America's first space station was wrecked 63 seconds after launch. They fixed it with an umbrella.

The shield wrapped around the workshop was doing double duty — stopping micrometeoroids and shading the hull from sunlight. Sixty-three seconds into the flight it deployed prematurely, and the airstream tore it off the vehicle. Debris from it fouled the solar arrays: one wing was jammed, the other was lost entirely. The station reached orbit short of power and with nothing between its skin and the Sun.

Interior temperatures climbed until Skylab was uninhabitable, with the food, medicines, film and experiments already aboard at risk. When the crew did arrive they encountered temperatures around 130°F. The problem was unusually cruel because it worsened while nobody was there to do anything about it, and because the two failures compounded — less power to run cooling, more heat to remove.

At Marshall Space Flight Center engineers developed, tested, rehearsed and approved three options: a parasol sunshade, a twin-pole sunshade, and a set of metal cutting tools for the jammed array. The crew and the repair kits launched eleven days after the accident. They deployed the parasol out through a scientific airlock — a port designed for instruments, not for structural repair — and interior temperatures came down enough for the science programme to begin. A later spacewalk freed the jammed solar wing.