BruceM_VGMA

Great question! I think all us McCandlesses are related if you go back far enough, but no, I can't say that we have any direct or close connection to Chris or Walter. I have to say, though, that I've wondered about this myself!

We are related to Allen McCanless, the bluegrass fiddler from North Carolina.

I think a lot of folks at NASA were really disappointed to see the early excitement about the Apollo program fade. I get why it happened--Vietnam, racial tensions, etc.--and I think it forced NASA to rethink a lot of things and reinvent itself as a science agency, trying to shed its quasi-military image.

He was involved in the repair efforts in 1973 but not, as far as I can recall, in the attempts to control the descent in '79. I think he was as vaguely embarrassed about it as everyone else was. I note that the Chinese have similar problems with the return to earth of their Long March 5 rockets--namely, no one knows exactly where they're going to come down. So far we've been lucky--no casualties.

Nope. Only into the ditch.

Man that's a lot to unpack DWiB403! You're right--he was selected to be an astronaut in 1966, the youngest man in his class, but then had to wait 18 years to get a mission. It was tough on him and on the family. He loved the work he was doing on Skylab and the Manned Maneuvering Unit and, later, on the Inertial Upper Stage and the Hubble Space Telescope, but his real ambition all that time was to get a flight. My book Wonders All Around goes into a fair amount of detail about why that happened the way it did. And no, he was never reluctant to go. In fact, he couldn't wait. (Correction: He COULD wait, and he did wait, but he didn't WANT to wait.)