In space, no-one can hear you snore. The opening two-parter of Defying Gravity introduced us, in a sluggish and tortuous manner, to the six-year mission of the spacecraft Antares, which contains eight astronauts and will visit seven planets, starting with Venus. Everything was meant to be stirring and momentous as mankind took up the baton previously lifted by the likes of Vasco da Gama and Neil Armstrong, to pursue the quest for knowledge and new frontiers. More prosaically, the trade journals tell us that Antares may be brought down by networks pulling the financial plug before it can be guided to its destiny by the mysterious life form lurking in the ship's Pod 4.