[TOMT][Scifi short Story] Astronaut Lost Floating in Space

Summary: Astronaut adrift in space, I think I saw it in a school textbook. I couldn't find anything online, I need help.

Good evening, everyone. I'm here to ask for help finding a text that I remember reading in my childhood, but which I haven't been able to find despite many efforts.

For starters, I am Brazilian. I'm asking for help in English too because im desperate and maybe this text is originally in English so who knows. These things always get far more easily in English

What do I remember?

The text was in Portuguese, a science fiction short story about a nameless astronaut who gets lost adrift in space, under observation from Earth.

He wasn't in a spaceship, but adrift as if an accident had occurred during a spacewalk. The text explained that Earth, instead of trying to rescue the astronaut or his body, simply observed. I particularly remember that an alteration in the colors of the astronaut's uniform (or skin color) was turned into a fashion trend by designer clothing brands.

The story does not contain aliens or other planets or sci-fi elements of the more fantastic variety. The narration is not from the perspective of the astronaut, it is an omniscient narrator describing earth's reactions to the incident. It was truly an exploration of humanity's immobility before tragedy, through this lens of such an event happening in space. The astronaut was nameless, and I don't think any characters in this story were named either. It was just one astronaut, not a crew. I don't recall if he died instantly upon being launched into orbit, if he survived for a bit before dying, or if he stayed alive due to sci-fi logic. I do remember the color changing very vividly, though I'm not sure if it was the astronaut's suit or skin that changed colors. It might have been his skin.

Where I remember reading this:

For this part, I think it's important to reveal a few details about myself: I studied my whole life at a private school, having finished my third year of high school in 2023. This is important because I think I came across this text in a school textbook. In my school, elementary school Portuguese classes used two books: a grammar book, those thick ones full of comic strips, and a text interpretation book, which focused on presenting textual genres and teaching us how to extract meaning from texts. My memory tells me that this short story was read in one of the interpretation books.

I don't know if the story was originally Brazilian or if it was translated from another language. I remember reading a text from Isaac Asimov's "Robot Dreams" in a similar book, so I don't rule out the possibility of it being a text originally in another language.

When I remembered this text, my first attempt to find it again was to search for keywords on the Internet, but nothing close to my text appeared. I guarantee you, it's not one of the obvious answers that Google or any AI will pull up for you.

After that went wrong, I started looking for the book where I think I read the text. To do this, I looked for school supply lists that matched my grade level each year, but since that didn't yield much result either, I decided to ask my mother if she remembered which books they were. Luckily, she managed to find a spreadsheet with the books she bought for my siblings and me during our school years. We don't have the books anymore because we got rid of them during a move.

I did some searches for the books, finding some digital copies of a few of them. Out of the ones I managed to find, none of my suspicions came to bear fruit. I will admit though that some of the materials seemed to be exclusively made available by the teaching system directly to the schools and then to the parents (there are some books I couldn't find IMAGES of them online).

If anyone finds it necessary I can share the spreadsheet here, but I doubt they will be particularly useful if you don't speak Portuguese.

All of these dead ends also make me consider the possibility that the text might have been in a test and not in a book, and if that's the case... well, I dont have the tests anymore, and then the books will be a dead end. If that's so then I have no clue where to go from it except trying to get this to reach someone that knows what this text is.

I am considering going to a store close to my old school that buys and resells old books, because that's the place that contains the highest probability of having this story in it. I might also e-mail my school and some of the publishers, but I'm seeing that as a last resort because I would be happy to solve this without needing to bother a ton of different publishers.

For now, I want to know, does anyone have the slightest idea what story this could be?