In the lost cosmonaut report, the originator of the story claimed the cosmonauts were trapped in an “expanding orbit”, doomed to spiral further and further out. But this really can’t happen, can it? No matter what velocity the orbiter was at , it would settle at the corresponding orbital distance. Until it eventually decayed from friction, as I don’t think the Russians were putting cosmonauts in anything but a low Earth orbit.
Dennis
I’m sure someone more knowledgeable than me will come along any minute, but… As I understand it, every two-body orbit is a conic section. It’s either a parabola where the center of gravity of the two bodies is the focus, or an ellipse where the center of gravity is at one of the foci. In either case, it’s possible for the orbit of the smaller body to intersect the surface of the larger one, in which case you have a crash. If it’s an ellipse, the smaller body can keep looping around and around forever, unless it starts losing speed due to drag from the upper atmosphere and then the orbit changes and it intersects the larger body after all. The only other option is an open-ended parabola (which can also be imagined as an ellipse whose second focus is infinitely far away), so the smaller body does go off to infinity but it’s not a spiral.
I guess, from the point of view of an observer on the surface of the Earth, it might look like the object is spiraling out but really it’s just following a parabola.
Things get much more complicated when you start figuring in other bodies (moon, Mars, sun, etc.).
ETA: It’s possible for the orbit to be an ellipse so eccentric and so big that you might, at first, think that it’s a parabola but then it turns out to be an ellipse after all.
I think it’s simpler than all that.
People who embrace “lost cosmonaut” conspiracy theories are as ignorant of orbital mechanics as they are of aeronautical history. 
There are some situations where an orbit can (very gradually) spiral outwards: The Moon is doing it, for instance. But those are all orbits that you’d be exceedingly unlikely to get into accidentally, and even if you did, the outward motion would be negligible over the course of a human lifespan.
It was not addressed, Cecil should be screened for alzheimer’s. But perhaps if the orbit was close enough to the orbit of the moon it could get a tug outward. Other than that I got nothing. The moon spirals outward because of the tides on the earth, I guess that something opposite the moon could also get such a boost but I doubt that orbit would be stable.
Not Alzheimer’s, more like addiction withdrawal … X-Files had quit running new episodes less than a year before the article was published … The Master is all better now …