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A comment on Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Space, Has Died. Parent comment

Re:Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Sp... by pvg on Sunday December 24, 2017 @03:57PM (#16001276)
Beside all the redundancy built into the device itself, the shuttle carried a second one so someone else could go out and retrieve the stranded astronaut. There's a detailed write-up on the development and use of the thing on NASA's history site:

https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4219/Chapter13.html

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Re:Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Sp... by ProAm on Sunday December 24, 2017 @04:17PM (#16001338)
> the shuttle carried a second one

Nothing like taking the second one out for a spin after the first one failed... lol.

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Re:Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Sp... by pvg on Sunday December 24, 2017 @05:32PM (#16001661)
Most space gear (excluding the stuff that gets you to and back from space) has been almost implausibly reliable. Voyager 1's thrusters still work far past their intended best-before date and they were not designed to have someone's life depend on them.

If a Manned Maneuvering Unit somehow failed, it would have been a highly extraordinary event. The crew on the shuttle along with their mission controllers could have made an assessment of the risk of failure of the second MMU.

This isn't like your computer kernel-panicking and you rebooting it and hoping for the best.

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Re:Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Sp... by limaoscarjuliet on Monday December 25, 2017 @08:33AM (#16004021)
Correct, but serious issues do arise, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#PGNCS...
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Re:Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Sp... by sitkack on Monday December 25, 2017 @04:42PM (#16005831)
And it had load shedding built in, so even in the mis configured state, it still worked.
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Re:Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Sp... by ProAm on Monday December 25, 2017 @01:38AM (#16003030)
Definitely, but it doesn't stop the carnival from playing in your mind as you strap in to go and rescue MMU-01 with MMU-02
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Re:Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Sp... by greenhouse_gas on Sunday December 24, 2017 @06:46PM (#16001879)
I guess that the second one could have gone tethered.
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