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Astronauts have a long history of solving problems with equipment and material not designed for the task, but, in space travel you usually can’t get the best tool for a job unless you brought it with you, so improvisation is a necessary part of space exploration. Comments are closed.
Holy hell the entire Skylab program was saved by a Mylar blanket. A magnificent piece of American improvisational engineering if there ever was!
The only life hack video worth watching.
Well said…..Thanks Scott
It’s the way kerbals do it
No mention of all the bodging they did to keep MIR operational?
And then there is the Mir…
Laser line generator and an ultrasonic mister are my favorite airflow vis tools.
3:37, that would not be the original bits you saw!!!!
They are/were still in the LEM.
i feel like a requirement for astronauts should be to go drive a crappy car on a road trip with no phone
Probably a bad idea to use ACME products in space
the ‘analogue’ space days, is the feeling that the early Alien films represent really well
Duct tape, the handyman’s secret weapon.
$2 Toothbrush with tea leaves? 🤔🔛🤞
Cool new intro.
Love it… quality episode… 👍
Scott, I have to say as a Dutch citizen. You are one of the greatest speakers on Youtube, vocabulary Titan!🙏
STS-51-D is memorable for me because I still have the “Toys In Space” vhs tape I bought at KSC in 1994 shows it.
I still have the tape. I should get that from my moms house and digitize it.
Makes me think of JWST. Everything has to work without MacGyvering…
cant wait for the benu video scott!!!!
Hi scott could you do a video on the space debris near-miss pls thanks
Really sad ending when Watney dies at the end after all that struggle.
‘zero gravity bodging’ also sounds like a cool sport.
So it sounds like they got this idea from a movie called (mission to mars)!
I grew up on a farm and we seldom had what we needed, but I learned to misuse tools and other stuff to get by.
Sees shirt. Hey, wait a minute. Checks. Hey! Wait a minute!
So thats why theres a broken opinion on the moon rover wheel in ksp
This was a case of reading the tea leaves in space.
We need to hide all the 3D printers on ISS so we can hear this kind of story more
great episode!
Kool topic, love the vids
I’d love to see a fly try to fly around in space….
109 likes and 0 dislike, keep it that way
Great Video, thanks for all of the great content Scott!
Survival tip: always have a roll of duct tape nearby🚀
Very interested to hear what you mean by “improvise a spacewalk”. I would assume that (over simplifying of course) they would just suit up, get in the airlock and tether up then hop out. I feel like I’m missing something.
Hey Scott wasn’t the moon rover built by AM general?
awe hack the planet, wait no, hack the space something??? !alert recover! <3
this video felt like it was 30 seconds long. I NEED MORE
How about saving an XB-70 Valkyrie with a paperclip?
Life lessons for your DnD sessions. Always bring a 10ft pole.
I wish I could give this 10 thumbs up! My favorite video of yours – and I’ve liked all of them.
I find myself being blown away from nearly every one of your videos Scott. Thank you so much for your videos.
Finally got a notification for a video!!
These are great real life hacks!
Man, I must have heard the ‘mutiny in space’ story involving Skylab half a dozen times now, but I have never even heard about this amazing EVA on Skylab II until now
Some times low tech is the best tech…
I do this stuff, every day in my shed.🤣🤣🤣🙈🙈🙈🙈
I would have expected outgassing from tape in a vacuum. Amazing.
This intro to the video is so good!
I downloaded Salyut 7 to watch a while back, but my dumb ass didn’t realise it would be in Russian. I don’t speak Russian. That was a hell of an experience, but I think I got the main points of the film
“those lifehacks on the internet are mostly useless. Now if you’re in a space capsule and this happens….”
Sometimes the best solution to a high tech problem is… What some would call “Primitive” lol
WTF Scott! this is one of the best video i saw from you. Thanks a lot!
This is already one of my favorite of your videos to date. Thank you for being a great person.
Throwing the mowers broken spring start and wrapping the rope around the remaining pulley…or a socket in electric drill on pulley nut for starting
Nothing like KSP and Scott Manley in the background.
Remember how an early Soyuz-Salyut docking got stuck halfway through the mechanical engagement, with no ability to continue and no provisions to back out of the procedure? They were looking at saving the crew at the price of losing the brand-new space station. Then hacking intensified and things worked out in the end.
Would the ISS be up the creek if one of the solar panels got clipped with head on debris?
I must be blind to see the AWESOME Launch platform with Saturn no it.
I’d like to know what bits of kit are carried on each mission designed to be improvised and bodged, or if its always just repurposing items with other functions
That $2 Toothbrush must have been before shipping charges.
Pete Conrad was the freaking man
To be fair, that toothbrush cost more than $2 due to the shipping costs.
When the going gets rough ….the rough get going..or nessecity is the mother of invention. .or can be a mother.
And this could be counted as one of the reasons why we need manned spaceflight.
Hey Scott, love your videos! Odd question but do you remember where you got that gantry for the Saturn V? I’ll be getting the lego set for xmas and was really hoping to find a nice model launch tower. Keep up the great work and thanks for all the educational videos!!
I have been waiting for you to make a video about it. I think the way the leak could be found is ingenious. Thanks for your thoughts and the video!
Longer videos man! I miss the vids when youd get nerdy for 20 30 mins then grab a beer and stream kerbal!
I’ll have to remember these next time I’m on the ISS
Sounds like the history of space flight is the history of bodging together solutions to unexpected problems.
I can imagine Dave from the EEVBLOG visiting the IIS and him going: “Oh ! We’ve got bodge !!” 😂
I hope they have a tube of Shoe Goo on board. That stuff is awesome.
And then there’s the other end of the hacker spectrum where if there isn’t a X for exactly their situation, then there is just absolutely no way that the task can be accomplished.
One of my favorite hacked together tools is when a man made a megaphone out of nothing but some string, a squirrel and a megaphone. Crazy.
I have been going about problems all wrong for too many years. Simply Bury the Red Tape in an ample amount of Grey Tape! 😜
I can swear there was some other famous, sciency-related toothbrush hack, but I can’t seem to remember what that was all about… Can anyone maybe tell me what I’m forgetting???
Ah yes, duck tape the tool to rule them all!
10 foot pole… looks like someones been playing a little dungeons and dragons 3.5
Space is hard, until $2 toothbrushes are saving the ISS.
Last time I was this early, KSP was making a Bob revamp.
Once I heard a story about random toothpaste boxes being empty and how the company fixed it (these stories change so much that I wonder if it’s actually true, but…):
It seems some random toothpaste box ended up empty at the consumer, no tube inside. So the company hired a 3rd party to fix the manufacturing problem. They couldn’t figure out why, so they developed a very expensive system that would weigh each box and, if it was deemed empty, it would push it out of the belt. Truckload of money, but problem was fixed.
One day, the supervisor was walking around the plant and noticed the device was plugged off. When asking the sector employees they said it was slowing down the line with the weighing process, so they just bought a cheap fan and kept it pointed at the belt, if a box was empty it was just blown off of it.
With all the problem solving going on in this video, I was expecting for it to be sponsored by brilliant
I highly recommend the video on making the Apollo 13 filter, Scott I love you, but your wife saved your bottom in the “crafts” department!
I clicked on the video without even reading the title. I wasnt deceived
The handyman’s secret weapon – duct tape.
-Red Green
So they were reading tea leaves to scry the location of the leak?
4:50 I do love that the Restock-mod devs had decided to reference that as a special variant for the MH wheel.
Bodging has a long and hilarious history.
Or as Tom Scott would say, they bodged together a solution
It’s a shame there was no mention of the Inanimate Carbon Rod
That is an ode to standardization and reusing if there is any…
Also, having a standard toolbox in any space situation.
toothbrush: damn
It always amused me that they never thought about making the air scrubbers compatible between service and lunar modules to begin with. In this case, the redundancy of having two separate systems was a bit too redundant.
“Greatest Tech Support call” – nah, that’s devops jerry-rigging in production. Straight up heroic.
I was just thinking: wouldn’t it be amazing if Scott did a video about space emergencies? And then this drop and i was like: yeah that will do.
Moral: Never run out of duct tape.
This is why you should always make sure to bring your mass effect field toothbrush with you!..
btw: You don’t need to leave the Earth to fave the need of crazy macgyvering. We constantly did the same in the middle of Siberian winter expeditions while building a neutrino telescope. No tool or resource went untouched.
“So I’ve been in space, on the end of an arm attached to a Space Shuttle. While I held on to a sattelite.”
Just imagine the stories he’s got during BBQ’s
Astronaut Garrett Reisman had a great story about McGyvering when he was on Joe Rogan. He was tasked with installing an antenna during a spacewalk at the ISS. The metal part didn’t fit, the male side was too big to fit into the female. Reisman used the revolutions around the earth, when the parts were exposed to direct sunlight as a solution. Metal would expand and contract depending on when they were exposed to the sun. By shielding one part from the sun with his gloves during direct sun exposure, it shrank in size and fitted into the opposing side.
What was that saying? “There is no more permanent fix, than a temporary one”
“YouTube is full of dumb life hacks.”
-Scott Manley for the 2020 Quote of the Year.