In 1984, American astronaut Bruce McCandless II (born 1937) became the first person to leave a spacecraft in space without a tether. He flew out of the payload bay of the space shuttle Challenger on February 7 , 1984, and using a jetpack called a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), flew around the vicinity of the shuttle as an independent satellite of the Earth. Also, in 1990, flying on the space shuttle Discovery, he participated in the d eployment of the Hubble Space Telescope, which soon afterwards returned views of interstellar space never before seen.

Joined the Astronaut Corps from the Navy

Bruce McCandless II was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 8, 1937, and attended high school in Long Beach, California. After graduating from high school, he went on to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He graduated from th e Naval Academy in 1958 with a bachelor of science degree.

Following his graduation from...