In 1985, NASA astronauts built two giant “flyswatters” aboard Space Shuttle Discovery; they used them in an attempt to activate a stranded satellite

A satellite worth $85 million was drifting aimlessly in orbit above the Space Shuttle Discovery back in April 1985, and NASA's solution was not some fancy invention out of their lab; it was a pair of makeshift “flyswatters” hacked out of spare cabin materials. Discovery had lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on April 12, 1985, on mission STS-51-D, carrying a seven-person crew commanded by Karol "Bo" Bobko, including Mission Specialists Rhea Seddon, Jeffrey Hoffman, and David Griggs, payload specialist Charles Walker, and U.S. Senator Jake Garn, who flew as the first sitting member of Congress in space. The flight's main job was to deploy two commercial communications satellites, and it was the second of those, a U.S. Navy-owned satellite called Leasat-3, that would end up hijacking the rest of the mission.

According to NASA's very own records of the mission, the attempted rescue operation during STS-51-D involved an unplanned meeting, an unexpected EVA (extravehicular activity), and an official request from Mission Control for a flyswatter. What was originally slated as a six-day flight ended up stretching to seven, as controllers on the ground bought extra time to plan and execute the improvised fix rather than simply writing the satellite off. It's a well-documented week in Shuttle history that serves as a surprisingly apt case study in how NASA actually deals with problems beyond the scope of the manual.

A satellite that just refused to wake up


This mission was supposed to be a routine procedure: lift-off, deployment of two communications satellites, and return. One of these satellites, Syncom IV-3 (also known as Leasat-3), was a Hughes-built satellite whose task was to extend its antennas, accelerate and start its onboard engine to reach a higher orbit. However, it remained silent.

As stated in the Spaceline STS-51D mission factsheet, the tiny sequencer switch did not work properly; thus, the satellite was unable to activate itself. The other satellite launched on the same flight, Telesat-I (also called Anik C1), deployed without any trouble on its Payload Assist Module, which only made Leasat-3's silence more conspicuous by comparison. NASA was confident that the solution would be incredibly easy: all the astronauts needed to do was to press a lever on the satellite. And this was impossible since no one had designed the instrument for "nudging a satellite lever from inside a spacecraft" until then.

Enter the flyswatter squad

The team improvised. Hoffman and Griggs, two Mission Specialists, fashioned two paddle-shaped devices out of spare materials stowed in the shuttle's middeck; the Space Shuttle Program had no orbiting space station to draw supplies from in 1985, so everything the astronauts used, including a spring-loaded rod and scraps of stiff material, came from lockers already on board Discovery. They basically built large flyswatters and a plastic "lacrosse stick," intended to snag or flip the pesky lever switch.

On April 16, 1985, Hoffman and Griggs donned their suits and went out on an impromptu spacewalk, the first unscheduled visit to space in the history of the Space Shuttle Program, and attached their constructed tools to the end of the shuttle’s robotic arm. The spacewalk lasted three hours and six minutes and forced payload specialist Charlie Walker to temporarily shut down an onboard experiment so the cabin could be depressurized for the EVA.

As per NASA's official STS-51D mission website, the objective was to use the robotic arm to snag the lever switch and flip it into place, coaxing the sequencer back into action. The attempt came very close to succeeding. Mission Specialist Rhea Seddon engaged the LEASAT lever using the remote manipulator system. However, the satellite still failed to start functioning since its internal sequencer would not turn back on.

Why this still matters

Now comes the part you can relate to: if you've ever duct-taped something together the night before a deadline, NASA didn't succeed on its first attempt, but that's okay. The space agency did not abandon the satellite or consider the mission to be a failure. Several months later in 1985, during the launch of STS-51-I, a different Discovery crew returned to the same satellite, this time armed with the proper equipment, and managed to fix and redeploy it into orbit. Mission Specialists James "Ox" van Hoften and William Fisher carried out two spacewalks totaling nearly twelve hours, physically grappling the 15,000-pound satellite by hand, installing a bypass unit to route around its faulty circuitry, and manually spinning it back up before releasing it to fire its motor on command. This time, the fix held, and Leasat-3 finally reached its intended orbit.

As described in a retrospective piece published by AmericaSpace, the flyswatter incident was among those episodes in the shuttle program history that demonstrated the ingenuity of the engineers who made use of whatever equipment they had to try to solve the problem, rather than waiting for a perfect solution. While it is just a funny episode in spaceflight history, it also demonstrates quite a bit about how NASA really works.