Marooned (1970) on Netflix

Three American astronauts are stranded in space when their retros won't fire. Can they be rescued before their oxygen runs out?

After spending several months in an orbiting lab, three astronauts prepare to return to earth only to find their rockets wont fire. After initially thinking they might have to abandon them in orbit, NASA decides to launch a daring rescue. Their plans are complicated by a hurricane headed towards the launch site and a shrinking air supply in the astronauts capsule.

—KC Hunt <khunt@eng.morgan.edu>

After a crew of three astronauts spend five of a planned seven months working in an orbiting space lab, the three astronauts - Jim Pruitt, Clayton Stone and Buzz Lloyd - are ordered to return to Earth by the head of the program, Charles Keith. They soon find however that their retro-rockets will not fire and they are unable to return. With only 42 hours of oxygen remaining, Keith and many others at NASA try to find a solution to get them back alive. With few options available, Ted Dougherty proposes a rescue mission using an experimental spacecraft that has yet to be rated for manned flight. To make matters worse, a hurricane is approaching the launch site. Faced with insufficient oxygen for all three of them, the astronauts face the ultimate decision. For those who survive, help comes from an unexpected source.

—garykmcd

Jim Pruett, Clayton Stone and Buzz Lloyd are the three astronauts aboard the Apollo spacecraft Ironman One, which is on a seven month mission to the space lab Saturn 4B (S4B). Due to what looks to be space fatigue, Charles Keith, chief of the space mission at NASA, protracts this mission at the five month stage. After separating Ironman One from the S4B, the astronauts find that their booster engines are not firing, literally meaning that they are stranded in space, with enough oxygen in Ironman One for the three of them for a little less than two days. Those in mission control have to decide whether to risk sending a rescue team which logistically would be a near impossibility to get everything organized to reach Ironman One within that time. Keith and Ted Dougherty, the chief astronaut, are on opposite sides of the argument, with the President ultimately falling on Dougherty's side to launch a rescue mission despite the odds. Dougherty will lead that rescue attempt. Something that reduces the odds even more is that the first hurricane of the Atlantic season has shifted course and is heading toward the Florida coast, Cape Canaveral the only location where there is even a rocket remotely ready to go. While Pruett, Stone and Lloyd's respective wives need to remain stoic both in public and in communicating to their husbands, the three aboard Ironman One have to decide which orders to follow. Most specifically, the three want to try and repair the boosters, not knowing exactly what is wrong with them, while those at mission control have ordered them to remain as inactive as possible to reserve their oxygen supply.

—Huggo