Captain Ridley O'Bannon

Captain Ridley O'Bannon is a character from Ghost Ship and Impact. She works for the Global Defence Force as an astronaut, originally hired to maintain the EDEN generation ship, but later promoted to captain of the new Global One satellite.

She is a close friend of John Tracy, and the two have weekly zero-g handball practice in Thunderbird 5.

Biography

EDEN Generation Ship

Ridley makes her biannual visit to EDEN, the derelict generation ship orbiting around the moon. After EDEN mysteriously starts up, Ridley is blown into the vacuum of space through an open airlock. On her way out, her air tank is punctured and she is losing air fast. EOS picks up a very faint GDF-encoded message, and John is sent out in his new Exopod to save her. After her rescue, she insists on returning to EDEN to see what's going on. Upon exploring with John, they discover that the Builder Bots have come back online. With some further exploration, they realise that scavengers Reece and Dobbs have brought the systems back online. Dobbs thinks they can stop the bots by reversing their programming, but instead they start taking the ship apart, the opposite of what they were supposed to do. John, with help from his younger brother Alan, takes Ridley, Reece and Dobbs to safety. Ridley - who should have arrested the two scrap metal traders - instead decides to let them go for their bravery against the rogue Builder Bots and give them the rights of salvage to the vessels remaining scraps.^[1]

Global One Satellite

After finishing off another round of her weekly handball with John, Ridley returns to her new station, Global One. However, the peace doesn't last for long, as Langstrom Fischler's new comet-harvesting experiment goes badly wrong, with the comet heading straight for the satellite. Ridley issues the command to abandon ship but stays herself, and begs John to come and save her, on the condition that he saves the satellite, too. Thunderbird 5 changes its usually fixed orbit to come get her, and uses the Space Elevator's mooring claw to grab hold of the station and move it out the way. Ridley knows it won't be enough, so she has to make her way along the roof of the station to access the manual thruster controls. However, the satellite is now being pelted with small fragments of the comet, and Ridley gets stuck between two solar panels on the return trip. John has to venture out in the comet debris in the Exopod to save her, and just moments later she returns the favour when John takes a knock from a comet.^[2]