If you’ve seen Tom Hanks’ Apollo 13, you surely remember the scene where a group of guys dump a bunch of junk onto a table to figure out how to adapt air-scrubbing canisters meant for the command module to work in the lunar module that was keeping the crew alive.
Ed Smylie lead the work that solved the problem, giving the crew enough air to breathe to make it home. His contraption was literally held together with duct tape:
Michael S. Rosenwald, writing about Smylie for The New York Times:
The day after the astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise returned to earth on April 17, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon awarded NASA’s mission operations team with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In his remarks, he singled out Mr. Smylie and his deputy, James V. Correale.
“They are men whose names simply represent the whole team,” President Nixon said at a ceremony at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. “And they had a jerry-built operation which worked, and had that not occurred, these men would not have gotten back.”