page_title: Bruce McCandless II
section_title: NASA career
hierarchical_section_title: Bruce McCandless II / NASA career
caption_attribution_description: English: Bruce McCandless was the capcom during Apollo 11's famous EVA
context_page_description: Bruce McCandless II was a United States Navy officer and aviator, electrical engineer, and NASA astronaut. In 1984, during the first of his two Space Shuttle missions, he completed the first untethered spacewalk by using the Manned Maneuvering Unit.
context_section_description: At the age of 28, McCandless was selected as the youngest member of NASA Astronaut Group 5 (labelled the "Original Nineteen" by John W. Young) in April 1966. According to space historian Matthew Hersch, McCandless and Group 5 colleague Don L. Lind were "effectively treated ... as scientist-astronauts" (akin to those selected in the fourth and sixth groups) by NASA due to their substantial scientific experience, an implicit reflection of their lack of the test pilot experience highly valued by Deke Slayton and other NASA managers at the time; this would ultimately delay their progression in the flight rotation.
  He served as mission control capsule communicator (CAPCOM) on Apollo 11 during the launch and during the first lunar moonwalk (EVA) by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin before joining the astronaut support crew for the Apollo 14 mission, on which he doubled as a CAPCOM. Thereafter, McCandless was reassigned to the Skylab program, where he received his first crew assignment as backup pilot for the space station's first crewed mission alongside backup commander Rusty Schweickart and backup science pilot Story Musgrave. Following this assignment, he again served as a CAPCOM on Skylab 3 and Skylab 4. Notably, McCandless was a co-investigator on the M-509 astronaut maneuvering unit experiment that was flown on Skylab; this eventually led to his collaboration on the development of the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) used during Space Shuttle EVAs. Although he was classified as a Shuttle pilot until 1983, McCandless ultimately chose to work on the MMU as a mission specialist due to the prestige of the program (which ensured a flight assignment) and his lack of test pilot experience.
  He was responsible for crew inputs to the development of hardware and procedures for the Inertial Upper Stage (IUS), Hubble Space Telescope, the Solar Maximum Repair Mission, and the International Space Station program.
  McCandless logged over 312 hours in space, including four hours of MMU flight time. He flew as a mission specialist on STS-41-B and STS-31.
caption: McCandless as capcom during the Apollo 11 EVA
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