Wonders All Around: The Incredible True Story of Astronaut Bruce McCandless II and the First Untethered Flight in Space

by Bruce McCandless III

Overview

The Man You Never Knew You Knew

It’s one of the most powerful and popular images in the history of space exploration: an astronaut in a snow-white spacesuit, untethered and floating alone in an expanse of blue. Bruce McCandless II is the man in that spacesuit, and Wonders All Around: The Incredible True Story of Astronaut Bruce McCandless II and the First Untethered Flight in Space is the thoroughly engrossing, extensively researched story of his inspiring life and groundbreaking accomplishments, as told by his son, a gifted writer and storyteller.

Bruce McCandless II, a Navy fighter pilot, joined NASA in 1966. He was Houston’s capsule communicator—the person talking to the astronauts—as Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong made his giant leap for mankind in 1969. McCandless supported subsequent Apollo flights and developed technology and techniques his fellow astronauts used during the Skylab program, working behind the scenes until he was chosen to ride Challenger into space on the tenth shuttle mission. When he stepped into the cosmos to test the Manned Maneuvering Unit, he became a space flight icon. But the road to that incredible feat was not the sure bet it should have been for such a gifted man.

Bruce McCandless II was an astronaut for 24 years, and his story encompasses the development of the space agency itself—the changes in focus, in personnel, in approach, and in the city of Houston that grew up with it.

Wonders All Around is more than a catalogue of McCandless’s extraordinary achievements, which included work on the design, deployment, and repair of the Hubble Space Telescope. It is also a tale of perseverance and devotion.

Recounted with insight and humor, this book explores the relationship between a father and a son, men of two very different generations. And finally, it is an exploration of the mindset of one unique individual, and the courage, imagination, and tenacity that propelled him and his country to their place in the forefront of space history. 

From Wonders All Around: 

"Bruce McCandless turned his Jeep around and screeched out of the cul-de-sac in front of our house for the ten-minute drive to the space center. The moon, a waxing crescent, was standing thirty degrees above the western horizon, and my father slipped into a sort of reverie as he sped toward it on NASA Road One. The moon floated serene and imperturbable in front of him like a black-and-white photograph of itself, Earth’s gravitational remora, her pale silent sister, movie star and legend, goddess and mirage. Bruce McCandless had just turned thirty-two. He was an engineer, a true son of science, a distant nephew of Sir Isaac Newton. He knew the formulas required for achieving orbital velocity, could tell you the fuel mixtures you needed, the stages and timing of rocket-booster separations. He brushed sentiments away like so many spider webs. But even he was having trouble believing that human beings—his colleagues and friends—were up there in the sky, getting ready to do something no one had ever done before. He was going to be part of it. He would be talking to two men as they walked on the moon. The young astronaut hadn’t quite reached his lifelong goal of touching the lunar surface, but he was close. He was almost there.

He could feel it."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781626348653
Publisher:	Greenleaf Book Group Press
Publication date:	07/13/2021
Pages:	284
Sales rank:	1,097,721
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Bruce McCandless III grew up in the shadow of Houston’s Johnson Space Center during the Apollo and Skylab eras. He graduated from the Plan II Honors Program of the University of Texas in 1983 and went on to earn advanced degrees from the University of Reading in England and the University of Texas School of Law. After teaching at Saint David’s School in New York City, he returned to Austin to practice law in 1995. He is the author of Sour Lake (2011), Beatrice and the Basilisk (2014), and, with his daughter Carson, Carson Clare’s Trail Guide to Avoiding Death (And Other Unpleasant Consequences) (2017). Bruce serves on the board of directors of the Worthy Garden Club, an Oregon-based environmental organization, and the Austin Public Library Foundation. He and his wife, Pati McCandless, live in Austin.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A Men’s Journal “Best New Books of 2021” Selection

Wonders All Around is at once a deeply-felt memoir of fathers and sons and an engaging exploration of space and its mysteries—space beyond the bounds of Earth and space between a suburban teenager’s ears. With his eyes on the stars and his feet on the ground—like his astronaut father—McCandless has produced a wonderful, readable book.
Joe Holley, Author of Hometown Texas

An important and entertaining book, Wonders All Around gives us a complex, complete portrayal of a brilliant and courageous American.
Tom Jones, Author of Skywalking: An Astronaut’s Memoir

Wonders All Around is part history, part science adventure, part memoir of a boy and part history of mankind’s greatest achievements so far. To read it is to have hope again in the face of impossible odds and know that humans can dare greatly provided they put in the work. It’s a marvelous book about a marvelous time when impossible things were someone's 9-to-5.
Jef Rouner, The Houston Press

With a dry, wry mixture of irreverence and love, Wonders All Around looks behind the stolid exterior of a seemingly unknowable, quiet man and finds – a great deal. It takes a talented author to bring old events to life, and his son’s humor and candor makes me feel as close to knowing [Bruce McCandless II] as we could ever get. I almost feel like hanging up my old 1980s poster again.
Francis French, Author of In the Shadow of the Moon

It was fascinating to read about the 18 years that Bruce McCandless II worked for NASA before he finally had his first flight, which debuted the Manned Maneuvering Unit, a jet-fueled backpack that he and Ed Whitsett Jr. spent so many years developing. (That's the joystick-controlled machine he's wearing in that mind-bending poster that hung on millions of Americans' walls over the following decade. The book is also so touching. I cried while reading about the declining health of Bernice, who survived so many astronaut wife struggles over the years and at the end of her life remained a loving partner and mother.
Addie Broyles, Austonia.com

By channeling a unique perspective informed by a lifetime of personal memories, Bruce McCandless III offers readers both a meticulously researched and well written portrait of his father’s life and career as an integral part of the U.S. Space Program in Wonders All Around.
James Weiskittel, Indie Reader

Wonders All Around is a wonderful read…a very human tale, one that underscores the astronaut’s perseverance, setback, defeat, and redemption.
Leonard David, Inside Outer Space

Editorial Reviews

★ 2021-09-18
The sometimes-frustrated, sometimes-exalted life of an astronaut is excavated in this probing biography.

McCandless profiles his father, Bruce McCandless II, an Apollo astronaut who never made it onto a moon shot but later served on a space shuttle mission where he made history’s first untethered spacewalk using the Manned Maneuvering Unit jet pack, becoming famous for an iconic photograph that showed him flying jauntily through space. In the author’s fond but cleareyed assessment, McCandless senior was a daring pilot, a brilliant engineer who did critical work on the MMU and the Hubble Space Telescope, a passionate environmentalist, and a questing soul whose motto was “onward.” He was also an “abrupt, self-absorbed, and prickly” man who was both whip smart and oblivious. (He once surprised his wife by giving her a book entitled Open Marriagefor Christmas, “just for consideration.”) The book is also a vivid depiction of a testy father-son relationship pitting senior’s culture of astronauts who “cut their hair short and at precise geometric angles to minimize drag” against junior’s feckless, 1970s counterculture of teens in “greasy hair and grimy jeans…looking for psychedelic mushrooms in the cow manure.” The author’s portrait ably conveys the complexities of an astronaut’s existence: the anxious jockeying for scarce mission slots, the death-defying extremism of rocketry—“it felt like Challengerwas going to break apart, and he shut his mouth tight so his stomach wouldn’t fall out”—and the pathos of McCandless senior’s predicament when he seemed eternally stuck in ground assignments that thwarted his drive and talent. (“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.”) The author’s colorful prose is shrewdly realistic about space flight but also alive to its lyrical humanism. (“The [photograph’s] oddly serene contrast of a solitary man emerging from the immensity of the universe, small but self-directed…suggests order—a triumph, even if tenuous, against what is dark and immense and essentially incomprehensible.”) The result is an absorbing testament to perseverance in pursuit of empyrean ambition.

A fine evocation of the NASA experience—in the sky and on Earth.

Kirkus Reviews