Bruce McCandless

Photo: NASA“It may have been one small step for Neil,” McCandless quipped in reference to Armstrong’s famous words, “but it’s a heck of a big leap for me.” As The New York Times reported at the time, “Free of any lifeline and propelled into the dark void by tiny jets, they became, in effect, the first human satellites.”The MMUs were powered by two dozen gaseous nitrogen thrusters stored in tanks on the astronaut’s backpack, enabling free movement in space. Control was achieved through hand controllers, allowing…

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft captured this view of Earth—appearing as a speck of light—on February 14, 1980, at a distance of roughly 3.2 billion miles (6 billion km) from the Sun—beyond the orbit of Neptune. The words of Carl Sagan, as featured in his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of a Human Future in Space, best describes the significance of this ultra-famous image:... Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human…