An Iconic Spaceflight

Shuttle mission STS-41-B blasted off from Cape Kennedy on February 3, 1984 with a crew of five astronauts. Fittingly, in the age of Ronald Reagan and renewed cold war, it was a photogenic crew—the Right Stuff, with sideburns. Commander Vance Brand was fifty-three, a blonde, easygoing Coloradan and Navy test pilot who’d flown previously on the Apollo-Soyuz mission and barely survived inhaling hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide fumes upon re-entry. Pilot Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson was a Naval Academy graduate and one of the best fliers NASA ever employed. An improbably handsome individual with a lush mustache, he lent a Tom Cruisian flair to the mission; he later married one of the space program’s most charismatic female astronauts, Dr. Rhea Seddon, and he was still winning airplane races at the age of 73. Mission Specialist Captain Bruce McCandless II was a former Navy fighter pilot and Stanford-educated electical engineer, a man who built computers in his spare time for fun. Army captain Bob Stewart was an unassuming former helicopter pilot who helped develop and test the Sikorsky Black Hawk assault helicopter; not long after the mission, he was promoted to Brigadier General. And Mission Specialist Dr. Ron McNair was an M.I.T.-trained astrophysicist, a black belt in karate, and an accomplished saxophone player. STS-41-B’s principal objective: to test the Manned Maneuvering Unit, the futuristic jet pack that would allow astronauts to maneuver in space untethered to their spacecraft. That test was scheduled for February 7, 1984. Buck Rogers was about to fly.