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Hitting the Books: Buck Rogers flew so that NASA astronauts could spacewalk - Engadget

Hitting the Books: Buck Rogers flew so that NASA astronauts could spacewalk - Engadget

Hitting the Books: Buck Rogers flew so that NASA astronauts could spacewalk - Engadget
Jul 31, 2021 1 min, 50 secs

That astronaut was Bruce McCandless II, Houston’s capsule communicator during the moon landing mission, Challenger crew member, and the driving force behind America's ability to conduct operations outside of the stuffy confines of space shuttles and international stations.

Wonders All Around, exhaustively researched and written by McCandless's son, Bruce III, explores McCandless the elder's trials and tribulations during NASA's formative years and his laser-focus on enabling astronauts to zip through space unencumbered by the mass of their ships.

From the afternoon in December 1966 that he first tried out the Manned Maneuvering Unit in a Martin Marietta simulator, he was hooked on a vision of a gas-propelled jetpack that would allow astronauts to operate outside their spacecraft.

None worked harder, though, than Bruce McCandless and his chief collaborator, an Auburn-educated engineer and Air Force officer named Charles Edward (“Ed”) Whitsett, Jr.

In the mid-sixties, the Air Force assigned Whitsett to NASA to supervise development of the Air Force’s Astronaut Maneuvering Unit.

[He] wants to build a larger operational unit to perform space chores outside the shuttle.” And that’s exactly what he did.

Though the Skylab M509 tests in 1973 and 1974 were a resounding success, resulting in the triumph of the jetpack concept over both rocket boots and the handheld maneuvering unit, Whitsett and McCandless didn’t rest on their laurels.

Smaller gyroscopes replaced those used on the ASMU, and, as space historian Andrew Chaikin has noted, the ASMU’s “pistol-grip hand controllers, which were tiring to operate in pressurized space suit gloves, were replaced by small T-handles that needed just a nudge of the fingertips.” The MMU’s new arm units were made to be adjustable, to accommodate astronauts of all sizes.

Painted white for maximum reflectivity, the unit was built to survive the 500-degree fluctuation in temperatures (from a high of 250 degrees F to a low of minus 250 F!) that an astronaut might encounter in space.

Shuttle astronauts wore a newly designed suit called the Extravehicular Maneuvering Unit, or EMU, a two-piece marvel of textile engineering made up of fourteen layers of Nylon ripstop, Gore-Tex, Kevlar, Mylar, and other substances.

American astronauts remained on Earth, as NASA struggled to produce its next-generation orbital workhorse, the space shuttle

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