Depends upon which version of "Lost in Space" you mean.
In the TV pilot, they simply ran into a meteor storm and drifted to the planet they crashed on.
In the broadcast series, the saboteur Dr. Smith was trapped on board while programming the robot to disable the ship. His weight drifted the ship into a meteor cloud and he woke up the pilot to save the ship. The pilot woke the rest of the crew up and while they were debating what to do, the reprogrammed robot damaged the hyperdrive, shooting them out of control to a spot where they could not identify any stars, lost.
In the movie, no meteors, robot destroying the ship, ship crashing into the sun. Crew activates hyperdrive with no destination to escape and same results.
Columbia
The Columbia supercomputer helped NASA guide the space shuttle. This supercomputer was named after the Columbia crew lost in an explosion in 2003 at lift off.
The M1 submarine was lost at sea in 1925. There is a list of the crew members lost that day online.
Two out of five Space Shuttles: Challager and Columbia, were the only 2 shuttles to be lost, challager exploded 72 seconds after takeoff while Columbia burned up in the atmosphere.
Apollo 13 almost got lost in space when an oxygen tank exploded, causing critical failure of the spacecraft's systems. The crew had to improvise solutions to safely return to Earth in a dramatic rescue mission.
The name of the first space shuttle that shuttled crew to and from their jobs in spaceis called Elicoll. After the first female shuttle commander Eileen Collins, a true hero in todays history.
it gathers information about space without a crew
The space shuttle is a space vehicle designed to carry five to seven crew members into space. It is made of four components namely, external tank, two solid rocket boosters (SRBs) and one orbiter.The orbiter is reuseable as well as the SRBs. The external tank is lost in space.
Christa McAuliffe, a school teacher selected to be the first civilian in space, was among the seven crew members who tragically lost their lives in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986.
The last words spoken by the crew of the space shuttle Challenger were "go at throttle up" seconds before the shuttle exploded. Due to the tragedy, communication was lost and the crew were unable to say any more words.
Space probes have the ability to gather information about space without a crew
Robinson. The alternate title of the program- used also in comic books based on it, was Space Family- Robinson. Two members of the crew (human) were not members of the Robinson family- Major West- who was a USAF officer, and the stowaway Dr. Smith, something of a comic villain type.