"Since men first steered a scraped-out log or a wicker basket to sea, it had been an agony for a captain to lose his ship." (Cold Victory, p. 276)
Here again is the comparison of space travel with sea travel. We see the first scraped-out log in Poul Anderson's "The Long Remembering."
Anderson's Time Patrol series recognizes a progression from sea to space to time travel - and time travelers interact with Tyrian seamen.
The problem:
on a hyperbolic orbit, the ship will leave the Solar System and does not have enough reaction mass to decelerate;
they are out of their own radio range to anywhere;
over such great distances, any high-acceleration ships sent in search of the lost "Thunderbolt" will not be able to compute its orbit accurately;
jettisoning everything non-essential will not slow them enough;
they can use Jupiter's gravity to throw themselves into a cometary orbit but such an orbit will take several years to bring them back into radio range of anyone and they only have a few weeks' supply of food;
the spacecraft of the Jovian Republic are too obsolete to match their velocity.
So what is the answer?
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