Resourcefulness Archives - Page 2 of 3

A Smartphone Chip on Mars

On April 19, 2021, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter made its first flight on Mars. It ran on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801, “a processor traditionally found in smartphones like Samsung’s Galaxy S5.” NASA used commercially available parts. Ingenuity completed 72 flights.

JPL engineer Tim Canham explained the choice: “The main driver is because the Snapdragon 801 board came already with Linux.” In 2026, with Ingenuity grounded, JPL gave the helicopter’s idle base station on the Perseverance rover a new job. Its processor now helps the rover find its own position. JPL’s Vandi Verma said: “This is kind of like giving the rover GPS.”

Do What You Can, With What You’ve Got

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are” is widely credited to Theodore Roosevelt. In his Autobiography of 1913, Roosevelt gave the credit to someone else. He called it “a bit of homely philosophy, quoted by Squire Bill Widener, of Widener’s Valley, Virginia.”

The Theodore Roosevelt Center says the popular version is “misquoted in two ways.” Roosevelt credited Widener, and the original says “got,” not “have”: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”

Broomsticks and a 20-Cent Bombsight

On April 18, 1942, 16 Army B-25 bombers took off from the Navy aircraft carrier USS Hornet to bomb Japan. None of the pilots, including the raid’s leader, Jimmy Doolittle, had ever taken off from a carrier before. The idea came from a Navy officer, Captain Francis Low.

The bombers were changed for a job they were not built for. Their fuel capacity was raised from 646 to about 1,141 gallons. Broomsticks painted black were mounted in the tail to look like guns. The secret Norden bombsight was replaced with a makeshift sight devised by pilot Ross Greening, described as a “20 cent aluminum version.” The crews trained for three weeks in short takeoffs that simulated a carrier deck.

Fender Repair on the Moon

On Apollo 17 in December 1972, astronaut Gene Cernan’s hammer caught the rear fender extension of the lunar rover, “and it popped clean off.” Without the fender, driving through the Moon dust “became a serious hazard.” A first repair with tape failed because “the tape lost its adhesiveness” in the dust.

A team in Houston worked out a fix with what the crew had on board. The astronauts took four of their lunar maps and fixed them to the fender with tape and “two clamps from the optical alignment telescope.” The Smithsonian’s account calls the tape “good old-fashioned American gray tape.” The four maps are now at the National Air and Space Museum.

Indiana Jones and the Swordsman

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, a swordsman challenges Indiana Jones and brandishes a large sword. Indy draws his pistol and shoots him. Entertainment Tonight called it the moment “considered by most fans to be the funniest moment in the franchise.”

The script called for a long fight. Harrison Ford later said he was “quite ill with dysentery” and found the planned fight “too much.” He recalled asking Steven Spielberg why they did not just shoot the man. Spielberg answered: “I was thinking that, too!” Ford’s stunt double, Vic Armstrong, tells it differently. In his account, David Tomblin, who worked on the film, suggested the gun.

The Mailbox

In April 1970 an oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13, and the crew had to use the lunar module as a lifeboat. Carbon dioxide began to build up. The spare filters from the command module were square, and the lunar module needed round ones.

Engineers on the ground designed and tested an adapter made from plastic bags, cardboard from the flight plan cover, a spacesuit hose and duct tape. NASA calls it “the mailbox.” The engineer who led the work, Ed Smylie, explained it in a 2021 documentary: “If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape.”

In his NASA oral history he said: “It was pretty straightforward, even though we got a lot of publicity for it …” He added that “a mechanical engineering sophomore in college could have come up with it.”

No Brown M&M’s

The concert rider of the rock band Van Halen for its 1982 world tour included the line: “M&M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).” In his 1997 memoir, the singer David Lee Roth recalled the clause as: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

Roth explained the reason. The rider contained detailed technical and safety requirements, and the candy clause showed whether the venue had read them. If he found brown M&M’s, he wrote, “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract.”

Apollo 8 Changes Course

Apollo 8 was planned as a test of the lunar module in Earth orbit. But the lunar module would not be ready before early 1969. On Friday, August 9, 1968, the NASA manager George Low proposed sending Apollo 8 to the Moon instead. That same afternoon, he and three colleagues flew to Huntsville to discuss it.

NASA then had only four months to prepare. The flight in December 1968 became the first human voyage to another celestial body.

Life Hack

The term life hack was coined in 2004 at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. It first meant the “scripts and shortcuts productive IT professionals use to get their work done.” In 2005 the American Dialect Society voted lifehack the runner-up for most useful word of the year, behind podcast.

The meaning soon spread beyond computers. A life hack is now “any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty improvisation that increases productivity and efficiency in life.”

MacGyver

MacGyver ran on American television from 1985 to 1992. Its hero, Angus MacGyver, was played by Richard Dean Anderson. He carried a Swiss Army knife and duct tape instead of high-tech weapons. He regularly solved problems with whatever simple things he could find.

His name became a verb. Merriam-Webster defines MacGyver as “to make, form, or repair (something) with what is conveniently on hand.” The dictionary dates its first known use to 1992.