“I was grossly over-trained. I was just anxious to get out there and fly. I felt very comfortable ... It got so cold my teeth were chattering and I was shivering, but that was a very minor thing,” he told the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado.
As a young kid, I thought astronauts where just specially trained pilots like any other who happened to go into space. When I actually did some research on it I found out how wrong I was. Many of them helped engineer the equipment they used (as McCandless did). I've never had the chance to meet an astronaut but they also seem like good people in general.
I've now met several, and they've all been a real treat. Charlie Duke, Ken Mattingley, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, Al Worden, Alan Bean, Tom Stafford, Eileen Collins, Scott Altman, and more.
In some sense they are very similar, and they all give credit to the men and women on the ground who made it happen. But they really do make it happen, and are amazing people.
Among them, Bruce McCandless was one of the best - an absolute gentleman, a brilliant speaker, and fascinating.
Wondering what was the fallback plan in this case. Would orbiter re position itself to catch up with the guy? Tough to imagine it was "you get to die in vacuum of space"!
Beside all the redundancy built into the device itself, the shuttle carried a second one so someone else could go out and retrieve the stranded astronaut. There's a detailed write-up on the development and use of the thing on NASA's history site:
Most space gear (excluding the stuff that gets you to and back from space) has been almost implausibly reliable. Voyager 1's thrusters still work far past their intended best-before date and they were not designed to have someone's life depend on them.
If a Manned Maneuvering Unit somehow failed, it would have been a highly extraordinary event. The crew on the shuttle along with their mission controllers could have made an assessment of the risk of failure of the second MMU.
This isn't like your computer kernel-panicking and you rebooting it and hoping for the best.
I was pleasantly surprised he was 47 when he did this, not that he wasn't qualified or capable, just assumed there would be a bias towards a younger astronaut.
Reading about the training and preparation, both physical and mental, that astronauts do is pretty inspirational. Astronauts are examples of peak human beings.
I asked Bruce how accurately the simulator matched the reality. He replied that it was amazingly close, with the exception that the real thing "Chattered loudly" when it was working. That caught him by surprise, and the simulator was subsequently changed to include the noise.
An intelligent, thoughtful, hard-working, humble, charming man.
