On September 11, 1985, NASA pulled off one of the most audacious orbital hacks in history. The spacecraft wasn’t even built for the job: launched in 1978 as ISEE-3 to study solar wind, it had long fulfilled its primary mission. But orbital dynamicist Robert Farquhar saw untapped potential. Through a complex sequence of lunar gravity assists, engineers slingshot the probe out of Earth-Moon orbit, rechristened it the International Cometary Explorer (ICE), and targeted Comet Giacobini-Zinner. Plunging through a blizzard of plasma and dust 44 million miles from Earth, ICE became humanity's first spacecraft to intercept a comet—beating an international fleet destined for Halley's Comet. Long before iterative software agility became standard tech dogma, ICE proved that audacious math and legacy hardware could conquer new scientific frontiers on the fly.