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40 years ago: An astronaut’s ‘big leap’ into space [1]

['Chris Tejirian']

Date: 2024-02-05 22:02:13+00:00

Imagine strapping yourself into the nose cone of one of the most powerful rockets ever built, then blazing out of our atmosphere to a zone with little hope of rescue.

The daring of early NASA astronauts is hard to comprehend. On February 7, 1984, Bruce McCandless II continued NASA’s tradition of awe-inspiring achievement when he took the first untethered spacewalk.

Photos show an astronaut floating free of attachment, with only glowing blue planet Earth and endless black space behind him.

“It may have been a small step for Neil, but it’s a heck of a big leap for me,” McCandless said before leaving the space shuttle. The line, intended to ease his colleagues’ nerves, also paid tribute to words spoken by astronaut Neil Armstrong upon becoming the first person to set foot on the moon in 1969.

McCandless, a veteran astronaut and trained engineer, trusted his life to the manned maneuvering unit that he helped design. The same day, and again February 9, McCandless, as well as fellow astronaut Robert Stewart, took untethered walks and went approximately 90 meters from the space shuttle.

Those spacewalks followed NASA’s first spacewalk June 3, 1965. In that case, astronaut Edward H. White II was secured to a spacecraft by two lines approximately 7 meters long.

NASA conducted untethered spacewalks on three shuttle missions in 1984, before discontinuing the practice two years later. In 1994, a NASA astronaut tested a new propulsive backpack system designed for use in case an astronaut becomes untethered during a spacewalk.

Forty years after the first untethered spacewalk, NASA’s Artemis missions are working to return to the moon and send astronauts to Mars.

McCandless was a member of NASA’s astronaut corps from 1966 to 1990. He died December 21, 2017, at age 80, with the hope his work would inspire the next generation of explorers.

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[1] Url: https://share.america.gov/40-years-ago-astronaut-big-leap-into-space/?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=hero&utm_campaign=share_america&utm_id=123

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