Astronaut Lost in Space—“Is Being a Space Traveler Dangerous?”

We’ve all heard stories about an “astronaut lost in space,” but what about an astronaut lost in time? When space travel between distant stars becomes reality, insurance companies will face applications that defy every risk category ever conceived. Consider this:

A Very Short Story: “Application Denied.”

Harrison Blackwell III set down his platinum stylus and stared at the holographic application floating above his mahogany desk. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Blackwell & Associates’ 47th floor office, Manhattan glittered like scattered diamonds. His assistant robot glided silently across Italian marble, delivering Earl Grey in bone china.

But Harrison wasn’t admiring the view or savoring his tea. He was gawking at the most insane insurance application in the firm’s 200-year history.

Occupation: Interstellar Astronaut. Duration of employment: Six months, ship-time. Actual elapsed time: Nine years Earth-standard. Applicant will experience severe temporal displacement due to relativistic (time-difference) effects. Loved ones will age significantly during applicant’s absence.

Ongoing psychological and emotional torture. Temporal exile, due to time dilation (astronauts age slowly). Radiation sickness. Repeated assignments likely.

Harrison laughed—a bitter sound that echoed off the crystal chandelier. “TIME DILATION,” he barked. “Astronauts want coverage for a job where abnormal survival is the punishment, and every homecoming is a funeral.” He huffed. “If they make it home.”

He stamped the application: REJECTED—UNINSURABLE RISK.

Harrison reached for his next file—“NASA Motion Sickness Test Subjects (Gallaudet Astronaut Training Program Revisited)”—and barely glanced at it before stamping APPROVED. Spinning rooms, “vomit comet” zero-G simulators, storm-tossed ferryboats? Child’s play. At least those brave souls came home to the same decade.

But interstellar? Some jobs, Harrison realized shaking his head, were simply too dangerous at any price.

The Original Hell Jobs
When Death Was Part of the Job Description

In the 1930s, during the Golden Age of Pulp Fiction, L. Ron Hubbard got the idea to look into and write stories about dangerous professions. In order to identify them, Hubbard turned to a life insurance company. But just knowing what those jobs were was not enough for him. He did what any daring writer would do: he went out and actually worked these death-defying occupations.

Having procured a list of extra-hazardous professions, Ron proceeded to pilot experimental aircraft, drive logs down North Pacific rivers, and otherwise immerse himself in the so-called K jobs, those deemed too dangerous to underwrite.

As Hubbard explained:

“These are the accident taboos. The rating, as you know, starts at A, the preferred risk on accident. This covers clerks and writers and such. Then there is B, a little higher and having more risk to it, and then you go up letter by letter until you get to E…. Then comes this rating K. K is out completely. It’s the ban.”

The Hell Job Series for Argosy magazine brought to life characters like Horace Purdy Potts, radio operator on a rust bucket loaded with explosive cargo, Sleepy McGee, a civil engineer building roads through hostile jungles, and Clip Gilroy, facing “forty jungle beasts, ten tons of big cat—claws out, fangs bared—leaping at your chest.”

These were the jobs that made insurance companies break out in cold sweats—deep-sea divers, test pilots, oil well shooters, circus acrobats who danced with death daily. But L. Ron Hubbard saw something coming that would make all those escapades look like desk jobs….

The Price of Relativity
The Science that Broke Our Hearts

“It [getting up to light speed (186,000 miles per hour)] was less tiring on the crew through the hundred fifties [thousands] and up, for one’s weight eased down as the gravity curve decreased. But she had to work for it and one could feel her throbbing by touching his finger to the rail.”

—from To the Stars by L. Ron Hubbard

Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity sounds like a gift from the cosmos: travel fast enough, and time slows down for you. What could be better than staying young while exploring the universe? But Einstein’s elegant equations conceal a truth that would make even the bravest Hell Job worker think twice.

Here’s the cosmic irony: as an astronaut approaches the speed of light, time dilation kicks in with mathematical precision. The faster you go, the slower your personal clock ticks relative to everyone back home. It sounds like a superpower—until you realize it’s actually cosmic trauma.

Picture this: you’re a 25-year-old interstellar astronaut, kissing your sweetheart goodbye at the spaceport. Your mission to star-system Alpha Centauri will take six months ship-time. Easy trip, right? Wrong. When you return after only six months, nine years have passed on Earth. Your love is now 34, has probably married someone else, maybe has kids. You’ve aged six months; she’s lived nearly a decade more.

But here’s where it gets truly unsettling—the effect compounds. Take a second trip? Another decade gone. A third? Your former girlfriend is now quite aged while you’re barely 26. Take enough trips, and you become a temporal ghost, watching generations live and die while you remain frozen in time.

“He who is gone for a century cannot well return. He knows too little. His people are dead. He has no place and he does not fit.”

—from To the Stars by L. Ron Hubbard

Einstein’s theory wasn’t just describing physics; it was prescribing the ultimate existential torture. The twin paradox isn’t merely a thought experiment—it’s a preview of heartbreak. Time dilation transforms the greatest human adventure into the cruelest punishment: you get to see infinity, yes; but you lose everything finite and precious.

Insurance companies in the 1930s worried about workers dying on the job. They never imagined a profession where the real danger was living too long—in all the wrong ways.

The Human Cost in To the Stars—Astronaut Return to Earth
LRH’s Vision of Temporal Tragedy

“Space is deep, Man is small and Time is his relentless enemy.”

—first line from To the Stars by L. Ron Hubbard

Twenty years before mainstream sci-fi caught on, L. Ron Hubbard was already torturing readers with time dilation’s emotional mathematics. Published in 1950, To the Stars didn’t just use Einstein’s theory as window dressing—it weaponized relativity against the human heart.

Young protagonist Alan Corday’s first return to Earth reads like a cosmic horror story. His parents are dead, their house replaced by a factory. His fiancée is an 80-year-old amnesiac who barely remembers his name. The upscale neighborhood of his youth has become a slum.

“He was on the long passage with the outcasts and pariahs of space. And from the ache in his body he knew he was already split away from the clocks of Earth and on a deadly route of his own.”

—from To the Stars by L. Ron Hubbard

But Hubbard’s genius wasn’t just showing us one man’s loss—it was revealing the Hound of Heaven’s starship crew as a society of the temporally damned. Captain Jocelyn and his men aren’t simply explorers; they’re refugees from time itself, each carrying the weight of centuries they’ve lost. They’ve become humanity’s ultimate martyrs, sacrificing not their lives but their very existence in linear time.

The bitter irony cuts deep: these men who unlock the universe’s greatest secrets—hyperspace travel, alien civilizations, the cosmos itself—pay for it by becoming strangers to their own species. They trade infinity for intimacy, cosmic knowledge for human connection.

“But was it simple? When he thought of his last trip in he wondered. The language had changed so much that he had been very poorly understood.… His own [engineering] technology was 3,500 years forgotten and rusty on Earth. To fit himself into that society now he would have to start in the first grade and study everything from grammar to manners. He did not belong on Earth anymore. He was homeless, a wanderer in absolute zero and eternity.”

—from To the Stars by L. Ron Hubbard

Hubbard understood that the price of touching the stars wasn’t death—it was becoming untouchable yourself.

Modern Echoes
Today’s Hell Jobs Don’t Compare

Today’s insurance companies still sweat over dangerous occupations. Deep-sea saturation divers risk nitrogen narcosis and decompression death at 1,000 feet down. Astronauts on the International Space Station in low earth orbit face radiation, micrometeorites, and the vacuum of space when braving outside repairs. Offshore oil riggers battle 80-foot waves and explosive blowouts. Bomb disposal experts literally handle death in their steady hands.

Even NASA’s early space program required volunteers for jobs no sane person would want. In the 1950s, they recruited eleven deaf men—the “Gallaudet Eleven”—to test motion sickness and weightlessness effects for future astronauts. These brave souls spent twelve days in spinning rooms, rode the “vomit comet,” and sailed through Nova Scotia ocean storms so rough that the NASA researchers themselves got violently seasick enough to call off the trials, while the deaf volunteers played cards companionably.

But here’s the thing—they all go home eventually. The saturation diver surfaces to his family. The low-earth-orbit astronaut returns to Earth within six months, with a little muscle loss. The oil rigger gets shore leave. Even if they die, they all die in their own time-period, among their own people.

The interstellar astronaut? He’s sentenced to watch civilization evolve without him, to become a ghost haunting human history. Physical death can end suffering—but temporal exile extends it across centuries.

So here’s the question insurance adjusters will soon face: Would you take a job where survival is the punishment?

Closing
The Application Question

Position: Interstellar Astronaut

Requirements: Surrender your place in human time. Watch centuries crush everything you leave behind. Become homeless in your own species—a wanderer in “absolute zero and eternity.” Outlive everyone who could remember you existed.

Compensation: The universe

Insurance: Zero

Though L. Ron Hubbard recognized that some jobs are too dangerous even for the brave, he nevertheless leaves us with an optimistic vision for future intelligent solutions in To the Stars: “Man shall triumph at last amongst the stars.”

To get To the Stars, click here.

Listen to an excerpt from the To The Stars audiobook here.

To get the Hell Job Series hardcover or audiobook, click here.

Listen to an excerpt from the Hell Jobs Series audiobook here.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Galaxy Press. (2025, March 5). To the Stars: L. Ron Hubbard’s man out of time. https://galaxypress.com/to-the-stars-l-ron-hubbards-man-out-of-time/

Galaxy Press. (2025, February 5). Dr. Gregory Benford on To the Stars. https://galaxypress.com/dr-gregory-benford-on-to-the-stars/

Galaxy Press. (n.d.). Hell Job Series. https://galaxypress.com/product/the-hell-job-series/

Galaxy Press. (2023, October 28). L. Ron Hubbard’s popular fiction from the 1930s and 1940s. https://galaxypress.com/l-ron-hubbard-popular-fiction-from-the-1930s-and-1940s/

Secondary Sources

Benford, G. (2005, January 1). To the Stars. Crows Nest. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20060323120953/http://www.computercrowsnest.com/features/arc/2005/nz7377.php

Bly, B. (2025, March 5). To the Stars: L. Ron Hubbard’s man out of time. Galaxy Press. https://galaxypress.com/to-the-stars-l-ron-hubbards-man-out-of-time/

Hubbard, L. R. (1950, February). To the Stars. Astounding Science Fiction, 44(6).

Hubbard, L. R. (1950, March). To the Stars. Astounding Science Fiction, 45(1), 78-123.

Hubbard, L. R. (1954). Return to tomorrow. Ace Books.

Publishers Weekly. (2004, August 30). Fiction book review: To the Stars. Publishers Weekly, 251(35), 37. https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-59212-175-5

Reference Works

L. Ron Hubbard bibliography. (2025, March 9). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Ron_Hubbard_bibliography

To the Stars (novel). (2025, March 29). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Stars_(novel)

Reviews and Critical Sources

Cheuse, A. (2004, December 14). Alan Cheuse’s 2004 holiday book picks. All Things Considered, National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4226073

Dodds, G. T. (2005). The SF Site featured review: To the Stars. SF Site. http://www.sfsite.com/03b/ts196.htm

The Hell Job Series. (2014). Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22714494-the-hell-job-series

To the Stars. (2024). Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1310069.To_the_Stars

Historical Sources

L. Ron Hubbard, Adventurer/Explorer. (n.d.). The Hell Job Series (Part 1/3). http://adventurer.lronhubbard.org/page54.htm

NASA. (2024, August 28). How 11 deaf men helped shape NASA’s human spaceflight program.https://www.nasa.gov/missions/project-mercury/how-11-deaf-men-helped-shape-nasas-human-spaceflight-program/