By Bruce McCandless III
ISBN: 978-1-62634-865-3
Pages: 247
Price: $24.95, hardcover
As we enter the seventh decade of human space flight, there is a wealth of astronaut biographies available to interested readers. Most autobiographies and biographies of astronauts from the Moon race era have been written, and today we are seeing many biographies from many who flew aboard the Space Shuttle.
The career of Bruce McCandless II – a Group 5 astronaut who had to wait nearly eighteen years for his first ride into space after watching many others from his group fly to the Moon – is not unique, since other astronauts selected in his group and the two groups that followed had to wait nearly as long or even longer to go into space.
Nor is the new biography of McCandless, Wonders All Around, written by his son Bruce McCandless III, the only book written by an astronaut offspring.
But this book, written four years after the elder McCandless’ death, is an engaging read that tells the stories of the author and the subject in an honest fashion.
Bruce McCandless II was a member of the “Original Nineteen” group of astronauts selected in 1966 to fill out crews for Apollo and Skylab. Two of those 19 never flew, and three had to wait until the shuttle began flying in the 1980s to get into space.
McCandless will always be associated with NASA’s greatest moment, since he was the spacecraft communicator in mission control who conversed with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during their moonwalk on Apollo 11. His son argues that McCandless’ career suffered from that point onward because he apparently failed to transmit an order to Armstrong and Aldrin to cut their lunar excursion short, a claim this reviewer finds questionable.
When he did get to fly on board the shuttle, McCandless got two memorable and important flights. After having spent years working to develop astronaut maneuvering units for spacewalking astronauts, McCandless became the first person to make an untethered spacewalk when he tested a maneuvering unit on board the STS-41B mission in February 1984. The photos of his feat are amongst the most iconic images of the space shuttle era.
Six years later, McCandless was on the STS-31 mission that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. In preparing for that mission, he and astronaut Kathy Sullivan developed tools and techniques that proved to be crucial in the work of repairing and maintaining Hubble during the five servicing missions that followed their deployment mission. Even as he retired as an astronaut following STS-31, McCandless played a key role in helping scientists decide how to restore Hubble after it was found that its main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. The fact that Hubble still functions into its fourth decade owes much to the work of McCandless and Sullivan.
The younger McCandless gives an honest account of how his father’s personality, which could be described as so driven that it even stood out amongst his fellow astronauts, affected his career and his family life. The book also describes how the author’s mother, Bernice McCandless, coped with living with an astronaut and two spirited children who grew up in the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s.
In discussing his own life, the author provides fascinating details about growing up in the shadow of the Johnson Space Center, which wasn’t too far away from other less glamorous industries in the Houston area that polluted the air and provided teenagers from relatively hardscrabble backgrounds to the high school young McCandless attended.
For anyone interested in the astronauts of McCandless’ time and their families, this book is worthwhile reading.
