This short film from the mid-1980s gives viewers a look at the initial piloting of Martin Marietta’s Manned Maneuvering Units (MMUs) in space during NASA’s Challenger mission STS-41-B in 1984. The film opens with astronauts in a space station or shuttle moving around in zero gravity. A Boeing C-135 Stratolifter transport dives in the sky, creating a zero-gravity simulation for the astronauts inside the empty cargo bay. Astronaut Ed White becomes the first American to walk in space on 3 June 1965 (00:50); he is later followed by astronaut David Scott, who crawls outside his spacecraft holding on to metal rings to maneuver around. The film then shows the facility where NASA and Martin Marietta engineers test astronaut moving units in development. This leads to Bruce McCandless leaving the Challenger’s payload bay with an MMU in February 1984 (01:35). More footage shows the maiden voyage of the MMU (02:17), as McCandless and Robert L. Stewart pilot the MMUs during the mission. One of the men uses the nitrogen jet-thrusters to move. At the Martin Marietta facility, an astronaut masters the MMU simulator in less than a day (03:01). A close-up shows the controls on the MMU’s armrest. An astronaut uses an MMU to leave a payload bay (04:00). The crew inside the Challenger and McCandless outside in space in an MMU speak with U.S. President Ronald Reagan (04:40) during the mission. The film shows a shuttle moving in space (05:16), followed by a 3-D design of a futuristic shuttle. This is followed by more footage of the two astronauts piloting the MMUs around the shuttle (05:55) and, in one case, toward a nearby satellite. The film shows a brief montage of footage and photographs of various NASA missions from the past 25 years before concluding with a shot of an astronaut maneuvering around a shuttle in an MMU (07:48).
The Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) is an astronaut propulsion unit that was used by NASA on three Space Shuttle missions in 1984. The MMU allowed the astronauts to perform untethered EVA spacewalks at a distance from the shuttle. The MMU was used in practice to retrieve a pair of faulty communications satellites, Westar VI and Palapa B2. Following the third mission the unit was retired from use. A smaller successor, the Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue (SAFER), was first flown in 1994, and is intended for emergency use only.
STS-41-B was the tenth NASA Space Shuttle mission and the fourth flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It launched on February 3, 1984, and landed on February 11 after deploying two communications satellites. It was also notable for including the first untethered spacewalk.
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
