A Team Made Up Entirely of Quarterbacks

NASA recently held a tree-planting ceremony in remembrance of my dad's work with the agency. I was invited to say a few words. Here they are:

Tree-Planting Ceremony for Bruce McCandless II

Remarks by Bruce McCandless III on April 24, 2019

Thank you.
That’s a phrase you’re going to hear a lot of from me today. Because looking out at this group, I am genuinely amazed and gratified at the good fortune that brought us together.
I’m grateful to my stepmother, Ellen Shields McCandless, and Stephanie Castillo of NASA for getting us here and organizing this wonderful tribute.
I’m grateful to my sister for sending her best wishes from Florida, though she couldn’t be with us today; and to my dad’s sister Rosemary for flying down from Dallas. If you really want to hear some stories about my dad, she’s the one to ask!
I’m grateful to my mother, Bernice, for bringing me into this magical mysterious world and teaching my sister and me that even though dad wanted peace and quiet at dinner time, it was okay to sing and dance immediately afterward. It’s my mom’s birthday. She was born on April 24, 1937 and she would have been 82 years old today. God bless you, Mom, and thank you for everything you did for us. We miss you every day.
I’m appreciative that my wife Pati and my daughter Carson, could join us today, even though they weren’t actually given a choice. Carson even made the ultimate sacrifice of missing her Physics and Pre-Calculus classes, so hey—wait to take one for the team, sister.
I’m grateful to the family friends of fifty years and more who traveled down to Clear Lake to join in this little celebration. I’ve known the Smiths and the Morrises, the Taylors and the Geehans and the Sienkowskis, since I was five. They don’t like to admit it, but they were a second family for us, and helped raise Tracy and me when my mom and dad were in the Soviet Union or Japan or wherever they went to get away from us all those times.
And I’m grateful to NASA and the men who preceded me here today. You can’t have Hollywood without movie stars, and you can’t have a space program without astronauts. I’ve known Fred Haise since the early Seventies. His son Steve was one of my best friends, and a fellow member of the Clear Lake High School Russian Club. We learned something very important in Russian Club. We learned that chicks don’t join the Russian Club.
Thank you also to Hoot Gibson. You all have seen that famous photograph of my dad piloting the MMU, a pure white ghost emerging from the haunted house of space. The man who took that photograph was none other than Hoot Gibson. He may not remember, but we met in Florida in 1990 before the launch of the Discovery flight that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. He was kind and considerate to my mom and me and all the other families that day, and I’ve always remembered him for it.
OK, so I’m a lawyer, and as if to prove it, I’ve just spent five minutes talking and I haven’t even gotten to the point.
What I came to talk to you about today is my namesake, Bruce McCandless II. And in particular, something we tend to forget about my dad. Not the belt buckle that spelled out PEACE in orange and red letters. Not the groovy turtlenecks he wore in 1969 or the red Volvo he drove for 24 years without washing. I’m talking about perseverance.
You’ve heard my dad was a smart, capable guy. A Naval Academy graduate, salutatorian of his class. A fighter pilot. He earned a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and was just a dissertation away from his doctorate. But guess what? Everyone in the astronaut office was smart. Everyone in that office was smart, and confident, and capable. It was like being on a team made up entirely of quarterbacks. It was like being on a team consisting entirely of Tom Bradys—only skinnier, and a whole lot nerdier.
So one thing people don’t remember so much anymore is that for a while there, it looked as if my dad wasn’t even going to get in the game. After being inducted as the youngest member of astronaut Group 5 in 1966, he waited 18 years for his first spaceflight. There was a point, after the Apollo missions ceased, and the Skylab flights were over, and Deke Slayton came back off the disabled list to claim a spot on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975, when the media described him as a forgotten astronaut.
Here’s what one newspaper had to say about him in those days, in an article called “Rookie Still on Earth”:
He sits in a swivel chair confronted by winking lights and flickering digital clocks, a rookie who never got a mission, the Mission Control console his closest approach to space. Declining budgets, changing national priorities, and the cruelty of time lengthen the odds he 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 ‘some days.’”
My dad didn’t care much for journalists. He ranked them just a little above lawyers and flight surgeons. So you may think that little article didn’t bother him. And you may be right. But I found four copies of it in his files, and I think it did bother him. I think it made him work harder. He latched on to a project initially called the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit and he, along with Ed Whitsett of NASA and Bill Bollendonk of Martin Marietta, willed that magical backpack, which Mike Collins called “far out” in 1973, into existence. I have a picture of him from those early days, testing the unit while grasped in what looks like a giant robotic claw. (As I mentioned to Rob Chambers of Lockheed Martin a little earlier, I think that would be considered an OSHA violation these days.) And finally, in 1984, after hundreds of hours of testing and designing and engineering and re-engineering, with Hoot Gibson and Vance Brand, Bob Stewart and Ron McNair, he got to fly it. And the rest is history—perhaps the most important and beautiful and compelling photograph of the entire Shuttle program—a contender for greatest space photograph ever—a sort of shorthand for human ingenuity and daring.
He went on to a less celebrated role in a more important project in1990—deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope, an orbital instrument that for decades now has captured stunning images of galaxies previously undreamt of, and allowed us to look back into time itself to try to understand who we are and how we got here—and, maybe more importantly, where we’re going.
The Hubble is still up there, 340 miles above earth’s surface, orbiting fifteen times a day, and we’re going to be studying the images it’s provided us for many years to come. Images like the odd, hourglass-shaped Southern Crab Nebula, several thousand light years away; and the shimmering pillars of the Star Queen Nebula, like fingers on the hand of God; the teeming galactic petri dish of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field; and the asymmetrical stellar tentacles and glittering, luminous gas fields of the McCandless Anomaly, which, oddly enough, seems to be located just down the road in Pearland.
That last phenomenon, by the way, is made up. But isn’t that kind of the point? All of this seems like it could be made up. The size and shape and sheer spectral weirdness of these images simply boggles the imagination, and makes prophets and dreamers of us all. My dad was immensely proud of that little satellite, and his part in bringing it to life—and, later, repairing it.
We all remember the successes, of course. That’s what we’re here for today. We’re proud to know we had a part in them—as friends, as colleagues, as family. But the thing I’m proudest of I think is my dad’s refusal give up—to give in—to let go of his dream when people whispered that the dance was over. As missions came and went. As platoons of new and shinier astronauts arrived in Building 4 and the years went slowly by.
We all know he didn’t give up.
Instead he got up, he did his job, he paid his dues, and he waited. And when the time came, he was ready.
I think we’re all ready. We all know NASA dreams big. We all know as well that a lot of those dreams have been deferred for an awfully long time. No longer. Now’s the time for us to fuel those dreams with the finances and the political will to see them through. Now is the time for Americans to stop having to thumb a ride to the international space station like a bashful hippie heading for Woodstock.
My wife and I are trying to do our own small part. Some of you may know there’s a new documentary out about the Apollo 11 mission. I can’t say enough good things about it. It really is magnificent, and I’m not just saying that because my dad shows up in his crazy turtlenecks, working as one of the CAPCOMs on that historic mission. We liked the movie so much that we decided to rent out a theater to show it to 46 of our closest friends. There were two thirteen year-old boys there, one of whom was the son of a former colleague of mine. The mom was a little apologetic about asking if she could bring them. They like to play video games, she said. Violent ones. One of them—her son—is an avowed Marxist. (What can I say? We live in Austin.)
But we said no, that’s fine, that’s great, bring ‘em. We want kids in the audience. So she did. And sure enough, even after the movie started, those kids sat there whispering to each other, watching undoubtedly inappropriate videos on their phones and probably trying to figure out how to dispose of all the grownups in the world without getting grounded.
But not for long. Because when they saw Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins started suiting up that day in July of 1969—calm, contemplative, but their eyes wide with a quiet apprehension they couldn’t quite mask—they stopped talking. And they were silent when the Saturn V rocket erupted in smoke and fire in front of them. And when Neil Armstrong put the lunar module down on the moon’s surface, with fuel running out and the world holding its breath, I looked over and those two boys were cheering like grade schoolers at a KPop concert. It was beautiful, man. So what I’m trying to say is, that spirit is still out there, just waiting to be rekindled in the hearts and minds of a massively distracted nation.
So we need to buy the NASA bumper stickers. We need to wear the t-shirts, and tell everyone we know about the movie, and the anniversary of the day we Americans accomplished the greatest engineering project in the history of the world. And sure, we can put mulch on my dad’s tree. By all means, as he would have said, Mulch away. But if we want to honor Bruce McCandless II’s legacy, and John Young’s vision, and Fred Haise’s daring, let’s not look down. Let’s look up. To the moon again. To Mars. And to every corner of the great dreaming undiscovered country beyond.

The End