Historical Beef #10: The Black Race Space Race - now a motion picture

[Professor Emeritus]

Y'all know about the USA and the USSR and their "Space Race" - who would be the first to put a man in space, the first to orbit the Earth, the first to reach the moon. Less often told is the racial component to the rivalry - the fight to see who would put the first Black man in space.

The USA thought of it first. In 1962 the legendary journalist Edward Murrow, working for JFK to improve the nation's international image, suggested to NASA that putting a Black man in space would be a boost for an America in the grips of the Civil Rights struggle. Jealous for the fame that the USSR's first man in space was receiving, he wrote to NASA:

"Why don't we put the first non-white man in space? If your boys were to enroll and train a qualified Negro and then fly him in whatever vehicle is available, we could retell our whole space effort to the whole non-white world, which is most of it."

After consultation with JFK himself, NASA agreed. They went to Whitney Young, executive director of the Urban League, for advice on who to select. Together they put their sights on Ed Dwight Jr.

Wait, no, this is Ed Dwight Jr.

How the hell does a young Black man in 1961 get in position to join the space program?

Ed, the son of a 2nd baseman for the Kansas City Monarchs, was a unicorn. Demonstrably intelligent from the moment he started talking, he got his first library card at 4 and started hanging out at the local airport at 6. By the time he was 9 he was working four jobs - delivering food for his parents' restaurant, running two paper routes every morning, and cleaning out planes at the airport. But his mind was always in the clouds.

[The pilots], they’d give me a nickel or a dime. And when I got to be about 10 or 11, I said, I want to fly. I mean, I don’t want the money. I want to know where you guys go when you leave and where the hell have you been when you come back. But this was a white man’s world. Kansas was segregated at the time. And I never for a minute thought that I would ever really fly an airplane. I mean, that just was crazy. But this was my private fantasy.

It remained a fantasy for years, until one day Ed picked up his papers and couldn't believe his eyes.

On the front page of one of my newspapers was an African-American pilot. And he was on the front page standing on the wing of a jet. He was a prisoner of war. And I says, oh my, God. They’re letting black folks fly jets. I immediately applied for pilot training.

Ed was obsessed with his vision and had the determination to carry it through. He went to the library and found pilot manuals, memorized every one of them. He went to the local community college and got an associate's degree in Aeronautical Engineering. He joined the Air Force and was selected for pilot school. He nailed the flight certification testing with an almost perfect score (due to all those manuals he had memorized) and quickly rose to captain, was in the pipeline for major. At night he studied at ASU and earned his B.S. in Aeronautical Engineering. And he lived in the air, picking up more flight time faster than any other pilot in his class. All of his dreams were being realized.

He couldn't have imagined that another dream was possible.

The requirements to become an astronaut were stringent. The candidates had to be in their 20s, with at least 1,500 hours of flight time in jets, and hold an engineering degree. When JFK's administration went looking for a Black man who had those qualifications at a time when pilot programs had only recently desegregated, they found there was literally one such man in the entire country.

Ed Dwight Jr.

Ed accepted the invitation and joined the advanced test pilot school for astronaut candidates. The school was headed by none other than Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the speed of sound, the most famous test pilot in the world. The had rigorous exams and flight tests on a weekly basis.

But Ed had far more responsibilities than advanced test pilot school. As the first black man to be considered for the space program, he was a celebrity. Every weekend he was sent around touring America. He was speaking to business leaders, to schools, to military recruits. Everywhere he went, he was the "Black astronaut candidate".

On one hand, he's a hero to many. On the other hand, he is facing constant doubt. Racist reporters questioned whether he was intelligent enough to fly a spacecraft. Racist politicians were even worse, discounting the entire Black race's suitability for spaceflight.

“These guys — I call them the forces of darkness — came in with all kinds of medical and intellectual questions about black people’s physiology and intelligence. They did studies and presented them to the White House and Congress saying my capabilities weren’t even in the ballpark. It was incredibly controversial and political.”

Within the space program itself it was even worse. Ed faced discrimination from both superiors and classmates. As the only candidate who had to spend 3 days a week giving speeches across America, he had logistic and mental pressures unlike any other. Yeager regularly called him into his office and tried to convince him to quit, telling him he was showing weakness.

The only thing that protected Ed was the backing of JFK himself. Despite the naysayers and the extra pressures, Ed Dwight Jr. successfully graduated from advanced test pilot school and became qualified as a potential astronaut candidate. But in 1963, when the next class of 14 astronaut candidates was announced (5 of whom would eventually walk on the moon), Ed was not selected.

He stayed in the Air Force, still hopeful that he would be chosen in the next class. But when Kennedy was assassinated, Ed lost his backer. Despite his status as one of the most qualified young test pilots in the Air Force, he was shuffled around to military assignments that had nothing to do with astronaut preparation. Another class was selected and again Ed was not on the list. Discouraged and tired of the discrimination he faced, he left the military in 1966.



That isn't to say that Ed's story ends there, or that he didn't have a successful life. Ed became a systems engineer for IBM and then worked as an aviation consultant. Soon he started his own business, and then another, and then another, operating successful restaurants and one of the largest real estate development companies in Denver. He became fascinated with art and went back to school to earn an M.F.A. in Sculpture. Moved by his growing awareness of Black history in America and Black stories that had never been told, he earned commissions to make Black History sculptures across America.

Today Ed, 86 years old and still going strong, is the owner and operator of the 25,000 square foot Ed Dwight Studios in Denver. He has created 129 memorial sculptures and over 18,000 gallery pieces. Just this month (likely inspired by the same stories I read last year), a documentary of his life was broadcast by the Smithsonian Channel.

Despite a happy and successful life, he still remembers those impossible dreams, that growth from a teenager in Kansas City who didn't believe Black folk were allowed to fly to a young Air Force test pilot who briefly thought he might reach the stars. He wonders what could have been if TVs across 1960s America had shown a young Black man striding across that platform into the Apollo shuttle and taking off for the moon.

To be continued....

 

[Professor Emeritus]

@Cole Cash, @Orbital-Fetus, @PewPew, @Reality, @VegasCAC, @storyteller, y'all told me you wanted tags on these.


Also, previous installments:

ALEXANDER HAMILTON AND AARON BURR BEEN DEAD 200 YEARS N STILL REALER THAN YA FAVORITE RAPPER (not mine, @th_412 just gave me a style to run with)
#2: When Kozo Noshino had to drop da bomb
#3: Robert Smalls vs. the Confederates
#4: Cleopatra
#5: The Greatest Sports Rivalry of All Time
#6: W.E.B. versus Booker T
#7: Bloody Scottish b*stards
#8: John Boyd Jr. vs the U.S. Department of Agriculture
#9: Kwame Nkrumah vs. White Supremacy

 

[Reality]

@Cole Cash, @Orbital-Fetus, @PewPew, @Reality, @VegasCAC, @storyteller, y'all told me you wanted tags on these.


Also, previous installments:

ALEXANDER HAMILTON AND AARON BURR BEEN DEAD 200 YEARS N STILL REALER THAN YA FAVORITE RAPPER (not mine, @th_412 just gave me a style to run with)
#2: When Kozo Noshino had to drop da bomb
#3: Robert Smalls vs. the Confederates
#4: Cleopatra
#5: The Greatest Sports Rivalry of All Time
#6: W.E.B. versus Booker T
#7: Bloody Scottish b*stards
#8: John Boyd Jr. vs the U.S. Department of Agriculture
#9: Kwame Nkrumah vs. White Supremacy

Dope. Thanks for the @. Consider me a subscriber to the series...need to catch up on a few of these as well.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

By 1967 the astronauts who would fly on the Apollo moon missions were already selected. But there was another program on the horizon. And once again an incredibly multi-talented Black pilot stepped into the cut.

At just 16, Robert Lawrence Jr. graduated near the top of his class at Englewood High School in Chicago, by 19 he was a Cadet Commander in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps, and by 20 he had earned a B.S. in Chemistry. He entered the Air Force as an officer, completed flight training and became a pilot, and soon became an instructor pilot, racking up over 2,000 flight hours in jets.

Incredibly, while excelling as an Air Force Test Pilot he was also completing a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Ohio State University, publishing his thesis on hydrogen bomb reaction mechanisms, "The Mechanism Of The Tritium Beta Ray Induced Exchange Reaction Of Deuterium With Methane and Ethane In The Gas Phase," in 1965 at the age of 29.

“He was probably the best graduate student I’ve ever advised,” said Dr. Richard Firestone, his graduate adviser, in an interview with Jet. “He was very intelligent, and he worked very hard. In fact, he worked as hard as a grad student should, which is unusual…. Also he had a lot of courage… not the kind of courage one needs to fly a jet air craft, but intellectual courage. He was quite a resourceful student, the kind who thinks for himself.”

In 1967 Robert qualified for the same advanced test pilot training school that Ed had completed, but unlike Ed, Robert was immediately selected as an astronaut candidate - but not by NASA, rather by the Air Force's own spy program. His class was destined to fly for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, an intelligence-gathering mission that would send 2-man teams up into orbit for 30 days at a time to take high-resolution images of the USSR and other USA adversaries.

Robert Lawrence Jr. became a public figure as the first Black astronaut in history. However, he consistently downplayed his achievement, simply saying that he was a scientist not a sociologist, calling himself "very lucky", and stating that things had just fallen into place as the natural progression of his career. His main platform in public appearances was to advocate for more Black youth to consider careers in STEM. Robert' s wife said that the MOL program was perfect for Robert, combining his love for flying with his love for experimental science, and he enjoyed every minute of it.

As he trained with the MOL program, Robert began flying the F-104D Starfighter, a supersonic fighter that NASA officials believed could be used to mimic the glide of a spacecraft returning to Earth and practice special maneuvers. Robert became one of the Air Force's experts in the craft and perfected "the glide", a dangerous maneuver in which the fighter descended from 25,000 feet at a steep 25-degree incline with engines idle, plummeting towards Earth at 330 mph before pulling up at the last moment for a level landing. Such a maneuver was necessary in order to learn how to land spacecraft which lacked the engines and long wings of typical planes. Within months Robert had perfected the technique, gliding down again and again.

On December 8th, 1967, Robert was tasked with teaching another pilot, Major Harvey Royer, how to execute the glide manuever in the F-104D. Major Royer was in the front command seat and Robert (also a major at that time) sat behind him as the instructor.

When Major Royer attempted the maneuver, he flared up too late, underestimating the speed of the plane plummeting towards the ground. The plane collided with the runway, shattering the landing gear and canopy. Both pilots ejected, with Major Royer's seat had ejected just vertically enough that he survived, though with serious injuries. Robert's seat ejected sideways as the plane began to roll, launching him into the ground without a fully open parachute.

Robert Lawrence Jr., the only pilot in the program with a Ph.D., was killed instantly. He left behind his wife of nine years and an 8-year-old son.

Two years later the MOL program was canceled, and thus Robert's classmates had to wait 15 more years to fly into space. When they finally did, they became the first class of Space Shuttle pilots. In 1997 the Space Shuttle Atlantis carried Robert's mission patch into orbit, presenting it to his widow upon their return. Though he had never actually entered space, that year on the 30th anniversary of his death Robert's name was engraved on the Astronauts Memorial Foundation's Space Mirror and he was officially recognized as the first Black astronaut.

Still, America had failed to win the Black space race. And someone else was about to come into the cut....

 

[Yapdatfool]

To Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Dwight

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

I recently read about this independent of this thread... I gotta find the link

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez was the most unlikely astronaut.

Born in Guantánamo in 1942 to Afro-Cuban parents, Arnaldo was orphaned at the age of 1 when his parents died of a serious illness. He was adopted by his aunt and uncle, who like his parents lived in poverty. Arnaldo was only able to study until the 8th grade and then began working on the streets at the age of 13. Later he was apprenticed to a carpenter, and that's what Arnaldo may have done with his own life if it weren't for the dramatic events to come.

"I was born in a poor negro family, and although I dreamed of flying from childhood, that was utterly unthinkable. I had to start work early, as a street shoeshine boy - a poor man's profession - or selling vegetables."

While Arnaldo was learning the carpenter's trade, the military dictatorship that America was propping up in Cuba faced increasing dissatisfaction. As a teenager Arnaldo joined the Association of Young Rebels and did road-building and village development work in remote mountains. Just before Arnaldo's 16th birthday, forces led by Che Guevara and other revolutionaries successfully took the city of Santa Clara, and the US-backed dictator Batista fled the country.

Arnaldo saw a new possibility for himself in the new Cuba. When he turned 17 he entered Rebel Army's "technical institute" to complete a course for aviation technicians, where he received top marks and was able to join the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces with the intention of becoming a fighter pilot. Arnaldo was sent to the Soviet Union where he spent a year training in aerial combat in MiG-15s and was certified as a combat pilot at just 19 years of age. Less than six months after returning to Cuba, the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted, during which Arnaldo flew 20 reconnaissance missions in defense of Cuban airspace, repeatedly intercepting American aircraft. He continued as a flight instructor in the Cuban military, married, and had two sons.

Arnaldo served as part of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces deployment in Vietnam in 1967. After returning from Vietnam the young Arnaldo (still just 27) studied command courses at Cuba's military college, became chief of staff to the Aviation Brigade of Santa Clara, and advanced to the position of Lieutenant Colonel.

Meanwhile the USSR was looking to buttress its global image and improve relations with other Communist countries. Early in the space race they made the point of sending the first woman into space, then in 1978 they became the first nation to send foreigners into space, sending astronauts from three Eastern Bloc countries. In Cuba the Soviets set up a lengthy selection process, starting with 80 selected candidates who were eventually whittled down to 20, then 9, and then finally 4 who went to the USSR for the last four weeks of tests. Of those 4 Arnaldo was selected as the primary candidate with José Armando López Falcón as his backup. The Russian cosmonaut Yuri Ramanenko would say this of the man who was to be his partner in spaceflight:

"What I liked about Arnaldo Tamayo is his exceptional sense of purpose. He is a very determined individual, but also very kind and has a sharp sense of humor. Of course, as a real Cuban, he is temperamental but in good command of his emotions. In training Arnaldo operated with a calculating and cool mind. We have done some hard work together, spending about 1,500 hours in all in the classroom and in practical training."

Arnaldo moved to Russia for two years to join the Intercosmos program. On September 18, 1980, he and Yuri launched into space on Soyuz 38. Arnaldo became the first Black man to rise up above the atmosphere and view his nation from above. The Soyuz met up with the Russian space station Salyut 6 and the two cosmonauts within, together performing 27 experiments on topics from sugar crystallization to Space Adaptation Syndrome, many of which had been designed by Cuban scientists.

Eight days after they left, Arnaldo and Yuri landed back on Earth in the Russian night. Arnaldo was met with fanfare around the globe, being named a Hero of the Soviet Union and a Hero of the Republic of Cuba. During public addresses Fidel Castro frequently hyped Arnaldo's African roots.

"And his humble beginnings has been referred to, repeated and insisted on because it really constitutes a symbol, the fact that our first cosmonaut and the first cosmonaut from Latin America is the first cosmonaut from Africa. It is not our whim to say that he also is the first cosmonaut from Africa because Tamayo, an eminently black man who also has in his veins Indian and Spanish blood is a symbol of the blood which, as demonstrated by the most severe test of our fatherland's history, gave rise to our people. It is African blood. It is Indian blood. It is Spanish blood."

You can decide for yourself how much of that was just propaganda, but Arnaldo became a national symbol and hero to many.

Arnaldo was promoted to Brigadier General and became Director of International Affairs in the Cuban armed forces as well as a deputy in the Cuban National Assembly. To this day, the 78-year-old continues to represent Guantánamo Province in the National Assembly. But within his many accomplishments, he never saw anything greater than that the shoeshining orphan from the humblest background would one day be the first Cuban and the first Black man in space.

 

[Geek Nasty]

They would have killed him if he was in the space program. I just watch that “Uppitty” documentary they tried to kill him too.

 

[88m3]

love these

 

[Professor Emeritus]

They would have killed him if he was in the space program. I just watch that “Uppitty” documentary they tried to kill him too.

Maybe they would have tried, but we can't treat them like they're omnipotent.

 

[A.R.$]

@Rhakim this is hella dope. I’m mad that I didn’t think of doing this for my podcast

 

[Professor Emeritus]

@Rhakim this is hella dope. I’m mad that I didn’t think of doing this for my podcast

Breh, I don't give a fukk about copyrights or protecting my content. If you want to lift any of my posts in the series word-for-word on your podcast, or adapt them however you want, be my guest. It would be dope if you gave a co-writing credit to "The Coli's Rhakim" at the end, but not required.



edit: Of course I should clarify, if you're ever using shyt that I've put into quotes you should probably google those and cite the original source material. I didn't do that cause it's just a Coli post but if you have an income stream via your podcast or are building any sort of audience it would be good practice. Usually when I write these I'm basing them on 8-10 web sources and 1-2 books so I'm not drawing too much from any one source and it in my own words, but you don't want to be plagiarizing quotes without attribution in any real production.

 

[A.R.$]

Breh, I don't give a fukk about copyrights or protecting my content. If you want to lift any of my posts in the series word-for-word on your podcast, or adapt them however you want, be my guest. It would be dope if you gave a co-writing credit to "The Coli's Rhakim" at the end, but not required.

I always give credit. I just shouted out the Coli in one of my videos.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

August 30th, 1983. Over 20 years after Ed Dwight Jr. first trained in the advanced test pilot program, an African-American man finally launched into space.

In 1978, "NASA Astronaut Group 8" was selected, the first astronaut selection in nearly a decade as the Apollo missions had long been closed. Now NASA was looking to begin the Space Shuttle program and many of their original astronauts had moved on to other shyt. So they brought a new crew of 35 on board, including three Black men with incredible credentials.



THE EMBODIMENT OF BLACK EXCELLENCE

Guion Bluford: Originally from Philly, got his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Penn State in 1964, joined the Air Force and received his pilot wings in 1966 then was immediately sent to combat training. Upon completion he joined the F-4C squad and flew 144 combat missions in the Vietnam War. After war he came back as an instructor pilot for the Air Force, logging over 5,000 flight hours in seven different fighters as well as earning an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering followed by a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Laser Physics. He worked in the Air Force Flight Dynamics Laboratory as deputy for advanced concepts in aeromechanics and branch chief of the Aerodynamics and Airframe Branch, writing several papers on computational fluid dynamics.

And that was all by the age of 36, when he was selected to be a fukking astronaut.

Frederick Gregory: Originally from D.C., his mother was sister of the legendary Dr. Charles Drew and his father was the first Black president of the Washington D.C. Public Libraries Board of Trusties. Ron graduated from the Air Force Academy with a degree in military engineering in 1964 (the only Black student in the entire school), did pilot training for a year and then went to Vietnam to serve as an H-43 helicopter rescue pilot, flying 550 combat missions and receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross for a mission where he rescued 4 crew members from a downed helicopter while under intense enemy fire. Upon return he entered test pilot school for fighter jets and became one of few pilots to perform as a fighter test pilot as well as a helicopter test pilot. In 1974 he was transferred to NASA to become a research test pilot for them, meanwhile also completing an M.S. in Information Systems from George Washington University.

He was 38 years old when he was selected to the astronaut training program.

Ronald McNair of South Carolina was the youngest of the crew but also the most precocious. In 1959 at the age of 9 he refused to leave a segregated library until he was allowed to check out books. Gotta include this story from Ron's brother:

"When he was 9 years old, Ron, without my parents or myself knowing his whereabouts, decided to take a mile walk from our home down to the library," Carl tells his friend Vernon Skipper.

The library was public, Carl says — "but not so public for black folks, when you're talking about 1959."

"So, as he was walking in there, all these folks were staring at him — because they were white folk only — and they were looking at him and saying, you know, 'Who is this Negro?'

"So he just propped himself up on the counter, and sat there, and said, 'I'll wait.' "

The librarian called the police — and McNair's mother, Pearl.

When the police got to the library, Carl says, "Two burly guys come in and say, 'Well, where's the disturbance?'

"And she pointed to the little 9-year-old boy sitting up on the counter.

"And he [the policeman] says, 'Ma'am, what's the problem?'

By then, the boys' mother was on her way, Carl says.

"She comes down there praying the whole way there: 'Lordy, Jesus, please don't let them put my child in jail.' And my mother asks the librarian, 'What's the problem?' "

"He wanted to check out the books and, you know, your son shouldn't be down here," the librarian said, according to Carl.

"And the police officer said, 'You know, why don't you just give the kid the books?'

"And my mother said, 'He'll take good care of them.' "

So, the librarian reluctantly handed over the books. And then, Carl says, "my mother said, 'What do you say?' "

And Ron answered, "Thank you, ma'am."

That library is now named after him.

Ronald went on to be valedictorian of his high school and went to North Carolina A&T, where he graduated magna cum laude (with great honors) with a degree in Engineering Physics. From there Ronald was accepted to MIT, where he picked up a Ph.D. in Physics in 1976 and became a staff physicist at the Hughes Research Lab in Malibu studying the newly invented chemical lasers. Oh, just because all of these motherfukkers have enough accomplishments for a dozen people, he also had already become an accomplished saxophone player and a 5th-degree karate black belt and instructor.

Ronald was just 28 when he was selected into the NASA's astronaut program.

Though there were 35 astronauts training in their class, as the three Black members it was clear that Guion, Fred, and Ron were going to be linked together forever. Here is a picture of the three of them together after their selection in 1978.

THE FIRST SPACEFLIGHTS

After four years of training, Guion was the first to get the call-up and go down in history as the first Black American in space. On August 30th, 1983, he flew on the Challenger's 3rd ever spaceflight as a mission specialist overseeing payload safety and flight software as well as successfully testing out the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System, a new robotic arm. Guion and the crew spent a week making 98 trips around the Earth before touching down at night for the first time (just to prove it was possible). Incredibly, it was later found that one of the rockets had worn down its protective lining to the last 0.2". If they had fired the boosters for a mere 14 seconds, the rocket likely would have exploded and the shuttle broken up in flight.

The first Black American in space y'all.

(photos are from several different spaceflights)

The next in the group to get his chance was Ron, who flew as a mission specialist on the Challenger's fourth flight on February 3rd, 1984. Like Guion before him he was in charge of payload and operating the external robotic arm, becoming part of history as he manipulated a platform for astronauts to stand on in space during the first-ever untethered spacewalk. He also went down for having the most swag in NASA history.

Fred was the last to fly, on May 6th, 1985, on the seventh flight of the Challenger. However, he got to go down in history as the first ever Black pilot of a spacecraft, piloting the shuttle for 7 days as the mission specialists performed fifteen different experiments in space, many involving the 30 rats and 2 squirrel monkeys who were also on board. Fred's flight was also struck by the life-threatening issues that shuttle flights became known for. After the flight, engineers discovered a problem with an o-ring that had degraded in one of the solid rocket boosters and told the crew, "You were 3/10ths of a second away from death."

POSTSCRIPT

Guion Bluford went on to complete three more spaceflights as a mission specialist, a second on the Challenger followed by two on Discovery, and completed an MBA from the University of Houston in his free time (to go with the BS, MS, and PhD he already held). After his fourth spaceflight in 1992 he retired from NASA and the Air Force and entered the private sector, serving as Vice President of various divisions of NYMA, Federal Data Corporation, and Northrop Grumman before becoming the president of the engineering consulting group Aerospace Technology in 2002.

Ronald McNair's second spaceflight was the Challenger disaster of 1986. Just 73 seconds into the flight, a compromised o-ring on the solid booster rocket led to the shuttle breaking apart in mid-air.

All seven astronauts were killed. A crater on the moon, an asteroid, a building at MIT, several songs, and numerous other science centers, schools, streets, scholarship programs and parks are now named in Ron's honor, including the federally funded McNair Scholars/Achievement Programs that encourage first-generation, low-income, or underrepresented college students to enter doctoral study

Frederick Gregory was working in Mission Control as the lead capsule communicator when Ron's shuttle exploded. He went on to become the first Black Commander of a space mission, commanding Discovery in 1989 and Atlantis in 1991. When he retired from the Air Force as a Colonel he had logged nearly 7,000 flight hours in over 50 kinds of aircraft. He then rose up the ranks of NASA, eventually becoming NASA's Deputy Administrator in 2002 and briefly serving as the Acting Administrator of NASA in 2005.



I want to end on a quote from Frederick Gregory on his feelings first seeing our home from above:

“When you’re in space and you’re looking down at earth and you see this perfect globe beneath you and you see the organization and non-chaos, you have to feel, as I did, that there was one great Being—one great force that made this happen...

From our vantage in space, we couldn’t help but redefine the world, where we all are part of a whole global entity, based on the absence of political and arbitrary boundaries on planet Earth.”

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Nat Geo cribbed my shyt! They even bit off my thread title.

The Space Race

THE SPACE RACE uncovers the little-known stories of the first Black pilots, engineers and scientists that became astronauts.

films.nationalgeographic.com

The Space Race - DC/DOX

dcdoxfest.com

'The Space Race' - A Comprehensive Look at Race and NASA

Alan reviews "The Space Race" from Tribeca 2023. The National Geographic documentary follows black scientists who helped shape NASA.

sunshinestatecineplex.com

‘The Space Race’ Review: Doc Reveals the Moving, Untold and Almost 60-Year History of a Few Black Astronauts

Directors Lisa Cortés and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’s greatest asset is the emotional testimony of the pioneering group of astronauts they interview.

variety.com

The Space Race Soars Above the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival

dwightbrownink.com

The Space Race Soars Above the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival​

(***1/2)

They’re heroes. Space race pioneers. Afronauts. Black folks who powered their way into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and made a path for others.

NASA, a United States government agency, is responsible for science and technology related to air and space. It’s diverse now, but that wasn’t always the case. The integration of this institution, as with other fundamental organizations, from schools and corporations to sports and politics, started with a few brave souls. Then over the course of history, change happened, opportunities arose, and inclusion took hold.

That’s what this extremely perceptive, enlightening and vital documentary, by filmmakers Lisa Cortes (Little Richard: I Am Everything) and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (Rulon Gardener Won’t Die), does so thoroughly. It archives the first moves by courageous forerunners, the resistance they confronted and the support systems that surrounded them as they built infrastructures that welcomed others.

The OG in the 60-year-old history of Blacks in the space program is Captain Edward Joseph Dwight. Dwight was a former captain in the United States Air Force and a test pilot. Facts and folklore have it that the National Urban League’s Whitney Young put a bug in President John. F. Kennedy’s ear that for the Black population to believe that they could achieve in science and aeronautics they needed a role model. JFK heard him and acted.

The legendary Chuck Yaeger, the first pilot in history to exceed the speed of sound, led the Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS), an Air Force training program that sent its graduates into the astronauts corps. Yaeger was implored by reps for Robert Kennedy to accept Dwight into his program. To the outside world, he was an all-American good guy hero. According to Dwight, the scuttlebutt he heard was that the ARPS leader plotted against him. Yaeger told his corps: “…they’re trying to cram a n—-r down our throats.”

Dwight’s entry into ARPS, in the early 1960s, was met with opposition, harassment and ostracization. While he experienced that degradation, he was being promoted around the country as the first black astronaut, a beacon of hope and a symbol of change. What he encountered wasn’t as rosy as the smiling family photos, fawning press releases and magazine cover stories.

Dwight’s experience is part of a pattern the African American community recognizes all too well. Whether it’s Jackie Robinson, President Obama or Althea Gibson the formula is the same. Take a hit for the team, show courage, survive, hopefully thrive and others will follow. In that way The Space Race is specifically about astronauts but generally about how African Americans experience progress.

The footage feels like someone is giving viewers a grad course in Black astronauts, Afrofuturistic theory and lessons in perseverance. Hearing from 89-year-old Dwight, who is still around to tell his story, is a miracle considering Young, Kennedy and Yaeger have passed away. Then discovering the advances and achievements that subsequent Black space travelers have made is like breathing rare, fresh air.

Astronauts Guion Bluford (first black man in space in 1978), Charles Bolden (four space shuttle missions), and Victor Glover (Flight Engineer on the International Space Station for Expedition 64) have much to say. Glimpses of Nichelle Nichols of TV’s Star Trek fame advocating for people of color and women to become part of the space program are equally inspiring. She bridged fantasy with real life voyages. The icing on the cake is viewing Jessica Watkins (Ph.D. in geology) as she floats around the International Space Station, where in April 2022 she became the first Black woman to complete a long-term mission. Collectively, their words are thoughtful, measured, heartfelt and precious.

Footage from the ‘60s up until present day is illuminating. Interviews are masterfully conducted and rich with personal experiences and astute perspectives by wise veterans. Tangential incidents, from JFK’s assassination to the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy and civil rights uprisings, are woven into a tapestry that is never less than reflective.

Trailblazers pay a cost. And as this uplifting documentary shines a light on those who sacrificed so others could follow, audiences will experience a sense of great pride for these heroes, African American history and a country that is in constant change as it learns to correct its errors.

The Space Race should be required viewing for every kid in a STEM program. For everyone interested in aeronautics, Black history and what it takes to make our best and brightest ready for the future.