First to fly untethered in space

Bruce McCandless, the first person to fly untethered in space and whose journey into the dark void above Earth was preserved in an iconic photograph, died Thursday. He was 80.

NASA announced his death Friday but did not provide more details.

Equipped with a bulky backpack, two dozen tiny jet thrusters and two bottles of nitrogen gas to fuel them, Mr. McCandless took his maiden voyage in February 1984. It was captured in an image of a man in a white space suit floating against a backdrop of the great black abyss.

A front-page article in The New York Times called Mr. McCandless’ ascent “a spectacle of bravery and beauty.” He and another astronaut, Robert L. Stewart, the article said, had effectively become “the first human satellites,” orbiting the Earth at the same velocity as the nearby shuttle — 17,500 mph.

One of 19 people selected by NASA to become astronauts in April 1966, Mr. McCandless, a former U.S. Navy captain, would play a role in Mr. Armstrong’s famed moonwalk only three years later.

Mr. McCandless, in mission control, was the voice the world heard communicating with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during their Apollo 11 mission.

Mr. McCandless would spend another decade helping develop the technology — called “manned maneuvering units” — that would eventually allow him to float free in space at the age of 46.

That 1984 mission had various technical objectives, but it was Mr. McCandless’ inaugural spacewalk that captured the hearts and minds of those about 170 miles below.”

During his second space shuttle mission, in 1990, Mr. McCandless helped deploy the Hubble Space Telescope. By the end of his career, he had logged more than 300 hours in space, including four hours in a manned maneuvering unit, according to his NASA biography.

Bruce McCandless II was born on June 8, 1937, in Boston, into a family of highranking naval officers. He graduated from Woodrow Wilson Senior High School in Long Beach, Calif., and received a Bachelor of Science degree from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1958. He later earned two master’s degrees — one in electrical engineering from Stanford University and another in business administration from the University of Houston at Clear Lake City.

He received several honors throughout his career from the Defense Department, NASA and the Smithsonian Institution. He was also awarded a patent for his role in designing what NASA said was “a tool tethering system” used during spacewalks.

While reflecting on that famous photograph in The Guardian in July 2015, Mr. McCandless noted that his visor was down.

“My anonymity means people can imagine themselves doing the same thing,” he said. “Like Neil said in 1969, I was representing mankind up there.”