5 Astronauts More Badass Than Any Action Movie Hero
#2. Catching a Satellite by Hand
The ability to grasp tools is a definitive advantage, and we've taken it all the way from sticks to ... communications satellites? Catching a satellite with your hands is what happens when Superman plays spaceball; it's not meant to be something that happens in the real world. But no one told the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour that when they went for an orbital triple play to capture a rogue Intelsat VI satellite. The Endeavour wasn't actually designed to capture satellites, but when you're already taking human bodies into space, achieving things you weren't ever designed to do is an awesome given.
Pierre Thuot, Richard Hieb, and Thomas Akers of mission STS-49 outdid every space combat movie ever made. Even the swashbuckling Star Wars gang never said "Let's just get out there and GRAB stuff," and that was a movie with Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Chewbacca.
The Johnson Space Center designed a mission-specific capture bar, which turned out to be the most expensive version of that annoying claw-grabbing game ever invented. Despite multiple spacewalks, the bar refused to grab hold, so the crew maneuvered to within about a meter of four tons of orbital velocity metal, got outside, and mastered an off-world communications hub with nothing but their opposable thumbs. Because even during the depressing years of working as the world's most glorified TV repair staff, astronauts still deserved every single bit of that glory.
So if V'Ger ever does come back, threatening to destroy the planet, we won't need the Starship Enterprise; we already have astronauts trained and ready to Greco-Roman wrestle it.