![]() "I'd been told of the quiet vacuum you experience in space, but with three radio links saying, 'How's your oxygen holding out?' 'Stay away from the engines!' 'When's my turn?' it wasn't that peaceful," McCandless wrote in the Guardian in 2015.īut he also wrote: "It was a wonderful feeling, a mix of personal elation and professional pride: it had taken many years to get to that point. Stewart became the second person to fly untethered two hours after McCandless. Stewart pioneered the use of NASA's backpack device that allowed astronauts walking in space to propel themselves from the shuttle. 'It wasn't that peaceful'ĭuring that flight, McCandless and fellow astronaut Robert L. It got so cold my teeth were chattering and I was shivering, but that was a very minor thing," he told the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colo., in 2006. I was just anxious to get out there and fly. ![]() McCandless said he wasn't nervous about the historic spacewalk. It was a source of friction between father and son for a time, but he says the two eventually healed their relationship.This 1982 photo made available by NASA shows McCandless in Houston, wearing a Shuttle Extravehicular Activity Suit with Manned Maneuvering Unit. McCandless did not pursue a Naval career like his father or grandfather. “I think he worked a lot harder because of it.” “If nothing else, it motivated him,” McCandless said. McCandless says his father didn’t discuss his feelings about the story, but kept six copies of it in his files. In 1973, a news article questioned McCandless II’s career as an astronaut, speculating that he was a “washout” since he had not yet been assigned to a space mission. ![]() “And with my dad’s cohort of astronauts, the very last thing any one of them would have admitted is that they were different in any sense.” “Back then, of course, that sort of thing wasn’t discussed, or widely known about,” McCandless said. McCandless II applied to Join NASA Astronaut Group 5, and to his greatest surprise, his request was considered in April 1966, when he was just 28 years old. McCandless II was never diagnosed as having an autism spectrum disorder, but his son says it is conceivable that he did. “He was a brilliant man, capable of intense concentration and very inventive, but wasn’t always as much of a team player as he could have been.” “He wasn’t as polished as some of the astronauts,” McCandless said. “Terrifying and beautiful at the same time.”īruce McCandless II became an astronaut in the 1960s, but the 1984 spacewalk occurred on his first mission, aboard the space shuttle Challenger, 18 years after he joined the astronaut program. “It’s a pretty magnificent, sort of iconic, image,” McCandless said. Later, NASA released a high-quality image, taken of his father by his crewmate, Robert “Hoot” Gibson. ![]() McCandless told Texas Standard that people seeing the spacewalk in 1984 had only grainy video images. His son, Bruce McCandless III, has released a book called “Wonders All Around: The Incredible True Story of Astronaut Bruce McCandless II and the First Untethered Flight in Space.” The man who made that spacewalk in 1984 was astronaut Bruce McCandless II. English: Mission: STS-41-B Film Type: 70 mm Title: Views of the extravehicular activity during STS 41-B Description: Astronaut Bruce McCandless II, mission specialist, participates in a extra-vehicular activity (), a few meters away from the cabin of Space Shuttle Challenger. The image of the first untethered spacewalk – a man in a spacesuit, floating at an angle above Earth – is among the most iconic of manned spaceflights.
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