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McCandless was a famous NASA astronaut and became the first person to have a spacewalk freely. He took his last breath in the age of 80. In 1984, he went for a spacewalk with a large spacewalker’s jetpack without any crew member. He was traveling alone in space and covered over 300 feet long distance from the space shuttle challenger.
"The iconic photo of Bruce soaring effortlessly in space has inspired generations of Americans to believe that there is no limit to the human potential," Sen. John McCain said in a statement. The Arizona Republican and McCandless were classmates at the U.S. Naval Academy.
McCandless passed away in Thursday declared by NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Friday. The reason of his death is unknown.
He was so daring that he enjoyed a lot during his first spacewalk without showing any nervousness.
"I was grossly over-trained. I was just anxious to get out there and fly. I felt very comfortable ... It got so cold my teeth were chattering and I was shivering, but that was a very minor thing," he told the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado, in 2006.
After McCandless his fellow astronaut Robert L. Stewart also had a spacewalk for two hours and became the second astronaut who traveled in space outside space shuttle.
"I'd been told of the quiet vacuum you experience in space, but with three radio links saying, "How's your oxygen holding out?" "Stay away from the engines!" "When's my turn?" it wasn't that peaceful,' McCandless wrote in the Guardian in 2015.
But he also wrote: "It was a wonderful feeling, a mix of personal elation and professional pride: it had taken many years to get to that point."
Afterwards, McCandless was participated in the 1990 shuttle crew that set up the Hubble Space Telescope in space to collect pictures of cosmic nature. Today we have excellent and amazing pictures of outer space just because of Hubble Space Telescope. It helps us capture everything happening in space which probably wouldn’t be captured from telescope set up in Earth. In 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, He was working as the Mission Control communicator in Houston.
During his spacewalk, "My wife was at mission control, and there was quite a bit of apprehension," McCandless wrote. "I wanted to say something similar to Neil when he landed on the moon, so I said, "It may have been a small step for Neil, but it's a heck of a big leap for me." That loosened the tension a bit."
Boston the city where McCandless was born and completed his graduation from Senior High School called Woodrow Wilson located in Long Beach, California. He also obtained electrical engineering and business administration degrees from the Naval Academy.
Being a naval aviator, McCandless took part in the Cuban blockade during missile crisis occurred in 1962. Amidst the Gemini program, he got an opportunity to get astronaut training and later became a backup pilot in 1973 when the first manned shuttle was launched to establish a laboratory in space. He worked not only for NASA, but also for Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Colorado.
"Bruce served his country with humility and dignity, and encouraged all of us to reach new heights," McCain said.