Ed Dwight, the first black astronaut, finally receives recognition.

Ed Dwight spent his childhood on a farm on the outskirts of Kansas back in the 1930s. The airfield was nearby, and as a young child, he would often visit to watch the planes and the pilots. Most of the planes were returning from hunting trips, and the inside was stained with blood and empty beer cans on the floor.

“They would say to me, ‘Hey, can you clean my plane? I’ll give you a dime,’” Dwight, 90, recalls. But when he was eight or nine years old, he wanted more than a dime. He wanted to fly.

“My first flight was the most exciting thing in the world,” Dwight says with a laugh. “There were no roads or stop signs. You were free as a bird.”

It took years for Dwight to entertain the thought of becoming a pilot himself. “It was white people’s territory,” he says. But when he saw an image of a black pilot shot down in South Korea on the front page of a newspaper, he immediately decided that he wanted to fly.

With that decision, Dwight set in motion a chain of events that would nearly lead him to become one of the first astronauts. Dwight was hand-picked by President John F. Kennedy’s White House to join Chuck Yeager’s test pilot program at Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Mojave Desert as he rose through the ranks in the Air Force.

However, after Kennedy’s assassination, Dwight’s path to NASA disappeared and he was not selected for the space program. In recent years, Dwight has finally begun to receive recognition with the release of the new National Geographic Documentary “Space Race,” which tells the story of Dwight, a pioneer who was nearly one of the first black astronauts.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957, it influenced the formation of NASA. Dwight was not initially thinking about becoming an astronaut, but political leaders became conscious of the image that American astronauts could project about American democracy, and then Dwight got an unexpected invitation to train to become an astronaut. He received acclaim for appearing on the covers of black magazines such as Jet and Sepia, but faced hostility by police officers and other developments during his training. Dwight was the only one selected by the White House to train at that time, yet eventually was not among the 14 selected in 1963, following Kennedy’s assassination.

Despite not becoming an astronaut, Dwight accomplished many things, including founding a construction company and earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture. He has created sculptures of notable black historical figures and had some of his sculptures flown into space aboard the Orion spacecraft. NASA even named an asteroid after him. For subsequent black astronauts, Dwight serves as an influential figure and is honored to be considered a pioneering black astronaut.

Dwight is filled with gratitude for the experiences he had and the opportunity to meet many influential figures throughout his life. He envisions that astronauts and influential leaders should have the chance to view the Earth from above to understand the futility of racism. “We’re flying around the galaxy in this little ball,” Dwight says.

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