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Contingency Plan
So what is a contingency plan? It’s a hip-pocket procedure, or a series of procedures, that you would invoke if things weren’t going the way you’d like. And so we tried to develop our spacecraft and our payloads aboard the space shuttle with redundancy, so if the primary system would break the backup’s going to be there to support you. And if that were to break you might have even a secondary system to substitute in because it’s a life-critical system.
The reason we have contingencies or contingency plans is to get us to mission success. And mission success in the space program is first off getting the crew and vehicle home, but the second goal is to complete the mission that you have in front of you. So to conduct the science, to build the space station, to do whatever might be called upon for your mission. And so if it’s really important you’ll probably have a Plan B, and if it’s really, really important – a life critical system, for example – you might even have a Plan C or D.
MacGyvering
Every once in a while, though, there are things that are completely off script and you have to MacGyver a solution, and that was the really fun part for me as an inventor, but also as someone who just likes to build and fix things. And then also just working with a brilliant team in mission control and with the help of your crewmates you can oftentimes come up with crafty solutions, including on my last mission, STS-120, when we had to go repair a live solar panel. This is something that we had never envisioned doing. You don’t want to get anywhere near a live solar panel because it has energy coursing through its circuit boards, even in orbital night behind the Earth and shadow. So that was a time when engineers on the ground worked around the clock for 72 hours, and we came up with a plan to send a crew out to the very tip of the space station to stitch together a solar panel using cobbled-together tools and a cobbled together robotic arm system, on a trajectory that had never been envisioned with procedures that had never been trained. So it was really one of those hanging-it-out-there kind of days.