I agree, lots of especially lazy writing in this one. The people in this story know so much about human physiology that they can manufacture a perfect replica of a human body and transfer a person’s consciousness into it, but they have no idea what the long term effects of space travel might be. Right.

Even leaving that aside, and leaving aside the failure to build backup replicas, why were the two astronauts left to sort out their situation alone between themselves? Why was NASA not involved at all?

Surely they would have wanted the astronauts to share the single remaining replica and would have provided psychological counseling to the astronaut whose family had been killed. Yet the only mention of involving NASA at all was an offhand comment toward the end of the story about lodging a complaint about bogus error messages.

Even if you accept the absurd premise of the story, it doesn’t play out consistently. Charlie Booker just wanted to have one astronaut kill the other one’s family, so he forced it to happen whether it made any sense or not.