WATCH The Epic Moment Late Astronaut Bruce McCandless Flew Into Open Space

McCandless' long and varied career at NASA included capsule communicator during the Apollo 11 moon mission in 1969, and member of the astronaut support crew for the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. He was one of the astronauts to participate in the mission to launch the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990.

McCandless clocked over 312 hours in space, including four hours of flight using NASA's Manned Maneuvering Unit, a breakthrough technology which allowed him to fly freely, literally 'no strings attached', into open space, on February 7, 1984.

NASA released footage of the daring moment when McCandless makes his ascent away from the Space Shuttle Challenger into open space, where he proceeds to hover over the Earth.

The US space agency also released a compilation film dedicated to McCandless' life, including rare footage of his work on the moon missions and his 1990 flight to launch Hubble.

McCandless joins the pantheon of spacewalking pioneers, which includes Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who became the first human being to conduct a spacewalk, in March 1965. Leonov was followed by Edward Higgens White, who became the first American to walk in space, in June 1965. In July 1984, cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman spacewalker.

These heroes' feats have since been complemented by other records, including that by the crew of Space Shuttle Endeavor, whose May 1992 mission became the first spacewalk simultaneously involving three astronauts. These records also include the daring July 1990 mission to the Mir Space Station by cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyev and Aleksander Balandin, who found themselves in mortal danger after discovering that their airlock hatch was hopelessly damaged and would not shut properly, forcing them to think quickly and to resort to a backup secondary airlock not originally designed for that purpose.