In space, there aren’t a lot of recourses when things go wrong. When astronauts first unfurled the solar arrays that would power the International Space Station, tangled guide wires tore a 30-inch hole in the $5.6 million apparatus and disabled one opening joint.

“This was a very serious problem,” Astronaut Dan Tani said of the experience in a prior interview. “The arrays needed to be fully deployed for them to be rotated to point them to the sun so that they can produce the maximum power [for the space station].”

The panels couldn’t be turned off through the repair, so 120 volts flowed through the grid while an astronaut carefully space-walked at the end of a 90-foot boom. Any shock could have been devastating.

With MacGyver-like gear – wires, aluminum and homemade tools – the crew was able to come together to repair the damaged equipment.

“This repair was the type of activity that would take over a year to design and would typically require over a year of crew training — and we did it with three days of procedure development and zero crew training,” Tani said. “The trust between the ground and the crew — and among the