"I’ve got a blowout, damper three!"
by Rob - March 11th, 2010.Filed under: Pop Culture.
“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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