From David Bowie’s Maj Tom and Elton John’s Rocketman via Capt Oates in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers to this summer’s Ryan Gosling movie Project Hail Mary, the astronaut who may be unable to come home has been a recurrent cultural character since Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth in 1961.
Another lonely floater is the pivotal figure in Ransack Theatre’s Life Out There by Tim Foley, a regular writer in the Doctor Who universe. Cmdr Isaacs, one of five explorers on a mission to find an alternative Earth after the first one was destroyed in unspecified but guessable ways, has vanished on a solo shuttle flight. But he is still a presence in the main capsule as a voice (Jack Myers) that may be AI recreation, memory or ghost from the viewpoints of his four crew mates as they contemplate landing on galactic location SQ356, a candidate for humanity’s second Eden.
