An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted on 04/10/2026
(Welcome home Artemis II crew!)
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Can't imagine why, but manned spaceflight is very much on my mind as of late. I dunno: after nonstop daily assaults of little else but horrifying and cruel headlines, I have apparently latched barnacle-like onto what seems to be the only genuinely uplifting and encouraging news story of 2026, so far. And while we are of course rightly celebrating the literally-out-of-this-world accomplishments of Black astronaut Victor Glover and his equally amazing colleagues Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen... there is another name that fails to come up when speaking of Black firsts in space travel, and that is Robert Lawrence, Jr., America's first Black astronaut.
Born in 1935 Chicago, Lawrence earned his degree in chemistry at Bradley University and then enrolled in the ROTC program, ascending to corps commander. He graduated in 1956 and received his commission as a U.S. Air Force lieutenant, and completed his flight training at Malden AFB. Early in his career his aptitude caught the attention of his superiors, and he was assigned as an instructor pilot at Furstenfeldbruck AFB for Germany's Air Force. Later he was transferred to Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico as a research pilot --ultimately accumulating more than 2500 hours' worth of flight time.
For Robert, now at the rank of Major, the truly seismic shift happened shortly after he earned his Ph.D in Chemistry from Ohio State University. On June 30, 1967 he was named as a research pilot to the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), a joint USAF and the National Reconnaissance Office project. This achievement didn't come without its pitfalls; on one occasion during a press briefing, a reporter snarkily asked if Lawrence "would be expected to sit in the back of the capsule." While the MOL project was ultimately shelved, literally every one of its members were rotated over to the replacement program: the Space Shuttle. Which certainly would have meant that Robert would have found himself amongst the first Shuttle crews.
Unfortunately, history had other plans. On December 8, 1967, at Edwards AFB during an instruction flight with another trainee pilot aboard an F-104 starfighter, the plane flared too late on its landing, skidded on the runway, and crashed --while both men ejected, Lawrence did not survive the wreck. His name faded into relative obscurity but in 1997 NASA made the decision to include Lawrence's name on the Space Memorial Mirror, citing Lawrence's brief but important contribution to human spaceflight. The Cygnus resupply craft launched on February 15, 2020, was renamed the S.S. Robert H. Lawrence. The asteroid Robertlawrence 92892 (located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter), was formally named in 2020.
(Oh, and: Lawrence appears to be another military biography that's somehow mysteriously disappeared from the official U.S. Air Force website. One would have thought the Department of Defense would have solved this recurring pesky problem by now...)
Next lesson - Watch this space