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.