--- title: Skylab's Space Hero Dies description: Never mind the folks who design the space hardware that works, it's the ones who step in when everything breaks down who are the real heroes — folks like Jack Kinzler, who has died at the age of 94 canonical: https://time.com/26241/farewell-to-a-cosmic-mr-fix-it/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-03-15T20:22:34.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:06:28.597Z article:section: Science og:title: Cosmic Mr. Fix-It: Farewell to One of NASA's Greats og:description: Never mind the folks who design the space hardware that works, it's the ones who step in when everything breaks down who are the real heroes — folks like Jack Kinzler, who has died at the age of 94 og:url: https://time.com/26241/farewell-to-a-cosmic-mr-fix-it/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt323975d5e13cf070/698685a555a8591f21a7fbda/skylab.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3156 og:image:height: 1775 og:image:alt: Skylab, with its gold colored sun shield covering its crew module og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Cosmic Mr. Fix-It: Farewell to One of NASA's Greats twitter:description: Never mind the folks who design the space hardware that works, it's the ones who step in when everything breaks down who are the real heroes — folks like Jack Kinzler, who has died at the age of 94 twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt323975d5e13cf070/698685a555a8591f21a7fbda/skylab.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Farewell to a Cosmic Mr. Fix-It > Sponsored content. 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Future Proof is TIME's weekly climate and energy newsletter, written by senior correspondent Justin Worland. It connects the energy transition to the decisions reshaping business, technology, policy and markets. #### Where can I follow the energy transition as a business story? Future Proof covers climate and energy as an economic and business story rather than only an environmental one. It publishes every Friday and is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who writes Future Proof? Justin Worland, a senior correspondent at TIME and an award-winning climate journalist, writes Future Proof. #### Is Future Proof free? Yes. Future Proof is free at time.com/newsletters. ## Video: The Sights And Sounds Of The Solar System [Watch (HLS stream): The Sights And Sounds Of The Solar System](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/35PDyDwj.m3u8) (3:47)  _Published 2014-01-06. NASA's Deep Space Network has been receiving images and sounds from space probes for 50 years._  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Mar 15, 2014 8:22 PM UTC  Skylab over Earth Skylab over Earth Getty Images  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Mar 15, 2014 8:22 PM UTC I spoke to Ed Smylie only once—about 20 years ago, when I was writing the book _Apollo 13_—and I counted it as one of life’s great privileges. Smylie was the improvisational genius who devised the on-the-fly fix that allowed the astronauts in the crippled spacecraft to use the air scrubber designed for their command module in their lifeboat lunar module instead. In one of the signature scenes from the later _Apollo 13_ movie, he dumps out a load of duct tape, plastic bags and other items the crew had on board, then holds up the command module’s square canister and the lunar module’s round one. “We’ve got to make this fit into the hole made for this,” he says, then gestures toward the junk on the table, “using nothing but this.” And they did. I was put in mind of Smylie today when I read that one of NASA’s other great Mr. Fix-Its, Jack Kinzler, had died at the age of 94\. Kinzler was the man who invented, among other things, the collapsible staffs that were used on the moon to make the flags the astronauts planted in the airless environment appear to be flapping. But it was in 1973, when the Skylab space station went into orbit and disastrously shed its external shielding on the way up, that Kinzler really saved NASA’s hash. Without the shielding, the temperature inside the station rose to a broiling 130°F (55°C ), utterly uninhabitable for the three-man crew waiting to blast off and join the orbiting ship. So Kinzler invented a huge, parasol-like heat shield that the astronauts—protected by their spacesuits from the heat inside Skylab—could carry into the sweatbox station when they arrived, poke through a porthole-like airlock and then unfurl. The crew brought the ungainly thing to orbit with them, deployed it as Kinzler instructed, and then went about their 28-day mission in a shirt-sleeve environment—marking America’s first long-term stay in space. Space travel has always been exceedingly intolerant of surprises. It’s an enterprise in which hardware is designed down to multiple decimal points of reliability, in which almost no system is flown without one or more back-up systems, in which the “single-point failure”—the one-off breakdown that by itself could wreck a mission—is scrubbed out of the equation almost completely. It’s thus something of an engineering irony that what we remember the most, what we celebrate the most, are the imaginative, in-the-moment fixes that no mission planner would ever abide until they run out of options. And so we had the unmanned Galileo mission to Jupiter, which was launched in 1989 and almost immediately came to ruin when one rib on its umbrella-like high-gain antenna failed to open, essentially rendering the spacecraft mute. Engineers thus reprogrammed the ship from the ground so that the torrent of pictures and data it would collect at Jupiter could be stored on magnetic tape—reel-to-reel, thank you very much—and then trickled back to Earth via the functioning low-gain antenna. This was worse than going from broadband down dial-up; it was more like broadband to Morse code. And yet it worked. And so we had William Pickering, the great mid-century rocketeer, watching in dismay as the Vanguard booster—which he hadn’t built and didn’t much care for—failed in its attempt to put America’s first satellite in orbit in 1957, blowing up just six inches above the pad. “Kaputnik!” hooted the headlines, in a jab at the fact that the Russian’s celebrated Sputnik had launched just months earlier. So Pickering recruited Wernher von Braun and James Van Allen, stacked his own second-stage rocket atop Von Braun’s first stage, and crowned them both with Van Allen’s Explorer 1 third stage satellite. Less than two months later, America was in space. When things are going well, that’s no way to do business. But things fall apart, stuff breaks down, even the most meticulously planned projects can become—as the engineers like to say—suboptimal. So props to the people who step in then. It ain’t just the duct tape—though that’s part of it—and it ain’t just the imagination. It’s the speed and the cool and the presence of mind that allows people under pressure to invent on order, and make the stuff work. Suboptimal is bad, but the people it produces can be legends. Kinzler was one of them. ## Transcript >> Human beings have been sending spacecraft into the cosmos for more than half a century now and all of the sights and sounds and data have to come back someway. -[ unk ] >> Even in the vacuum of space, sound is not absent, but it's electromagnetic sound, the hiss and the crackle and the strangely musical flow that can be heard as data strikes the antenna and is translated into sound waves. 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