Marooned (novel)

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Marooned is a 1964 science fiction thriller novel by Martin Caidin, about a mission returning from a space station which becomes stranded in Earth's orbit, oxygen running out, and only an experimental craft available to attempt a rescue. The film based on the novel was released in 1969, four months after the Apollo 11 mission.

The first edition of the novel Marooned involved a single astronaut stranded in orbit in a Mercury capsule, a rescue mission launched using the then-experimental Gemini spacecraft, and a Soviet Vostok also becoming involved in the mission.

The 1969 re-release of the novel, which coincided with the film, was extensively rewritten to reflect the advancements in the U.S. space program. The plot featured three U.S. astronauts stranded in an Apollo spacecraft after separation from an Apollo Applications Program space station (in fact, very similar to the later Skylab program actually flown in 1973-75).

The rescue mission in the 1969 edition was flown with an Titan III-C carrying an experimental X-RV lifting-body spacecraft, which was never actually flown in space. In this edition, the Soviet involvement in the rescue mission was portrayed as using a Soyuz spacecraft. With a dreadful irony, Caidin chose Soyuz 11 as the designation of the rescue flight: two years later, the real Soyuz 11 mission ended in tragedy when all three cosmonauts perished during re-entry.

In the original edition, the Mercury astronaut is Dick Pruett, and the pilot of the rescue mission is Jim Dougherty. In the 1969 version, the names were changed to Jim Pruett and Ted Dougherty, with Clayton "Stoney" Stone and "Buzz" Lloyd added to make up the three-man Apollo crew.