Sounds like a nice story, but it makes little sense. "I keep pushing, but the parts don't go into the board" LOL. NASA isn't one thing (or one place either), so while someone somewhere at NASA may have done this, the likely horrible reliability for such an assembly would heavily discourage these sorts of hacks, especially for anything going into space.
Surface mount is hard enough to get it to work reliably even with a specific footprint for each part, with fairly precise and repeatable component dimensions, so the vagaries of hand bent leads seems to be asking for certain disaster. And, through-hole parts are on the way out anyway.
You can mix through hole and SMD on a board with no problems at all, and I find it useful for the few instances where SMD parts can be problematic, such as for electrolytic caps, and film caps with nice dielectrics. Maybe this was what was being referred to?