Hitting the Books: Buck Rogers flew so that NASA astronauts could spacewalk

You have all seen the long-lasting image of the US astronaut driving gracefully upon his NASA-built MODOK chair. That astronaut was Bruce McCandless II, Houston’s capsule communicator throughout the moon touchdown mission, Challenger crew member, and the driving power behind America’s skill to conduct operations exterior of the stuffy confines of house shuttles and worldwide stations. With out McCandless, there is no assure the US would have EVA capabilities at present. Wonders All Round, exhaustively researched and written by McCandless’s son, Bruce III, explores McCandless the elder’s trials and tribulations throughout NASA’s adolescence and his laser-focus on enabling astronauts to zip by means of house unencumbered by the mass of their ships.

Copyright @ 20201 Bruce McCandless III. Revealed by Greenleaf Guide Group Press. Distributed by Greenleaf Guide Group. Design and composition by Greenleaf Guide Group and Kimberly Lance. Cowl design by Greenleaf Guide Group, Shaun Venish, and Kimberly Lance. Cowl picture courtesy of NASA, photographed by Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson

In his lengthy leaden days of ready for a spaceflight, my dad discovered the path to redemption on the again of an ageing cartoon character. From the afternoon in December 1966 that he first tried out the Manned Maneuvering Unit in a Martin Marietta simulator, he was hooked on a imaginative and prescient of a gas-propelled jetpack that might permit astronauts to function exterior their spacecraft. This imaginative and prescient had an apparent pop-culture antecedent. Within the Twenties a comic-strip character named Buck Rogers — a rock-jawed, All-American World Struggle I veteran — succumbed to the results of a mysterious gasoline he encountered whereas working as a mine inspector. He fell right into a deep sleep and woke after 5 centuries of slumber to a wierd new world of spaceships, ray weapons, and Asian over-lords. Although he initially traveled this new world by way of an antigravity belt, a tool that allowed him and his greatest gal, Wilma, to leap nice distances at a time, Buck finally acquired a svelte and evidently omnidirectional jetpack. He finally ventured into house in an journey known as Tiger Males from Mars, and his exploits within the cosmos modified America’s imaginative and prescient of the longer term without end. Thousands and thousands adopted Buck’s adventures within the funnies, on radio, and in film serials. Amongst Buck’s imitators and non secular heirs are Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford, John Carter of Mars, and Han Solo.

A number of gifted women and men spent important quantities of money and time to wrestle that jetpack out of the humorous papers and into the house shuttle. None labored more durable, although, than Bruce McCandless and his chief collaborator, an Auburn-educated engineer and Air Pressure officer named Charles Edward (“Ed”) Whitsett, Jr. Whitsett was a pale, bespectacled particular person, mild-mannered however tenacious. He had a head begin on my father. He’d been pondering and writing about jetpack know-how as early as 1962. In a way, he was attempting to resolve an issue that didn’t exist but: Specifically, how may an astronaut enterprise exterior his or her spaceship and carry out constructive duties in an setting with no oxygen, with excessive temperature fluctuations, and in an orbital “free fall” that would go away the spacefarer lolling within the sensible equal of zero gravity? Alexei Leonov of the Soviet Union and American Ed White had confirmed that extravehicular exercise was potential, that males may survive exterior of their house capsule, however mainly all they’d achieved was float. How may a person transfer from one a part of a spaceship to a different, or from one spacecraft to a different craft, or from a spacecraft to a satellite tv for pc, to be able to make inspections or repairs? None of those wants actually existed within the early sixties, when the applications of each nations had been nonetheless simply attempting to fireside tin cans into low Earth orbit and predict, roughly, the place they might come again down. However clearly the wants would finally come up, and numerous strategies had been proposed to deal with them.

Within the mid-sixties, the Air Pressure assigned Whitsett to NASA to oversee improvement of the Air Pressure’s Astronaut Maneuvering Unit. Gene Cernan’s failed take a look at flight of the AMU on Gemini 9 in 1966 — the “space-walk from hell,” as Cernan known as it — set the jetpack mission again, but it surely by no means went away. McCandless, Whitsett, and a NASA engineer named Dave Schultz labored quietly however assiduously to maintain the dream alive. They enlarged and improved the AMU all by means of the latter half of the last decade and into the seventies. Within the “Forgotten Astronauts” wire story that portrayed him as a washout in 1973, my dad talked about the rationale why he needed to remain within the manned house program regardless of not having received a crew project on both Apollo or Skylab. “McCandless,” mentioned the article, “has helped develop the M509 experimental maneuvering unit. The Skylab astronauts strap it on like a backpack and propel themselves Buck Rogers — like across the Skylab inside. [He] desires to construct a bigger operational unit to carry out house chores exterior the shuttle.” And that’s precisely what he did.

Although the Skylab M509 exams in 1973 and 1974 had been a powerful success, ensuing within the triumph of the jetpack idea over each rocket boots and the hand held maneuvering unit, Whitsett and McCandless didn’t relaxation on their laurels. Over the following a number of years, utilizing no matter time and funding they may scrape collectively, the workforce made a number of upgrades — eleven, by one rely — to what was now being known as the “manned maneuvering unit,” or MMU. The bulbous nitrogen-gas gas tank of the ASMU was changed with two streamlined aluminum tanks within the rear of the unit, every of which was wrapped in Kevlar. The variety of propulsion nozzles was elevated from fourteen to twenty-four, positioned across the jetpack to permit for six-degrees-of-freedom precision maneuvering. Smaller gyroscopes changed these used on the ASMU, and, as house historian Andrew Chaikin has famous, the ASMU’s “pistol-grip hand controllers, which had been tiring to function in pressurized house go well with gloves, had been changed by small T-handles that wanted only a nudge of the fingertips.” The MMU’s new arm items had been made to be adjustable, to accommodate astronauts of all sizes. Painted white for max reflectivity, the unit was constructed to outlive the 500-degree fluctuation in temperatures (from a excessive of 250 levels F to a low of minus 250 F!) that an astronaut may encounter in house.

By 1980 the machine weighed in at 326 kilos. Just like the AMU and the ASMU earlier than it, the MMU was designed to suit with or “over” the astronaut’s stress go well with. Shuttle astronauts wore a newly designed go well with known as the Extravehicular Maneuvering Unit, or EMU, a two-piece marvel of textile engineering made up of fourteen layers of Nylon ripstop, Gore-Tex, Kevlar, Mylar, and different substances. Energy for the jetpack’s electronics was provided by two 16.8-volt silver-zinc batteries. Two motion-control handles — the translational hand controller and the rotational hand controller — had been mounted on the unit’s left and proper armrests, respectively, and a button activated an “attitude-hold mode,” which used motion-sensing gyroscopes to direct the firing of the thrusters to take care of an astronaut’s place in house.

The machine had been examined in each method its designers may think about. A consultant of a neighborhood gun membership visited Martin Marietta and shot the MMU’s nitrogen gas tank with a .50 caliber bullet to establish whether or not the tank would explode if pierced. (It did not.) The jetpack was run by means of a whole bunch of hours of simulations. At my father’s urging, a gifted and intense Martin Marietta mission supervisor named Invoice Bollendonk subjected the system to space-like circumstances within the firm’s thermal vacuum facility. The MMU was now not a “far out” experiment, as Mike Collins as soon as known as it. It was now a promising house device. Sadly, for the second, it was nonetheless an unused house device. American astronauts remained on Earth, as NASA struggled to provide its next-generation orbital workhorse, the house shuttle.