A four-day deadline from the Russian space agency to find a solution to bringing astronauts safely back to earth is enough pressure for any NASA engineer.

One man was able to solve that spatial dilemma: a blind NASA electronics engineer named Marco Midon.

“I just got on the net, did a little research, learned what I could about the Soyuz and what the data formats were like and about two hours later I put together what I thought might be some equipment that would do it,” he explains.

With his equipment in hand, Midon and his team were ready for the grand final.

“There was another group of people figuring out, if we are going to do this and where are we going to do it from? Finally it ended up being Athens. The whole point of this is that we are going to get somewhere before the Russian ground stations in Kazakhstan can see it, so we are in a place where we can see the signal before them and we can get them the data they might not have otherwise,” Midon says.

Midon came up with a way to capture and record the signal so that it could then be transferred to the Russian controllers.

Having a disability never stopped the engineer from finding the solutions. On the contrary, because of his disability he is able to solve problems in an unconventional way.

At the moment the two countries aren’t always in agreement. However, when it comes to space, for the US and Russia it’s a totally different matter.

“I think co-operation is what it’s all about. I think that space costs too much and is too big an arena really for one country. I think if we’re going to move beyond what we have now, it is going to require international co-operation,” Midon believes.

So, it’s this kind of problem solving in space that may signal more co-operation between the US and Russia on the ground.