A pretty girl wanders off from an anniversary party and heads to the beach for a late-night swim. Shortly afterwards, the girl is found dead — apparently murdered. So begins a new TV mini-series, Ascension, which starts on British television tonight. The plot is not, however, quite as formulaic as it sounds. The party and even the beach, it soon emerges, are on board a vast spaceship. As for the milestone being celebrated, it is the 51st anniversary of the original 600-man U.S. crew blasting off from Earth in a rocket powered by nuclear bombs. They are halfway through a 100-year journey to colonise a planet so secret its existence was kept hidden from the public.
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Sky's Ascension TV series is based on a U.S. defence project called Orion
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Project began after Sputnik I was launched by the Soviet Union in 1957
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Scientists, including British physicist Freeman Dyson, planned to propel a giant rocket through space by exploding thousands of mini atomic bombs
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The project was quietly killed off at the beginning of 1965
‘We were a bunch of crazies in a way,’ he said of the @placeholder team.