The first person to fly freely in space

Forty years ago, the first untethered spacewalk produced one of the most iconic photographs in the history of space exploration .

Photo of astronaut Bruce McCandless II floating untethered outside the Challenger spacecraft. Photo: NASA

On February 7, 1984, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II, wearing a manually operated backpack propelled by a nitrogen engine, flew out of the payload bay of the space shuttle Challenger, according to Live Science . He flew 320 feet away from the spacecraft, becoming the first person to attempt a spacewalk without a harness. McCandless orbited Earth as the first human satellite for 1 hour and 22 minutes.

"It may have been a small step for Neil, but it was a giant step for me," McCandless said of his solo flight around the world.

The moment was immortalized by Challenger pilot Robert “Hoot” Gibson, who used a Hasselblad camera to capture McCandless flying alone above the Earth. It is the most famous photograph of the entire shuttle program.

Even though the photo was unplanned, Gibson immediately knew it would be famous, so he adjusted three exposures and focused four times on the photo, according to NASA. He even tilted the camera to make sure the horizon was horizontal in the photo.

McCandless served as a liaison to NASA mission control during Apollo 11 in 1969 and Apollo 14 in 1971. His second and final flight was in April 1990 on mission STS-31, which deployed the Hubble Space Telescope into Earth orbit from the payload bay of the space shuttle Discovery. He died in 2017 at the age of 80. His backpack is on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia.

An Khang (According to Live Science )

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