Thank you, Bruce McCandless, for this iconic space photo

An astronaut floats alone with the blackness of space behind him and the bright blue limb of the Earth below. 

He's untethered with nothing but a NASA-made jetpack to protect him.

NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless — who died at the age of 80 on Thursday — is that untethered astronaut in one of the most iconic space photos of all time.

"My wife [Bernice] was at mission control, and there was quite a bit of apprehension," McCandless said in 2015 of the 1984 spacewalk that led to the photo. 

"I wanted to say something similar to Neil [Armstrong] when he landed on the moon, so I said, 'It may have been a small step for Neil, but it’s a heck of a big leap for me.' That loosened the tension a bit." Read more...