"A Little Something for Us Tempunauts" is a science fiction short story by American writer Philip K. Dick.
Time travelers from the United States, called tempunauts, are sent only a few days into the future rather than a century as was intended.
Addison Doug, one of the tempunauts, believes that they are trapped with the rest of the Earth in a closed time loop, forever doomed to repeat the period between their starting their trip and their fatal return.
Doug decides to sabotage "reentry" unbeknownst to the others—by smuggling a mass of car engine parts into the time machine—to both at the same time (and completely contradictorily) find resolution in death and close the time-loop, freezing all of humanity, and possibly the whole universe, in endless repetition of a single week.
[2] Dick said in his afterword for The Best of Philip K. Dick: In this story I felt a vast weariness over the space program, which had thrilled us so at the start—especially the first lunar landing—and then had been forgotten and virtually shutdown, a relic of history.