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News
National Aeronautics and
Space Administration
Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center
Houston, Texas 77058
AC 713 483-5111
McCandless Retires from NASA, Navy
Captain Bruce McCandless, II, a NASA astronaut sinee April 1966 and mission specialist on two Space Shuttle flights, retired from NASA and the Navy August 31.
During his first space flight, STS 41-B in February 1984, McCandless made the first, untethered, free flight of the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU} which he developed with Charles E. "Ed" Whitsett of the Automation and Robotics Division. Paraphrasing Neil Armstrong's historical comment on Apollo ll, McCandless said, “That may have been one small step For Neil, but it's a heck of a big leap for me,” just before leaving the orbiter's payload bay for his MMU flight.
His second flight, STS-31 in April 1990, deployed the Hubble Space Telescope.
McCandless was Capcom on Apollo 10 and 11 and a member of the astronaut support crew for the Apollo 14 mission. He was backup pilot for the first manned Skylab mission and was co-investigator with Whitsett on the M-509 astronaut maneuvering unit experiment which was flown in the Skylab Program. He has been responsible for crew inputs to the development of hardware and procedures for the Inertial Upper Stage (I1US), Space Telescope, the Solar Maximum Repair Mission, and the Space Station Program.
McCandless remained an active-duty Naval officer through his NASA career, He retired with more than 32 years of Naval service.
McCandless did not announce his plans for the future.
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