90 Y.O. Ed Dwight Became The Oldest Person And 21st African-American Man To Go To Space

In 1961, Edward Joseph Dwight Jr. was chosen by President John F. Kennedy as the first non-white man in space. He was among the 26 potential astronauts recommended to NASA by the Air Force, but in 1963, unfortunately, he wasn’t among the 14 selected.

It took 63 years of waiting, yet, sponsored by Space for Humanity, Dwight finally made his dream come true and made history as the oldest person to fly to space.

More info: Blue Origin

Blue Origin was founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and is the second provider of lunar lander services for NASA's Artemis program. Its reusable rocket-capsule combo called New Shepard was developed for space tourism and named after Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut in space. The vehicle was made to carry humans and customer payloads to the edge of space.

The 25th New Shepard mission, which was the 7th crewed flight of the vehicle overall, lifted off at 10:37 a.m. EDT and reached a maximum altitude of 65.7 miles (105 kilometers) by giving crew a few minutes of weightlessness and an unforgettably beautiful view of the Earth surrounded by the deep darkness of space.

Dwight, whose seat was sponsored by Space for Humanity with additional support from the Jaison and Jamie Robinson Foundation, was stunned by the view.

“Fantastic! A life-changing experience. Everyone needs to do this!” Dwight recalled the special moment above the Kármán Line, the imaginary barrier that separates Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. “I didn’t know I needed this in my life, but now I need it in my life.”

No matter the age, Dwight has no plans to stop pursuing his dreams: “It's like getting a taste of honey. I want a whole jar of that. I want to go into orbit. I want to go around the Earth and see the whole Earth. That’s what I want to do now.”

Besides Dwight, the crew included 5 more members: Mason Angel, the founder of Industrious Ventures, a venture capital fund supporting early-stage companies that enable or progress new industrial revolutions; Sylvain Chiron, the founder of the Brasserie Mont Blanc, one of the largest craft breweries in France; Kenneth L. Hess, a software engineer and entrepreneur who shaped today's technology-based family history industry when he developed the Family Tree Maker product line in the 1990s; Carol Schaller, a retired CPA, who was told in 2017 by her doctor that she would likely go blind; and Gopi Thotakura, a pilot and aviator who’s a co-founder of Preserve Life Corp, a global center for holistic wellness and applied health.

In past several years, space tourism has gained lots of attention from billionaires such as Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson, and has rapidly expanded. Blue Origin has not revealed its ticket prices, yet, for example, the company's competitor in the suborbital tourism business, Virgin Galactic, currently charges $450,000 for a seat on its VSS Unity spacecraft.

Dwight was born on the 9th of September, 1933, in Kansas City, where he grew up near Fairfax Airport, a municipal airport that was turned into an Army Air Force base during World War II. Since the airfield was within walking distance, he would often go to marvel at the planes, expecting that one of the pilots would give him a ride.

"They’d say to me, ‘Hey kid, would you clean my airplane? I’ll give you a dime,'" Dwight shared the memories. But he wanted more than that, he wanted to fly.

It took years before Dwight decided to become a pilot himself, mainly because at the time, it was the white man’s domain. It all changed when he accidentally saw in a newspaper an image of a Black pilot in Korea.

"Oh my God, they’re letting Black people fly," Dwight thought back then. “I went straight to the recruitment office and said, 'I want to fly.' My first flight was the most exhilarating thing in the world. There were no streets or stop signs up there. You were free as a bird."

Later on, hard work and remarkable progress in the Air Force led him to be handpicked 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 the main attention of America at the time was on the space race, the eyes of Black America were on Dwight.

"I received about 1,500 pieces of mail a week, which were stored in large containers at Edwards Air Force Base. Some of it came to my mother in Kansas City. Most of my mail was just addressed to Astronaut Dwight, Kansas City, Kansas," he recalled more memories. And yet despite huge public attention, the opportunity to become first Black astronaut disappeared since he was never selected for the space program for reasons that remain unknown until today.

Starting from 1966, Dwight spent a decade as an entrepreneur before shifting his path to sculpture as a way to tell the story of Black history. He spent decades creating large-scale monuments of such iconic Black figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. He created more than 20,000 gallery works and 130 public works were installed in museums and public spaces across the U.S. and Canada.

On the 19th of May, Ed Dwight became the 21st Black American astronaut to fly into space and the oldest one in history to do so.

No one knows what a difference he would have made if he had actually flown to the edge of the space decades ago, yet now, Dwight definitely left a deep mark in people's hearts by showing that it's never too late to blast off toward your dreams; it's just a matter of persistence and time.