Dunno. I keep picturing in my mind extremely long ropes.
But, as my point mentioned before, the moon missions and spacewalks were a different matter because they were pushing the envelope and trying to accomplish things that had never been done. This business of sending up shuttles to see how moths copulate in zero gravity and such is a little different - they had opened the door to civilians, not just trained military pilots. They had geezers like John Glenn going up there. That, if nothing else, sent the signal that these missions were no longer considered very risky.
I realize that planes, trains and automobiles crash too and that there are no guarantees. That's not the issue. The issue is that a craft in orbit might be disabled for a whole host of possible reasons and what I'm hearing is that NASA had no plan to even try to safely get them down. That's acceptable when you are dealing with risky new territory. It's not acceptable with something expected to go up hundreds of times.