Forty years ago, the first men walked on the surface of the moon. Interestingly, they used a low-tech solution to repair the lunar lander so they could blast off. The TimesOnline has the story:
There in the dust on the floor on the right side of the cabin, lay a circuit breaker switch that had broken off…
The broken switch had snapped off from the engine-arm circuit breaker, the one vital breaker needed to send electrical power to the ascent engine that would lift Neil and me off the moon…
I had a felt-tipped pen in the shoulder pocket of my suit that might do the job. After moving the countdown procedure up by a couple of hours in case it didn’t work, I inserted the pen into the small opening where the circuit breaker switch should have been, and pushed it in; sure enough, the circuit breaker held. We were going to get off the moon, after all. To this day I still have the broken circuit breaker switch and the felt-tipped pen I used to ignite our engines…
This story and others are told in Buzz Aldrin’s new book Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon