He was aboard a Blue Origin flight that successfully launched and returned to Earth on Sunday.
Air Force Capt. Ed Dwight was selected for an astronaut trainee program under President John F. Kennedy but never made it to space until this week at 90 years old on a Blue Origin spacecraft. Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images/ Blue Origin , a Black Air Force captain selected in the '60s for the U.S.'s astronaut trainee program, but who never made it to space because of racism, finally reached space this week at the age of 90.
Dwight was selected in 1961 for a trainee program and became an overnight hero in the Black press. However, the NASA program did not select him for the astronaut program. NASA later chose U.S. Air Force officer Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. as the first African American astronaut. But Lawrence died after his F-104 Starfighter crashed in 1967 at Edwards Air Force Base in California.inexplicably stonewalledDwight later became a prolific artist, designing more than 130 memorials all over the world that "tell the story of Black history," he says, including a statue of Martin Luther King Jr., in Denver's City Park.
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