How does one recover poor stranded cosmonauts from the surface of the moon with a faulty spaceship?
If there were two astronauts on the moon and you stranded them on that rock... would that be fucked up or what? The situation was actually accounted for at some point -- the famous undelivered Nixon Moon Disaster speech.
The problems for such a situation are two-fold:
1. It is awfully expensive and difficult to pull off and
2. it takes just too long to do, so it's very likely that by the time you actually got there, they were already dead. (Afterall, there's no Walmart on the Moon yet.)
Putting my conspiranoic hat on, I would say that if that were to happen, they would publicly report that the person already died. However, history proves me wrong, and they were prepared to say “we’re leaving them there”.
Of course, technology advanced since then, but we’re not yet in a position to send a taxi to the Moon to go pick them up. Maybe SpaceX will come to save the day soon?
