Forgotten Astronaut Recognized First Black Astronaut Joins List Of Fallen Comrades

Exactly 30 years after her son died in the crash of an Air Force jet, Gwendolyn Lawrence Duncan stood watch as Robert Lawrence’s name was officially added to a national monument to fallen astronauts.

“I feel as though that’s where it belongs,” Duncan said Monday, gazing at the Space Mirror outside the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex. “It’s a matter of record. A matter of history.”

It took much of the 30 years since the crash at Edwards Air Force Base to bring Lawrence recognition as the first African American astronaut, his family said.

The 32-year-old Chicago native was killed in a crash during a training exercise on Dec. 8, 1967, six months after he was chosen for the Air Force’s manned orbiting laboratory program.

Because he never flew the required 50 miles into space, the Air Force didn’t consider him an astronaut. Had he lived, though, Lawrence likely would have moved to NASA, as did many of his colleagues when the Air Force canceled the orbiting laboratory program in 1969. And by NASA standards, anyone selected for astronaut training is an astronaut.

But without the Air Force designation, the Astronauts Memorial Foundation refused to etch Lawrence’s name on the granite Space Mirror.

“It was a bunch of bureaucratic gobbledygook,” said Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., who intervened last year, calling Lawrence’s omission “institutional racism.”

Rush persuaded the Air Force to recognize Lawrence as an astronaut last January, and the foundation voted two weeks later to add his name.