Apollo 11 astronauts

NASA had plans in place to sever all communication with Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon if they were to get stranded by a technical failure. Nixon even had a prewritten speech that said, "For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come, will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind." This almost did end up happening as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin broke a vital circuit breaker, snapping power to the engine. They however were able to push and hold it back in with a felt-tip pen long enough for it to take off from the moon.