Space Review: Saving Colonel Pruett

[Graham2001]

Fifty years ago, the movie Marooned offered one of the more realistic portrayals of spaceflight of that era, depicting an Apollo spacecraft stuck in orbit. John Charles explains how that dilemma could have been avoided, and thus one of the film’s characters could have survived, had they only known about backup procedures.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3723/1

I actually own a copy of this one and spent a little time with Orbiter and NASSP trying to figure out the launch inclination for this mission. As to my result, it is doeable and I was able to confirm that all the ground traces shown in the film appear to be accurate and consistent. I'll dig up my notes on that later.

I'll admit my interest in the film was always trying to figure out the fallout...

 

[Graham2001]

A little update to this one. I'd almost forgotten that back in '09 I'd started work on a 'Marooned' based scenario pack for NASSP (What I completed back then may still be in the current build for NASSP.) but from the notes for that, here are the 'stats' for Ironman 1 compared with Skylab 4.

Mission Name: Ironman One
Station: S-IVb OWS
Station Alt: 480km
Inclination: 43º
Rendezvous: 2nd orbit
Duration: 7 months (cut to 5 months)
Deorbit: Single SPS burn.

Name: Skylab Four
Station: Skylab
Station Alt: 427 by 432
Inclination: 50º
Rendezvous: 5th Orbit
Duration: 2 months (extended to 3 months)
Deorbit: Dual SPS Burn

The inclination was the result of many test launches to match a specific ground trace (The ground traces in the film are all consistent with a spacecraft in an orbit with a 43º inclination, unusually for Hollywood someone actually paid attention to the small stuff.), the altitude comes in part from dialog in the film and in part from NASA documentation which indicated in the planning for the Earth-Orbit-Rendezvous version of Apollo, the lunar spacecraft would be assembled at this altitude.