McCandless, Bruce

Bruce McCandless, in full Bruce McCandless II, (born June 8, 1937, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died December 21, 2017), American naval aviator and astronaut, the first person to conduct an untethered free flight in space.

McCandless was the son of an admiral and the grandson of a commodore. He received a B.S. from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1958. After two years of flight training, he was designated a naval aviator in March 1960. McCandless then served as a fighter pilot and, briefly, as an instrument flight instructor in the U.S. Navy until 1964. He earned an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 1965 and an M.B.A. from the University of Houston at Clear Lake in 1987.

McCandless, Bruce

McCandless was among 19 astronaut candidates chosen by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in April 1966. He served as a member of the support crew for the Apollo 14 mission in 1971 and as the backup pilot for Skylab 2 in 1973. He also helped develop the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), a rocket-propelled backpack that was worn by an astronaut during shuttle space walks.

McCandless’s first spaceflight came as a mission specialist on STS-41-B aboard the Challenger space shuttle on February 3, 1984. During this flight, McCandless tested the MMU in space walks and thus became the first person to fly in space without being tethered to a spacecraft. He traveled 300 feet (90 metres) away from the shuttle. Astronaut Robert Gibson’s photograph of McCandless flying in space, with Earth in the background, became a symbol of the space program. The crew also deployed two communications satellites into orbit and returned to Earth on February 11, 1984.

McCandless flew again as a mission specialist on STS-31, launching on the Discovery space shuttle on April 24, 1990. The STS-31 crew successfully deployed the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. The shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California on April 29, 1990.

After leaving NASA, McCandless worked at Martin Marietta Corporation and was a senior research scientist at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton, Colorado.