NASA says this photo of Bruce McCandless’s 1984 spacewalk in the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) was one the of ‘most terrifying photos’ ever taken.
But McCandless, who’d wanted to go up in space since he was a kid, thought it was ‘liberating’.
Maybe NASA was projecting. Some previous spacewalks were successful, but others were problematic. This was the first time an astronaut planned to move, untethered as spaceship + astronaut simultaneously traveled at around 28,900 km/ hour. They had reasons to be terrified.
When McCandless was a kid, he’d wanted to fly like Buck Rogers. His parents encouraged him to do something more down to earth. He took their advice and joined the Navy, but when the challenge of Sputnik pushed the American space program into action, he saw his chance.
His spacewalk wasn’t the first, though. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov left his two-man Voskhod 2 to walk in space in 1965. As the Voskhod orbited above Earth at some 18,000 miles an hour, Leonov spent about 10 minutes maneuvering, tethered to it with a cord.
Two months after his spacewalk, Leonov wrote “I was concentrating fully, cold blooded and relatively unexcited”. But he also said “The sight was spectacular! The stars do not blink. The sun seems welded into the black velvet of the sky. The earth alone speeds along.”
Years later, he admitted, that spacewalk was problematic. His suit unexpectedly inflated during his walk. It grew so large, he couldn’t get back inside the Voskhod.
“I knew I could not afford to panic” he recalled in the book “Two Sides of the Moon” (2004). He knew if he deflated the suit by releasing oxygen from it, he might be able to get back in, but that would threaten his life support system. Having no better options, he slowly deflated the suit and made it inside.
Ed White was the first American to leave the safety of his Gemini space capsule to walk through space. He thought it was a hoot.
Time magazine said White was “like Buck Rogers propelling himself with his hand-held jet. He floated lazily on his back. He joked and laughed. He gazed down at the earth 103 miles below, spotted the Houston Galveston Bay area where he lives and tried to take a picture of it. Like a gas station attendant, he checked the spacecraft’s thrusters, wiped its windshield. Ordered to get back into the capsule, he protested like a scolded kid. “I’m doing great,” he said. “It’s fun. I’m not coming in.” After 20 minutes he agreed to come back, but he didn’t get enough of space walking Having to come back into the spacecraft made it “the saddest day” of his life.”
Not only did White have fun out there, he doubled Leonov’s 10-minute record, spending 23 minutes in space.
I guess some have the Right Stuff (and some don’t.)
McCandless hoped to go on the next spacewalk, but he didn’t want to use the Handheld Maneuvering Unit, saying it was “an elegant, simple concept that was fiendishly difficult to operate.” NASA’s first alternate design, the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit, was a backpack with hot gas thrusters fed by the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide.
McCandless said. “You’ll note that .. Ed Givens, one of my compatriots is wearing stainless-steel mesh trousers to prevent him from getting the proverbial hot seat from those hot-firing thrusters.”
Gene Cernan tested the AMU during the Gemini 9 flight. The AMU worked fine, but the walk required a level of physical exertion that overwhelmed Cernan’s spacesuit’s temperature controls. The suit’s visor got so foggy, Cernan couldn’t see out. Tom Stafford, the commander, canceled the spacewalk and brought him back inside.
McCandless proposed a new design,a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) that could be tested inside the Skylab workshop. He planned to make it a ‘svelte maneuvering unit’ that could fit on his back and be carried through an airlock. These three designs were prototyped.
McCandless said “I’m in the suit in all three cases, and I can assure you that being bent over like this is because of my supporting the weight of the unit.”
“It may have been a small step for Neil, but it’s a heck of a big leap for me,” McCandless said before successfully taking a huge leap of science and faith, going out and about for 100 meters at 28,900 Km/hour, and returning safely to the shuttle.
The MMU was used on two other space shuttle missions, but after the Challenger accident, NASA didn’t have enough money to re-certify it for flights on the new shuttle.
McCandless believed the MMU could later be useful for maneuvering around the Moon and Mars. He also thought it could help astronauts get around the surface of an asteroid, noting that “there aren’t enough handholds on the average asteroid, after all.”
I never would have thought of that. People who have been to space think different. Yet another reason to send more of us up.