"Unprecedented" repair in space?

"TVDad Jim" wrote in news:1123169893.286543.316830
@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

How does this repair job eclipse Pete Conrad's saving the entire Skylab
program with his TWO repair jobs during the Skylab 2 mission?
Assembling a ship-wide parasol AND freeing a solar panel was a heckuva
lot more work than pulling two pieces of vinyl out of a heatshield.

This repair job eclipses the Skylab repair in consequences, not complexity.
The Discovery EVA may have been simpler than the Skylab EVA, but the
survival of the Skylab crew wasn't riding on the success of the EVA, as was
potentially the case here. The Skylab crew was repairing the *station*, not
their *return vehicle*. If they failed, there was no question they could
still have returned home safely. That's not to say that Discovery
*couldn't* have landed with the gap fillers, only that the aerothermal team
had a lot of uncertainty in their analysis results, and the worst-case
results were loss of vehicle.

--
JRF

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