You can identify 50s science fiction by it's curious blend of ancient technology (large computers with blinking buttons/lights that are operated with binary switches) and characters who smoke, but with stories which aren't very far off scientifically. The reason for this is simple: relativity, quantum mechanics and most physics we know today, at least the barebones, was known then. But technology such as computers and social norms, such as not smoking, didn't become part of our culture in the 1990s. It was a gradual change.
What we have in this story is an interesting incident in which 3 astronauts find a ship crashed on a planet they're exploring. The characters are clearly in a time loop in which all space-time routes away from the planet loop back to the planet. They arrive to see their crashed ship. They attempt to leave at some point, and their actions, which are in response to their own observance of the crashed ship, cause them to crash their ship. So, you're left with "how did they first crash the ship?" The solution in physics can only be a closed space-time loop. There's no way for it to have happened the first time in the universe they are in.
The universe in which they crashed it initially is no longer part of their history, but it is part of one of their histories, which has now broken free from all of their possible current histories. My guess is that this could be explained using Everett's many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics if you suspend the axiom of independence for all universes--at some point, they made a transition to one of the virtually infinite branches of their current universe to a version which has a closed space-time curve
curves back on itself, and there is no way to get back to the actual universe they came from and no way to leave the planet.
What we have in this story is an interesting incident in which 3 astronauts find a ship crashed on a planet they're exploring. The characters are clearly in a time loop in which all space-time routes away from the planet loop back to the planet. They arrive to see their crashed ship. They attempt to leave at some point, and their actions, which are in response to their own observance of the crashed ship, cause them to crash their ship. So, you're left with "how did they first crash the ship?" The solution in physics can only be a closed space-time loop. There's no way for it to have happened the first time in the universe they are in.
The universe in which they crashed it initially is no longer part of their history, but it is part of one of their histories, which has now broken free from all of their possible current histories. My guess is that this could be explained using Everett's many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics if you suspend the axiom of independence for all universes--at some point, they made a transition to one of the virtually infinite branches of their current universe to a version which has a closed space-time curve
curves back on itself, and there is no way to get back to the actual universe they came from and no way to leave the planet.