Marooned is a 1964 science fiction thriller novel by American writer Martin Caidin, about a crewed spacecraft stranded in Earth orbit, oxygen running out, and only an experimental craft available to attempt a rescue.

The film was released in 1969, four months after the Apollo 11 mission, with the revised novel sold by book stores a few weeks earlier.

The first edition of the novel Marooned opens with the central character, Major Richard "Dick" Pruett, attempting to come to terms with his impending doom.

His engines have failed to fire for re-entry and he is stranded in orbit, where he faces death due to asphyxiation as he depletes the on-board supply of oxygen.

The story goes into an extended flashback that reviews Pruett's development as a US Air Force fighter test pilot and training as an astronaut.

An idiosyncratic book, the revision is part original novel and part novelization, its major alterations of plot and character adapted from the screenplay by Mayo Simon, which re-imagined the story along more then-contemporary lines; in keeping with this, Simon gets screenplay by-line credit on the cover and title page of the new edition, as well as specific acknowledgement from Caidin in a foreword.

With the crew launched on a planned seven-month mission docked to the S-4B workshop, ground controllers, including NASA Director Charles Keith, decide to terminate the flight two months early as Lloyd begins showing signs of fatigue and deteriorating performance.

Pruett's friend, now named Ted Dougherty, plans a rescue mission using an experimental X-RV lifting body spacecraft, an early study for the Space Shuttle orbiter.

(The real-life Soyuz 11 mission, in 1971, ended in tragedy when all three cosmonauts perished during re-entry while returning from Salyut 1, the first occupied space station.)

The 1969 version also features Dougherty's launch in the Titan IIIC being through the eye of a hurricane, after an earlier attempt, which might have been in time to save all three astronauts, is scrubbed at T-59 seconds by excessive wind conditions.