Wonders All Around: The Incredible True Story of Astronaut Bruce McCandless II and the First Untethered Flight in Space
The following is an excerpt from Wonders All Around: The Incredible True Story of Astronaut Bruce McCandless II and the First Untethered Flight in Space by Bruce McCandless III which publishes July 13, 2021 and is available everywhere books are sold.
Praise for Wonders All Around
“ Bruce McCandless II waited eighteen years for his first spaceflight, marking him as an astronaut with seemingly inexhaustible supplies of patience and dedication. When he cruised serenely away from Challenger in 1984, photographed against the infinite cosmos, we stared in wonder at a fellow human slipping the bonds of Earth. An important and entertaining book, Wonders All Around gives us a complex, complete portrait of a brilliant and courageous American.”
— Tom Jones, Veteran Astronaut and Spacewalker, Author of Sky Walking: An Astronaut’s Memoir
Chapter 1: The Long Drive
He was an Apollo-era astronaut, one of nineteen men picked from hundreds of qualified applicants to plant the American flag on the moon. Now, though, the Apollo program was over, and Bruce McCandless’s prospects for leaving Earth seemed bleak.
Some men would have started looking elsewhere for a job. My dad’s reaction was just the opposite. He kept pushing for a spot on some future spaceflight, even if the flight was, at this point, largely hypothetical. He worked hard. He checked all the boxes. And when Congress enacted a nationwide 55 mph speed limit in an attempt to reduce oil consumption, my father dutifully complied. Dad! A fighter pilot! A man who’d wrestled a Phantom warplane capable of flying 1,200 miles per hour onto the deck of a lurching aircraft carrier in a thunderstorm, at night, was now poking along Highway 183 north of Austin in a barn-size Chevy Suburban with the speedometer pegged on double nickels. Even worse, I was a fifteen-year-old boy stuck in this clown car with him and the rest of my family.
My father manned the driver’s seat, silent except when he saw some natural or historic feature in the distance.“The Llano River!” he announced, as if he’d put the waterway there himself. My mother, Empress of GORP, nodded companionably from the passenger side, content to indulge her husband’s periodic travelogue but focused mostly on smuggling snacks to us in the back and watching the wispy winter clouds. My little sister, Tracy, the Precious Cargo, paged through Tiger Beat in the middle seat, and I occupied the way-back — the Tail Gunner, as I thought of myself, strafing the countryside with my piercing scowl.
It was January 1976. West of Abilene, the empty sorghum and cotton fields of the Panhandle lay around us like a sea of dirt. Bulbous water towers were the only landmarks, guarding the horizon like eyeless pod creatures on spindly metal legs. I watched plumbing vans accelerate past our car. Eighteen-wheelers ribboned like long insects from our lane to the next and then back again once they were safely in front of us. Cadillacs full of languorous suburban kids from Dallas swung wide as they went by, the passengers barely sparing a glance at us as they sped on their way to Taos or Aspen. We passed through dreaming skeleton towns: Sweetwater, with its sign for the world’s biggest rattlesnake round-up; Snyder, where a long-ago resident had spotted a beautiful and extremely rare white buffalo, and then killed it; and Post, the cereal millionaire’s not entirely successful agrarian utopia.
It took me years to figure out why a man with the skills and experience to drive as fast as his V-8 could go would possibly submit to the idiotic strictures of a speed limit no one else in the great state of Texas was paying the slightest attention to. But I get it now. Such were the vagaries of NASA’s flight-crew selection process that anything — marital scandal, a five-car pile-up, a negative fitness report — might have gotten Bruce McCandless scratched from the lineup for a future spaceflight. And he was not going to let that happen. So he toed the line, and we toed it with him.
Unfortunately, Dad’s insistence on abiding by the rules seemed to make little difference. As early as 1973 he was being called a failure by the press — one of only three men from his astronaut class, Group 5, not to have been selected for or actually flown on either an Apollo or a Skylab mission. Indeed, excluding Ed Givens, who died in 1967 from injuries sustained in a car crash, and John Bull, who left the program in 1968 for medical reasons, and including projected Apollo, Skylab, and Skylab rescue flights, he was the only man not to be picked. A journalist interviewed my father as he worked as a capcom — capsule communicator — for Skylab 2, and the story showed up in newspapers all around the country. The writer called Bruce McCandless a “forgotten astronaut” and concluded that “declining budgets, national priorities in flux and the cruelty of time lengthen the odds [McCandless] ever will exult in the thunder and fire of launch, float weightless or wear the gold astronaut pin that separates the ‘been theres’ from the ‘somedays.’” It was a humiliating experience for my father. He was a brilliant man. He had always been something of a wunderkind, marveled at for his mathematical aptitude, capacious memory, and rock-ribbed self-discipline. Now the prodigy, son and grandson of naval heroes, was being portrayed as a washout in the national media. He was the Moonlight Graham of the space program, the promising rookie ballplayer who never even got to the plate in the big leagues.
There was a mission the journalist failed to mention. Still in the planning stages in 1973, when the article was written, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was a one-off American-Soviet flight meant to mark the end of the space race and usher in an era of friendlier relations between the United States and the USSR. America’s astronauts would leave Earth using Apollo hardware. The Soviets would fly their Soyuz craft, and the two vehicles, Soyuz and the Apollo command module, would link up in orbit using a specially designed collar that would allow the two crews to go back and forth between the spaceships. Dad prepared a cheat sheet to pitch himself to management as a candidate for the mission. He noted that he’d studied German at the Naval Academy and was currently teaching himself Russian, that one of his hobbies was photography, and that when he served as a young lieutenant on the USS Enterprise he’d acted as an informal ambassador for foreign dignitaries visiting the ship. He admitted he was occasionally “off-putting” — too damn smart is what he meant, and not afraid to show it — but insisted he could work with anyone in the astronaut office.
Alas, he wasn’t chosen for that mission either. The three slots were allotted to Tom Stafford, Vance Brand, and the grizzled veteran Deke Slayton, finally cleared for spaceflight after a long medical suspension for heart issues. The mission went well. Linked together, the space vessels looked like two bugs kissing through a harmonica. Our astronauts shook hands with their cosmonauts, Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov. The combined crew made toasts and constructed a commemorative plaque. It was a nothing flight, a symbolic gesture, but it was a flight, and my dad’s frustration deepened when he wasn’t picked for even this relatively undemanding assignment.
I remember my father’s days of waiting for a mission as a sort of perpetual twilight. Bruce McCandless didn’t smoke or drink. He dutifully jogged several miles each week on the oak-shaded track behind the astronaut gym. He avoided TV during the week and watched only sparingly on weekends, when my mom could coax him into a spree of slothfulness that included The Mary Tyler Moore Show on Saturday evenings and Masterpiece Theatre on Sundays. He didn’t watch sports, play sports, or gamble on sports. He didn’t fish or hunt, and he never cracked open a cold one with his buddies. In fact, I don’t remember him having any buddies. He was a loner, courteous but self-contained. You didn’t get a pat on the back in our house unless you were choking.
Our dinners were somber affairs. We ate around a rectangular Formica table in the breakfast nook. Tracy and I sat on benches padded with orange vinyl cushions. Mom and Dad occupied faux-Spanish style chairs with green felt upholstery. Despite the informal, Howard Johnson’s-at-the-airport feel of the furnishings, there was a tension in the air that set in right around the time the frozen string beans started steaming. I had the feeling that my sister and I had forgotten to do something important, though I couldn’t figure out what it was, or that judgment had been rendered on us and we’d been found guilty of . . . something — again, it was unclear what. Horseplay was prohibited. The TV and all sources of music or other frivolity were turned off, and singing was strictly forbidden. The only sound came from the aquarium pump. My father had a 100-gallon tank along the wall behind his chair. Sometimes the big plecostomus would attach itself by its mouth to the glass facing us, and I imagined it was sucking all the oxygen out of the room.
But one night it was worse. One night Dad, a resolutely even-keeled man, unflappable really, slumped in his chair, put his head in his hands, and went completely silent. It was such an odd and disturbing sight that gravity itself seemed to bend and fold around his motionless figure. We’d seen him mad plenty of times. He hated the length of my hair. He was annoyed when I said I wanted to be a DJ when I grew up. He got mad at my mom and frustrated with Tracy, just as we all — like any family — got angry and annoyed with each other. But this was different. This was an existential crisis in the life of a man who didn’t have existential crises.
The room was quiet, save for the rasp of the pump. It was like the house itself was on life support. Was my father mourning his lost potential? Was he bitter about the years he’d wasted, waiting for a flight that never came? Was he physically ill? All three? Tracy and I had probably been bickering. And maybe there was more to it. A disagreement with my mother. The pressures of getting by on a government paycheck. But I suspect the biggest frustration for my dad was the feeling that he was stuck. He’d always been at the top of his class. He’d succeeded at everything he tried. Now he found himself a man without a mission, branded as a failure in the media, an astronaut who would never see the stars. The Skylab program had been over for two years, and the first flight of the space shuttle was still half a decade in the future. There were rumors going around about selection of a gigantic new astronaut class, a host of young hotshots just as eager to see space as Bruce McCandless was. He knew he could pass whatever test he was assigned. It was just that no one would give it to him. So, for the moment, he sat. And the house was very quiet, the way a forest grows quiet before a storm.
The next month our family packed up for the long drive to Denver, where Dad was training at a Martin Marietta aerospace facility and where my mom, my sister, and I were going to tour the U.S. Mint and visit the Denver Zoo. We brought extra socks and sprayed our jeans with Scotchgard because there was a chance we’d get to go skiing. The trip from Houston took twenty-three hours. Every time a car zipped past us, I’d check Dad’s face in the rearview. There wasn’t a trace of emotion on it. But periodically he would lean forward in his seat and crane his neck to gaze out the wind- shield to where jet aircraft, possibly fighters out of Dyess Air Force Base, were painting bars across the sky with their ghostly contrails.
A decade had passed since my father left his PhD studies at Stanford University to join NASA, lured by the prospect of a walk on the moon and a place in the history books. What had once seemed like a sure bet was now fading on the far turn. He knew he might never get beyond the blue veil to the vast unknown beyond. What he didn’t know was why. We didn’t know either. Was it something about him? Was it us? Was it, I wondered, me? At fifteen I had discovered I was a fundamentally flawed and repugnant human being, full of violent and generally unprintable desires. It was entirely possible I was the Jonah on this damned ship, holding my father back from what he’d wanted for so long. True, he never said as much. The fact was, he never said much at all. But we felt his disappointment. We breathed his frustration. And even in the way-back of the Suburban I could see that his knuckles were white as we left Lubbock for Amarillo, heading north through the brown lands toward the peaks and forests of Colorado. I wasn’t sure we’d make it. Jesus. The miles. The speedometer remained at 55, and it was obvious.
We were doomed.
We were still driving six hours later.
“Raton Pass!” shouted Dad, and we started to climb.
