If the fates decided differently, Air Force test pilot Ed Dwight could have become NASA’s first Black astronaut in the 1960s — but he lost out, amid racial controversy. Now he’s in line to travel to space with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.
Blue Origin listed the 90-year-old Dwight among six people who’ll be on its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship when it resumes crewed flights, on a date yet to be announced. Crewed flights were suspended after an uncrewed research mission went awry in 2022, but a repeat of that uncrewed mission went off without a hitch last December.
Dwight, who became a sculptor after resigning from the Air Force as a captain in 1966, will have his flight sponsored by Space for Humanity and by the Jaison and Jamie Robinson Foundation, which was created by the founders of Seattle-based Dream Variation Ventures.
Dwight’s life story is featured in a National Geographic documentary titled “The Space Race.” In 1961, he was chosen to enter an Air Force flight training program that was regarded as a pathway to NASA’s astronaut corps, and went on to win an Air Force recommendation to join NASA. But Dwight was passed over — and he later said that racism was to blame.
“My hope was just getting into space in any kind of way,” Dwight said in the documentary, “but they were not going to let that happen.”
It would be another two decades before Guion Bluford Jr. became the first Black American in space in 1983.
This isn’t the first time Blue Origin has put a would-be pioneer astronaut on its crew list. The quartet for the company’s first crewed flight in 2021 included Wally Funk, a member of the “Mercury 13” group of women fliers who missed out on joining NASA’s early astronaut corps.
Dwight could be in line to attain a different kind of distinction in space history: As of now, the oldest person to reach space, albeit on a suborbital trip, is William Shatner, the star of the first set of “Star Trek” TV shows and movies. His age was 90 years and 205 days at the time of his flight in October 2021. Dwight is currently 90 years and 208 days old. He could thus wrest away Shatner’s space title. (Blue Origin said “the flight date will be announced soon.”)
The other five people on the list for New Shepard’s next crewed flight are:
- Mason Angel, the founder of Industrious Ventures, a Denver-based venture capital fund supporting early-stage companies that enable or progress new industrial revolutions.
- Sylvain Chiron, the founder of Brasserie du Mont Blanc, one of the largest craft breweries in France.
- Kenneth L. Hess, a software engineer and entrepreneur who developed the Family Tree Maker product line in the 1990s. The genealogy tech company was acquired by Ancestry.com in 2003. In 2001, Hess founded Science Buddies, a K-12 nonprofit that’s based in California and focuses on STEM literacy.
- Carol Schaller, a retired CPA and adventure traveler who lives on a farm in Lumberville, Pa., with her husband of 40 years.
- Gopi Thotakura, co-founder of Preserve Life Corp., a global center for holistic wellness and applied health located near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. In addition to flying jets commercially, Thotakura pilots bush planes, aerobatic planes and seaplanes, as well as gliders and hot air balloons, and has served as an international medical jet pilot.
Blue Origin said each spaceflier will carry a postcard to space on behalf of the company’s Club for the Future. The nonprofit effort aims to get students involved in Blue Origin’s space program through educational activities, including an all-digital method to create and send postcards that are loaded onto a hard drive for New Shepard missions. After each mission, students are emailed instructions for accessing their cards. (The Club for the Future also accepts on-paper postcards.)
The next mission will mark the 25th New Shepard flight — a tally that takes in six previous crewed missions and 18 uncrewed missions since 2015. Thirty-one spacefliers have taken rides in New Shepard’s space capsule to heights beyond the 100-kilometer (62-mile) Karman Line that currently serves as the internationally accepted boundary for spaceflight. (U.S. agencies use a 50-mile standard instead.)
Blue Origin’s flight arrangements are made privately, and it hasn’t disclosed how much its spaceflight customers are paying. Just after the first crewed flight in 2021, Jeff Bezos said the Kent, Wash.-based company was “approaching $100 million in private sales already, and demand is very, very high.”
Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, has said that she intends to lead an all-female New Shepard crew on a suborbital flight that she hopes will take place this year. In an interview published by Vogue last December, Sanchez said the fliers would be remarkable people who are “paving the way for women,” but few other details about her plans have come to light.
Clarification for 4 p.m. PT April 4: In an earlier version of this report, I referred to Guion Bluford Jr. as NASA’s first Black astronaut. NASA considers Robert Lawrence (1935-1967) to be the first African-American astronaut, although he was never able to join the space agency’s astronaut corps.
Lawrence was selected by the Air Force to join the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program in 1967, but died in a plane crash later that year. NASA said “it is virtually certain” that Lawrence would have been transferred to NASA had he lived, and today he’s typically included in lists of U.S. astronauts.
I’ve also added a few days to Ed Dwight’s age, based on his Wikipedia entry.
