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Near the end of Robert Zemeckis’ “Contact,” Jodie Foster — her enormous eyes full of the things of the universe — gasps out the famous line: “They should have sent a poet.” But a facility with iambic pentameter is not what’s needed when the quandaries you face, sealed in a cigar tube half a million miles up in the sky, are more ethical than metaphysical: In Joe Penna’s restrained and ruthlessly rational sci-fi “Stowaway,” they should have sent a moral philosopher.
Of course, even Immanuel Kant would consume oxygen — or he would have in his day — and so he too would only have contributed to the problems that beset the crew of the Kingfisher, a two-year, three-person mission to Mars, which goes awry just hours out from Earth.