that I’d read it earlier!
As for technical details, there is a lot wrong with the science of the book. It is, after all, fiction, so I don’t expect it to be totally accurate. It might be interesting to mention a few things.
The idea of a rocketplane is not so outlandish. There has been talk of such a thing for a long time. In the 1970s, it had looked like there would be a demand for faster and higher aircraft. This was the age that they were building supersonic transports. The thought was that by the century’s end, that would be the way that the airlines would go. But, only a few such SSTs were built. They are too expensive to build, consume far too much fuel, and are too small to sell enough tickets for the airlines to make money. Bigger, slower aircraft make more money. Now, all commercial supersonic transports are gone. Even faster and more expensive rocketplanes are unlikely to be commercially in the current economy for passenger transport. There may be an argument for rapid courier services (same day package delivery to the other side of the world sort of thing), but not for passengers. Maybe that will change, though. And, even if a rocketplane were used for transport, it would not have engines capable of putting it into orbit — not even a low orbit. It would be silly to put engines that large and powerful on board, and such engines would consume so much fuel to put the aircraft into orbit that there would be no room for passengers.
Part of the plot involves NASA being able to send up a shuttle on a moment’s notice. In the novel, NASA is flying a shuttle about once per week, with only a couple week turn-around between landing and launch. They rush preparations to get a shuttle launched in a matter of hours instead of the normal weeks. This is really far fetched. However, at the time that the novel was written, it may not have seemed so far out there. After all, part of the pitch for the Space Shuttle program was that it would save money by having reusable spacecraft that didn’t sit around on the ground much. They would take off, land back near the launch site, be strapped onto another external tank, and take off again about as fast as they could be managed. The NASA public relations people were talking optimistically about a two or three week turnaround and perhaps better than one launch per week. That never was really possible. But, a lot of people other than the engineers and people most intimately associated with the space program seemed to accept that it may be possible. Had it really happened, then the Space Shuttle program would, indeed, have turned out to be economical. It is simply not possible to get a shuttle ready for launch in so short a time. Oh, and I really liked a scene in the novel where one of the astronauts is looking out at the shuttle’s external tank and it is described as being white. Only the very first few shuttles had white external tanks. After those few, NASA decided to leave the paint off, saving a great deal of weight. So, the rest of the tanks that have flown have been the orange color of the insulating foam.
There are several other parts of the story that are not realistic, too. At one point, a TV satellite moves into position to cover the rescue. It flies in formation with the aircraft. In reality, two bodies in orbit would have such different orbits that it would be unlikely for them to maneuver into formation like that unless one were launched with matching orbits as the intent of the launch (such as the current shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope). Another problem is in the manner that the airliner finally returns to Earth. What they describe really would not have worked. It would not have provided enough force, and it would have been in the wrong direction. I won’t say what they did, since I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone who wants to read it! Also, the solution worked out would likely have taken longer than the oxygen supply on board would have lasted as described in the novel. Oh, and I am not even going to tackle the pressure stress on the aircraft hull! That is yet another thing.
Long ago, I learned that not everything in science fiction is real, or even totally realistic. I really do enjoy the science fiction written with an attention to detail in terms of trying to make things are realistic as possible. But, if I were not able to sit back, accept the bad science, and just enjoy the read, then I’d long ago have run out of things to read! The fact is that I liked the book. It was enjoyable, and that is what matters to me.
-Astroprof
Mang on May 16, 2009 at 9:17 am: 1
There was a 1983 movie called Starflight with Lee Majors
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086357/plotsummary
It says it was loosely based on Orbit.
I recall seeing about 15 minutes of it flipping chanels once. It looked really bad.
J D Prasanna Deshapriya on May 17, 2009 at 1:51 am: 2
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Yours sincerely,
J D Prasanna Deshapriya