(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
White to move and mate in two #623 - Untethered [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-04
Forty years ago on Feb 7, 1984, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II (Jun 8, 1937 – Dec 21, 2017) made the first ever untethered free flight using the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) and starred in one of the most memorable images of our time.
From www.smithsonianmag.com/…
NASA PMs were terrified of the MMU. They worried that a pressure-suited astronaut in the vacuum of space was “one system away from certain death.”
McCandless and Stewart strongly argued against using a tethered MMU, saying that the MMU was intended to crawl at a few inches per second and the spacewalk would stay close to the shuttle. All systems on the MMU were redundant. In case of a total failure, the shuttle could be maneuvered to scoop up the astronaut.
Still, even some insiders couldn’t help feeling nervous about what McCandless and Stewart were about to do. NASA’s Paul Bailey, an orbital mechanics specialist who helped train astronauts to fly the jetpack, felt confident in both Martin and in Ed Whitsett, but as the STS-41B launch approached, he had a recurring nightmare: He would be sitting on the shuttle’s tail section, with Earth filling the sky, just as McCandless and Stewart floated out of the airlock. “I was looking down the cargo bay over at the MMUs. And I thought, Holy mackerel, these people think I know what I’m talking about! And they’re going to die!” Waking up in a cold sweat, Bailey would grab his MMU reference book, go through it one more time, and reassure himself he hadn’t forgotten anything.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/4/2299611/-White-to-move-and-mate-in-two-623-Untethered?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
