To be fair, that toothbrush cost more than $2 due to the shipping costs.

Moral: Never run out of duct tape.

"Either damaging the panels or the astronaut would be a very bad outcome." Another of Scott Manely's famous understatements.

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.

What was that saying? "There is no more permanent fix, than a temporary one"

I'll have to remember these next time I'm on the ISS

“UKposts is full of dumb life hacks.” -Scott Manley for the 2020 Quote of the Year.

This is just one of many reasons why we need human spaceflight. It's the ingenuity & "out of the box" thinking of human brains attached to human hands out there on the spot that can save the mission.

i feel like a requirement for astronauts should be to go drive a crappy car on a road trip with no phone

"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

For those of you wondering how dropping a hammer to a hip-height fender in 1/12th a G could somehow manage to damage it (obviously impossible), the answer is that that's not what happened. He had the hammer in a pocket and it caught the edge of the fender and popped it off.

"And they still operate today with the emergency fix still in place" I, a software dev, shudders at that sentence.

"Greatest Tech Support call" - nah, that's devops jerry-rigging in production. Straight up heroic.

Rocket engineers: "We calculate that we need to lose some mass to make this mission successful. What can we get rid of? How about these rolls of duct tape." Astronauts bunching fists... Rocket engineers: "OK, OK. How about the desserts out of the ration packs?" Astronauts: "Fine. Whatever."

Scott: Jabbing metal objects into electrical panels isn't good. Me, an electrician: Ummmm, that's pretty much my job description?

So they were reading tea leaves to scry the location of the leak?

Bodging has a long and hilarious history.

My favorite (from the movie "The Right Stuff") is when Chuck Yeager fell off his horse,and broke his ribs the evening prior to the first Mach 1 flight. He was unable to reach across and close the access hatch with his injuries and unwilling to admit the injuries to the higher ups and lose the flight to some other pilot. So, he smuggled a length of broom stick aboard. Wedged into the hatch frame, it gave him the grip/leverage needed to close the hatch. The only this that rings untrue in this story was that, while riding his horse hell-for-leather in pitch darkness into a closed fence, he was stone cold sober (not likely).

The handyman's secret weapon - duct tape. -Red Green

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.

"Houston... We have a problem...." "One minute ISS... We'll call our brazilian expert on gambiarras..."

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.

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.

And this could be counted as one of the reasons why we need manned spaceflight.

With all the problem solving going on in this video, I was expecting for it to be sponsored by brilliant

Space is hard, until $2 toothbrushes are saving the ISS.

This reminds me that once away from home my bike chain broke, a link was broken and with two stones and broken pieces of the chain I managed to join it again.

That is an ode to standardization and reusing if there is any... Also, having a standard toolbox in any space situation.

The timing of the "toothbrush that saved the ISS" story is interesting, because that was ~six months before Mass Effect 3's Citadel DLC dropped, which also features a toothbrush saving a spacecraft.

wow! I didn't realize the ISS solar panels are just film with the photovoltaics on there! That shot of the one array moving as it was being worked on was fantastic! Is that Kapton? Always wondered why they are orange.... Edit: I did some research and the solar arrays are in fact cells bonded to a Kapton/fiberglass blanket. The more you know!

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.

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.

STS-49, Endeavour's maiden flight. When the original plan to capture the wayward Intelsat VI satellite failed, the crew and ground support worked out a plan using three astronauts in the only EVA in spaceflight history to date to do so to grab and then hold the satellite by hand so that the capture bar that had failed on previous EVAs due to a lack of sufficient resistance to trigger it off and clamp onto Intelsat IV. The working out of radio, airlock procedures, use of the ASEM struts and equipment for another unrelated EVA test to create positions for two of the three astronauts to position themselves in the payload bay on definitely qualifies as one of the greatest improvised rescues in spaceflight history.

The McGuyver mode is one of the modes of operation that make humans great. There is the loving mode, the artistic mode, and all sorts of other skills and qualities and capabilities we should be proud of and for which we owe our existence. But among these must always be valued, the McGuyver mode. :)

OMG. Fantastic stories....many of which I had never heard before!! Great video!!!

"Grey Tape" comes to the rescue so many times. Whoever first thought that it would be a good idea to put it onboard should get a reward.

That $2 Toothbrush must have been before shipping charges.

"If you'd told me this morning that a toothbrush was going to save the Normandy, I'd have been very skeptical."

IMHO the greatest tech service call is "S.C.E. to AUX" John Aaron is a god.

I have been going about problems all wrong for too many years. Simply Bury the Red Tape in an ample amount of Grey Tape! 😜

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.

Dear Scott: the following is a list of other important hacks in space: 1- Using slings to close the doors of the Hubble Space Telescope after repairs. 2- Neil Armstrong thetered the Agena module to his Gemini space ship after having trouble with the docking maneuver. 3- Leting Sheppard "go" in his spacesuit🤣🤣🤣🤣. 4- Neil Armtrong using his slide rule to calculate the LM position after he noticed they were off the expected landing zone 5- The 1202 and 1201 alarm "Service call" in the Apollo 11 landing on the moon😅😅😅 6 - Mark Watney's Iron man maneuver🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. 7 - Alexey Leonov deflating his spacesuit after the first ever EVA to fit through the hatch of hi's Voskod space ship. And finnaly.... 8 - Leaving the retro rocket pack attached to John Glenn's Friendship 7 Space ship to ensure its heat shield did not saparated from the spaceship while returning to Earth, avoiding "Plasma Baking" John Glenn.👍 There are some other "space hacks" but I don't remember them all. Have a pleasant evening.

This is why I love space exploration, ingenuity of humankind at its peak. Thank you Scott for bringing us all these stories and videos to us mere mortals.

I like to snowmobile, and one of the interesting things about the pastime is you often end up out in the middle of the woods somewhere with an unexpected problem with one or more of the vehicles that got you there (and are your ride home). You learn to come prepared. It's actually part of the excitement for me to be challenged by and overcome these problems. This video reminds me of snowmobiling in that way and I feel like space travel is the ultimate version of my own adventures.

It's a shame there was no mention of the Inanimate Carbon Rod

Fantastic! I knew the more famous ones but this collection of hacks is incredible. Suggestion: you could talk about that time the Canadian robotic arm failed and astronauts had to do an EVA to take a satellite they were fetching back BY HAND. A good time to understand the difference between weight (force) and mass (inertial mass) as the satellite had several tons.

This is the great reason for having 3D printer on ISS. Is absolute tool for hacks/magavering things. Especially when specialist on earth can design part and transmit file to ISS.

If you had told me before that a toothbrush would save the -Normandy- ISS I would have been very skeptical.

the 'analogue' space days, is the feeling that the early Alien films represent really well

toothbrush: damn

That's why STEM education, coupled with practical hands on experience is so valuable.

Scott, I absolutely love to listen to you talk about this stuff. It’s just fabulous. Thank you so much.

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!

I can imagine Dave from the EEVBLOG visiting the IIS and him going: "Oh ! We've got bodge !!" 😂

This is already one of my favorite of your videos to date. Thank you for being a great person.

Hello Mr. Manley, Thank you for telling all these peculiar stories in one video! Greatly appreciated.

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.

Ah yes, duck tape the tool to rule them all!

Space, one of the many ways we know the earth is not flat. Great video.

Laser line generator and an ultrasonic mister are my favorite airflow vis tools.

I hope they have a tube of Shoe Goo on board. That stuff is awesome.

Or as Tom Scott would say, they bodged together a solution

Scott, I have to say as a Dutch citizen. You are one of the greatest speakers on UKposts, vocabulary Titan!🙏

this video felt like it was 30 seconds long. I NEED MORE

NASA: duct tape, pen caps, maps, etc. Homer Simpson: inanimate carbon rod.

Sounds like the history of space flight is the history of bodging together solutions to unexpected problems.

I love ALL of your videos - this is my favorite by far!! Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and passion, I will share all of these videos with my students and children.

Love it! most of my life seems to be doing this..mending repairing stuff with whats on hand..I call it the 'Desert Island thinking' ..you can only fix it with what is around you and your life depends on it..its amazing what you can achieve with seemingly useless objects and stuff.

I'm pretty sure NASA toothbrushes cost more than 2 bucks but the delivery cost is the real killer :)

The Spanish for duct tape is “cinta americana”. Understandable why.

This is absolutely fascinating! Thank you Scott!

STS-125 was the final Shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. When they had problems getting a bolt to loosen, they had to make a breaker bar to get it loose. They also had to physically rip off a metal handle in order to get at a circuit card that needed to be replaced.

I clicked on the video without even reading the title. I wasnt deceived

Pete Conrad was the freaking man

Well said.....Thanks Scott

WTF Scott! this is one of the best video i saw from you. Thanks a lot!

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, 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!!

Great Video, thanks for all of the great content Scott!

The greatest hacks ever. Bravo, Scott.

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!

Broke: Canadarm Woke: A bloke with a long pole

During (if I remeber well) the Aragatz mission on MIR with the french cosmonaut Jean-Loup Chrétien, a 3m deployable mesh antenna made by Aerospatiale was to be tested in deployment in zero G. The antenna had been stowed earlier in the station for a long time, and when they put it out for the deployment test, it failed to deploy. Most probably, moisture from the interior of MIR had frozen when it was exposed to the cold of space. Alexander Volkov was in charge of activating the deployment outside and in communication with the ground in Russia. He was ordered to wait for analysis, but he pretended a bad radio link as they were going out of coverage and literaly and strongly kicked the antenna which then urfulled perfectly. A sort of kickass hack !

When I was in the army, they called it "hundred mile an hour tape".

Knowing the history and the 18-20 minute comms delay, these are the things I am constantly thinking about in regard to putting people on Mars. They'd better be some damn good problem solvers and we might want to back them up with some good AI that can help them solve weird problems with the tools on hand.

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

Loved this. Thanks for sharing!

*FANTASTIC FOOTAGE* SCOTT!!! Lot of them never heard of!!! thanks!

109 likes and 0 dislike, keep it that way

Welcome to rural Alaska, minus the experts on the ground.

This intro to the video is so good!

Don’t be afraid of telling us about these little details, I hadn’t heard of many of the situations and the ones I HAD heard of didn’t cover all the stuff you have known for years and years. Very informative and interesting 🤔!

Longer videos man! I miss the vids when youd get nerdy for 20 30 mins then grab a beer and stream kerbal!

I'd love to watch this but they're stacking the SN8 nose cone RIGHT NOW.

Great post Scott. Many Thanks.

My favorite is when Story Musgrave used packing straps to close the Hubble doors.

10 foot pole... looks like someones been playing a little dungeons and dragons 3.5

This is perhaps what makes scifi stuff with very small crews so remarkable, The fact they can function without that mission control and no matter what breaks their engineer/mechanic always knows the answer.

12:19 gotta love the ACME Bolt. There is nothing more reliant than an ACME tool

Absolute belter of a vid, cheers mate