Astronaut and the first person to fly untethered in space

Born: June 8, 1937;

Died: December 21, 2017

BRUCE McCandless, who has died aged 80, was a Nasa astronaut and the first person to fly untethered in space. He was famously photographed in 1984 flying with a hefty spacewalker's jetpack, alone in the cosmic blackness above a blue Earth.

In all, McCandless travelled more than 300 feet away from the space shuttle Challenger during the spacewalk, but said he was not nervous about the historic spacewalk.

"I was grossly over-trained," he said in 2006. "I was just anxious to get out there and fly. I felt very comfortable. It got so cold my teeth were chattering and I was shivering, but that was a very minor thing."

McCandless made other significant contributions to space exploration: he helped develop the jetpack and was later part of the shuttle crew that delivered the Hubble Space Telescope to orbit.

He also served as the Mission Control capsule communicator in Houston as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969. McCandless's voice was heard around the world as he talked to Armstrong and Aldrin during their mission and indicated at the time that he was keen to get into space for the first time himself.

Born in Boston, McCandless graduated from the US Naval Academy, earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a master's degree in business administration from the University of Houston at Clear Lake in 1987. He was a naval aviator who took part in the Cuban blockade in the 1962 missile crisis.

He was selected for astronaut training during the Gemini programme, and he was a backup pilot for the first manned Skylab mission in 1973.

His famous untethered trip into space came 11 years later in February 1984 when he was 46. He was equipped with a heavy backpack and small jet thrusters to control his movement. At the time, McCandless played with Neil Armstrong's most famous comment when he said that Armstrong had taken one small step but that he had taken "a heck of a big leap".

Speaking after the trip, he said: "Once you're accustomed to seeing the Earth rushing by at four miles per second and you concentrate on the Orbiter and/or the spar as your references at hand, you feel quite comfortable flying around at the relatively slow velocities with respect to them. It's sort of like two rather fast airplanes flying formation over one another."

By the end of his career, McCandless had logged more than 300 hours in space, but his most famous moment remained the picture of him alone and untethered in the blackness of space. McCandless's face could not be seen in the picture but the astronaut said that added to its power. "My anonymity means people can imagine themselves doing the same thing," he said.

Senator John McCain, who was a classmate of McCandless at the US Naval Academy, also spoke about the power of the picture. "The iconic photo of Bruce soaring effortlessly in space has inspired generations of Americans to believe that there is no limit to the human potential," he said.

Bruce McCandless is survived by his wife, Ellen Shields McCandless of Conifer, Colorado, two children and two grandchildren.