Word: mccandless
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...space walks, photographed by a handful of color TV cameras, including one perched on the MMU, began on the fifth day of Challenger's flight. Appropriately it was Mission Specialist Bruce McCandless II, 46, a Navy captain, who got first crack at the $15 million backpack. While waiting 18 years to make his first flight, he has been working closely with the MMU's designers to perfect the complex machine, which looks like a seatless chair and can be steered by controls in its armrests. Each of these controls activates one or more of 24 jets that expel...
...McCandless started cautiously on the epic walk, slowly moving beyond the edge of the cargo bay at a sluggish .2 m.p.h.* But as he ventured deeper into the forbidding abyss of space, whatever apprehension he may have felt-NASA no longer talks publicly about astronaut heartbeats-seemed to vanish. "Hey, this is neat!" McCandless shouted, and then followed with a verbal bow to Neil Armstrong's famous comment when that astronaut first set foot on the moon: "That may have been one small step for Neil, but it's a heck of a big leap...
...distance widened between Challenger and the stiff, toylike figure, McCandless bubbled with superlatives. "Beautiful," "Super," "Superb," he kept telling mission controllers in Houston, adding, as if they did not already know, "We sure have a nice flying machine here." The excursion began while the shuttle was still in the earth's shadow and ended 90 minutes later, about the time it takes the shuttle to make one pass around the earth. Slowing down in front of Challenger's windshield, McCandless asked: "Hey, you going to want the windows washed or anything while I'm out here?" Skipper...
Safely back in the cargo bay, McCandless turned over his Buck Rogers contraption to Lieut. Colonel Robert Stewart, 41, the first Army man to journey into space. (Of the two MMUs aboard Challenger, one was always kept in readiness as a spare.) Urged McCandless: "Enjoy it. Have a ball." The hot-rodding Stewart, a former helicopter pilot, took that advice. When he throttled up to a radar-timed speed of .7 m.p.h., Brand warned him to slow down...
Like any test pilots, the astronauts gave their flying chair a thorough checkout; McCandless reported that his only real surprise was that the MMU shook and rattled when he turned on the forward-motion jets. The space walkers also retrieved a faulty camera from the aft end of the cargo bay, engaged in a brief and successful tryout of the shuttle's sinewy, 50-ft.-long arm, readjusted a scientific instrument on the big West German-made movable platform called the Shuttle Pallet Satellite (SPAS) and tested some of the tools created for April's satellite retrieval...