Final Orbit
2025 novel by Chris Hadfield
Final Orbit is a 2025 alternate history, thriller novel by Canadian retired astronaut and writer Chris Hadfield. It was first published in October 2025 in the United States by Little, Brown and Company, and in the United Kingdom by Quercus. The book is Hadfield's third novel in his Apollo Murders series, the first two being The Apollo Murders in 2021, and The Defector in 2023.
Final Orbit is set in an alternate 1975 and centers around the American-Soviet Apollo–Soyuz space mission. The novel includes a number of historical figures from the period, including US president Gerald Ford and Chinese chairman Mao Zedong. Hadfield stated that "almost everything in "Final Orbit" is real".
Background
Final Orbit revolves around the historic 1975 American-Soviet Apollo–Soyuz space mission, and is set against the backdrop of the abandoned American space station, Skylab, and Gerald Ford replacing Richard Nixon as US president. Hadfield said he wanted the book to be in chronological sequence with the two previous novels in the Apollo Murders series. Looking for a third player in the American-Soviet Space Race, he decided to add China after discovering the pivotal role Qian Xuesen had played in the development of Chinese aerospace. Hadfield explained that Xuesen was an American-Chinese scientist who joined Operation Paperclip after World War II to assess Nazi rocket scientists.
The public source identifies “Final Orbit” as 2025 novel by Chris Hadfield. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Final, Orbit and novel.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q138048332. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2021, 2023 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Final Orbit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.