Marooned is a 1969 American science fiction film directed by John Sturges and starring Gregory Peck, Richard Crenna, David Janssen, James Franciscus and Gene Hackman about three astronauts who are trapped and slowly suffocating in space.
While the original novel was based on the single-pilot Project Mercury, the film depicted an Apollo command and service module with three astronauts and a space station resembling Skylab.
Three U.S. astronauts—commander Jim Pruett (Richard Crenna), "Buzz" Lloyd (Gene Hackman), and Clayton "Stoney" Stone (James Franciscus)—are the first crew of an experimental space station on an extended duration mission.
There are no backup launch vehicles or rescue systems available at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and NASA Director of Manned Spaceflight Charles Keith (Peck) opposes using an experimental U.S. Air Force lifting body, the X-RV, that would be launched on an Air Force Titan IIIC booster rocket; neither the spacecraft nor the booster is man-rated, and there is insufficient time to put a new crewed NASA mission together.
Ted Dougherty (David Janssen), NASA's Chief Astronaut, opposes Keith and demands that something be done, claiming most time-consuming preparation items can be dismissed.
The President agrees with Dougherty and tells Keith that failing to try a rescue mission will kill public support for the crewed space program.
While the astronauts' wives (Lee Grant, Mariette Hartley and Nancy Kovack) agonize over the fates of their husbands, all normal checklist procedures are bypassed to prepare the X-RV for launch.
He orders everyone into their spacesuits then leaves the ship, ostensibly to attempt repairs, although this option has been repeatedly dismissed as futile and wasteful of oxygen.
He can do nothing but deliver oxygen, since the Soviet ship is too small to carry additional passengers and lacks equipment to dock with the Apollo.
Stone and Lloyd, suffering oxygen deprivation and lapsing into semiconsciousness, cannot understand the cosmonaut's gestures or obey Keith's instructions from Houston.
The Soviet cosmonaut shines a light on Lloyd, drifting slowly away from the Apollo; Dougherty retrieves him using a maneuvering pack.
After separating, both the Soviet ship and the X-RV execute retrofire to return to Earth, and the final scene fades out with a view of the abandoned Ironman One adrift in orbit.
He wrote in an internal memorandum that "It would be better for the agency's standpoint if this picture was never made" because of the spacecraft failure and threat of death in space it would portray.
Amid concerns about the size of the project, Columbia Pictures' M. J. Frankovich offered Capra $3 million to make the film, prompting him to abandon development.
NASA, and its primary contractors such as North American Aviation and Philco-Ford, helped with the design of the film's hardware, including the crew's chairs inside the capsule, the orbiting laboratory—which used an early mock-up of the Skylab concept—the service module,[5] the actual Plantronics headsets worn by the actors in the spacecraft, as well as authentic replicas of actual facilities, such as the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) at Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Air Force Launch Control Center (AFLCC) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
[12] In a review for The New York Times, Howard Thompson, applauded the movie as "[l]eanly structured, crisply performed," "beautifully directed," and "admirably intelligent all the way," bemoaning only an intermission that "severs the tension and cripples the dramatic crescendo" and a climax that "seems curiously antiseptic" and lacks "a vital, culminative wallop.