James Bond and Moonraker by Christopher Wood, The Book of the Film.

To Vernon Harris, with affectionate gratitude.

Chapter 1, The End and the Beginning.

The 747 was flying high, nosing aside wisps of cloud as a celebrity might brush past eager reporters.

It was not alone.

On its back was the squat outline of the space shuttle it was transporting. The word moon raker

distinctively letted on its side. Seen from afar, the shuttle looked like a giant fish

riding on the back of a cruising whale. Inside the control cabin, the captain's eyes flickered over the panels of

instruments, the wavering needles, the banks of coloured lights. There was nothing abnormal. The

747 was flying itself. There appeared to be no adverse reaction to the unaccustomed load.

The captain was surprised and relieved. It proved what a hell of a good aeroplane, the 747 was.

The captain indulged a twinge of patriotic pride and wondered, not for the first time, why the

space shuttle was being lent to the British. Was it just for an airshow? It seemed a gesture both

expansive and expensive at a time when the administration was cutting back savagely on overseas spending

and when the space program itself was being starved of funds to the point where there had been

accusations in the Senate that space was being abandoned to the Russians. Maybe the British boffins

had come up with something that NASA could use. That seemed the most likely explanation.

While the shuttle was in England, the British scientists could run their own tests and confer with their American colleagues.

Despite limited resources, it was difficult to believe that the British had not come up with something since Blue Streak, if only at the drawing board stage.

Beside the captain, the first officer glanced at his watch and moistened his lips. He was thinking of pleasure,

not business, of an apartment off the Bayswater Road in London, where a lady of his acquaintance

would be checking that there was still enough Jack Daniels left in the bottle, and that extra

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