"I've got a blowout, damper three!"

"Get your pitch to zero!"

"Pitch is out. I can't hold altitude."

"Correction, alpha hold is off. Trim selectors -- emergency!"

"Flight Com! I can’t hold it! She’s breaking up, she’s break --"

One of the reasons I'm thrilled to have my novel FlashForward adapted for television on ABC is that one of my favorite shows when I was a teenager -- The Six Million Dollar Man -- was on ABC, and it, too, was adapted from a novel: Cyborg by Martin Caidin.

But I realized that in all my collection of science-fiction toys and memorabilia, I didn't have anything to commemorate my fondess for the adventures of astronaut Steve Austin.

And so I bought the wooden model pictured above. It's a NASA/Northrop HL-10 lifting body. In the episode "The Deadly Replay," the craft that Austin crashed in, costing him an arm, both legs, and an eye, was identified as the HL-10, and the real HL-10 was used in the pilot and that episode (although the actual tumbling crash shown in the opening credits is a different lifting body, the M2-F2; the HL-10 is only seen in the opening credits in the shot of it from above as it drops from a B-52's wing accompanied by the words "We have separation").

I bought this from Builderscience on eBay; his asking price was US$68.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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