The First Untethered Spacewalk

The first space shuttle mission of 1984, the launch of Challenger on the cool, windless morning of Friday, February 3, was apparently perfect—and eagerly trailed by a national press anticipating the first flights of what they called the “Buck Rogers jetpacks.” Formally known as the Manned Maneuvering Unit, the invention was a massive backpack equipped with gas thrusters that would allow astronauts to leave their spacecraft and float free in space for the first time in history. Reporters hoped that the spectacle would approach the theatrics of watching men walk on the moon more than a decade before. But, once in orbit, as the astronauts tackled the initial tasks of their weeklong mission, they experienced a trickle of humiliating failures: First, mission specialist Ronald E. McNair oversaw the launch of the Westar 6 communications satellite, which spun like a top out of the payload bay as planned, but then apparently vanished. Mission Control sheepishly admitted that they had simply lost it somewhere in space. “We can’t find it,” they told the astronauts over the radio link. “It’s not where it’s supposed to be.”