Marooned is a 1968 movie directed by John Sturges and staring Gregory Peck, Richard Crenna and Gene Hackman.

Marooned was released only three months before the Apollo 11 moon landing and is clearly tied to the topical public fascination with the event. The film does its best to depict the actual Apollo space program in a realistic fashion.

The film won an Oscar for Visual Effects.

Marooned was based on a 1964 novel by Martin Caidin. Caidin was a pilot who ran an aerospace consultancy firm and wrote a number of fiction and non-fiction books. The work he was most famous for was the novel Cyborg (1972), which became the basis of the television series The Six Million Dollar Man (1973-1978).

Plot

Three American astronauts are returning from several months at a space station when the retro rockets on their command module, "Ironman," fail to fire and they are stranded in orbit. Mission Control debates whether a rescue flight can reach them before their oxygen runs out. A hurricane is headed for the launch area delaying a rescue. Finally, a Soviet spacecraft also tries to make contact. The film ends on the somewhat Utopian wish fulfillment of the Space Race being resolved on a note of East-West cooperation.

The Film's Legacy

Marooned debuted only months before the moon landing, and the ill-fated Apollo 13. After seeing the same drama from the movie played-out in real life, the public and NASA began to question the safety of the US Space Program. Some say that the result of this contributed to the end of the NASA Apollo Project, the development of the Space Shuttle, and also the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project between the US and the Soviet Union.

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