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Guion Stewart Bluford Jr. (born November 22, 1942) is an American aerospace engineer, retired United States Air Force (USAF) officer and fighter pilot, and former NASA astronaut, in which capacity he became the first African American to go to space. [1][2][a] While assigned to NASA, he remained a USAF officer rising to the rank of colonel.
Guion S. Bluford at the time was already the first African-American in space, having previously flown on STS-8. With STS-61-A he became the first African-American to fly in space twice. [6] He would later go on to fly on STS-39 in 1991 and on STS-53 in 1992. Bluford was a member of the U.S. astronaut class of 1978. [6]
STS-8 was the eighth NASA Space Shuttle mission and the third flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It launched on August 30, 1983, and landed on September 5, 1983, conducting the first night launch and night landing of the Space Shuttle program. It also carried the first African-American astronaut, Guion Bluford.
STS-39 was a dedicated U.S. Department of Defense mission. Unclassified payload included Air Force Program-675 (AFP-675); Infrared Background Signature Survey (IBSS) with Critical ionization velocity (CIV), Chemical Release Observation (CRO) and Shuttle pallet satellite -II (SPAS-II) experiments; and Space Test Payload-1 (STP-1).
STS-53. STS-53 was a NASA Space Shuttle Discovery mission in support of the United States Department of Defense (DoD). The mission was launched on December 2, 1992, from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. This was also the last mission to have been operated via MCR-2 in JSC. Afterwards the room was restored entirely to its Apollo era appearance.
Among these are Sally Ride, the first American woman in space; Story Musgrave, who flew six missions in the 1980s and 90s; and Francis Scobee, commander of the ill-fated final Challenger mission. [11] The 2010 class consisted of Guion Bluford Jr., Kenneth Bowersox, Frank Culbertson and Kathryn Thornton. [12]
The first three African Americans to travel into space – Ron McNair, Guy Bluford and Fred Gregory. African-American astronauts are Americans of African descent who have been part of an astronaut program, whether or not they have traveled into space. African-Americans who have been passengers on space-tourist flights are also included in this ...
His crew included Steven R. Nagel (pilot), James F. Buchli, Guion S. Bluford Jr. and Bonnie J. Dunbar (mission specialists), and Reinhard Furrer, Ernst Messerschmid, and Wubbo Ockels (payload specialists). The seven-day mission was the first with eight crew members, and the first Spacelab science mission planned and controlled by a foreign ...