250,000 miles from home, the hardest thing to face...is yourself.
Sam Bell is an employee contracted by the company Lunar Industries to extract helium-3 from lunar soil for much-needed clean energy back on Earth, leaving behind his wife Tess, who is heavily pregnant with their daughter, Eve. He is stationed for three years at the largely automated "Sarang" lunar base with only a robotic assistant named GERTY for company; a chronic communications satellite failure limits him to only occasional recorded transmissions to and from Earth as fixing the link is currently not among the top priorities of Lunar Industries.
Two weeks before completing his contract, he begins to hallucinate, briefly seeing a teenage girl on the station. During a routine rover excursion to retrieve ready canisters of helium-3 from a harvesting machine, he sees the same girl standing on the lunar surface.
Distracted, he crashes the rover into the harvester, losing internal atmosphere and switching in a hurry to the suit life support.