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I recall as a kid finding old books all over my house owned by my father and uncles from the 1960's and 1970's and 1980's at the latest (those 1980's ones were books from garage sales I bought actually), and there were a few that dealt with the whole bleak astronaut genre. That being the sort of macabre, "Heavy Metal" magazine sort of stories where astronauts would get stranded on a dead planetoid in outer space to languish, or one would go crazy and start killing eachother, or they'd get lost in space to float off into eternal darkness, or get eaten by cosmic radiation, and so forth which I think was prevalent to some degree around the decades of the space race. I think the song "Space Oddity" is actually in this genre too, since an astronaut in said song just floated off forever into the void. "2001: A Space Odyssey" is probably in here too since everyone got killed, basically.

Save for a few explosions and the diaper lady, I don't think NASA ever had any of these problems (maybe owing to a limited manned space program).

So what if any of that did happen? What if an astronaut did go crazy, and do something like kill himself, crash the capsule into the moon, trap everybody outside of the airlock, or something, or just simply have a nervous breakdown. What if astronauts just floated off into eternity due to some technical difficulty or one by his own free will, or crash landed on the moon with no way of recovery. Or any other macabre space scenarios.
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