Guion Bluford flew 144 combat missions over Vietnam, earned a doctorate in aerospace engineering, and told NASA he'd rather be second — then rode Challenger off the pad at 2:32 in the morning on August 30, 1983, to become the first African American in space.

Guion Bluford told NASA he would rather not be first. Being the "No. 2 guy," he said, sounded like more fun.

NASA didn't take the suggestion. At 2:32 in the morning on August 30, 1983, Bluford rode Space Shuttle Challenger off the pad at Kennedy Space Center as a mission specialist on STS-8, and became the first African American to travel into space.

Why NASA needed a different kind of astronaut

The Mercury Seven of 1959 were white military test pilots, and for two decades NASA kept using that template. By the mid-1970s the agency needed a much bigger corps to fly a reusable spacecraft with a crew cabin instead of a one-man capsule, and it went looking outside the template for the first time.

NASA hired the actress Nichelle Nichols, who had played Lieutenant Uhura on "Star Trek," to help recruit women and minority applicants for the astronaut class chosen in January 1978. Of the 8,079 people who applied, NASA took 35, and the group nicknamed itself the Thirty-Five New Guys. Bluford was one of three Black astronauts in it, alongside the physicist Ronald McNair and the test pilot Frederick Gregory; six of the thirty-five were women, among them Sally Ride.

Bluford was careful, later, about what the selection meant and what it didn't. He wanted the flight judged as engineering work first. Being a role model, he said, and opening another door for Black Americans, mattered to him too; it just wasn't what he was actually being tested on, day after day, through the nineteen months of training that followed before NASA designated him a full astronaut in August 1979.

What was in his file before Vietnam

Bluford's application did not read like a recruiting poster: born in Philadelphia in 1942 to a mechanical engineer and a special-education teacher, he studied aerospace engineering at Penn State, then flew F-4C Phantoms out of Cam Ranh Bay. He logged 144 combat missions in Vietnam, 65 of them over the North, and came home with the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Palm.

Back home, he taught other pilots to fly the T-38, then went back to school. A master's degree came in 1974, then a doctorate in aerospace engineering (with a minor in laser physics) in 1978. NASA selected him the same year he finished it. He was also, by then, an Eagle Scout and a husband of more than a decade to Linda Tull, with two sons. All of that was in place well before anyone at NASA had heard his name.

What happens at 2:32 in the morning?

STS-8 was, among other things, an experiment in scheduling. It was the first American crewed launch to lift off in darkness since Apollo 17 in 1972, timed to put Challenger in position to release its main payload: INSAT-1B, a communications and weather satellite built for the Indian Space Research Organisation.

Commander Richard Truly and pilot Dan Brandenstein flew the orbiter; Bluford ran the payload deployment and a set of biomedical experiments alongside fellow mission specialists Dale Gardner and Dr. William Thornton, a physician who at 54 was then the oldest person to reach space. Six days and 98 orbits later, Challenger came down at Edwards Air Force Base at 12:40 a.m. Pacific time, closing the program's first night landing in the same darkness the mission had opened in.

Was Bluford really first?

Here the record needs a qualifier, and it is worth stating plainly.

Bluford was the first African American in space. He was not the first person of African descent to leave Earth at all. That distinction belongs to Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, a Cuban air force pilot who flew aboard Soyuz 38 with the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko on September 18, 1980, nearly three years earlier, as part of the Soviet Union's Intercosmos program. Tamayo Méndez was Cuban. American is the word doing the work in Bluford's record, and the two facts get run together often enough in casual retellings that it's worth separating them here.

Three more flights

STS-8 turned out to be the first of four flights over the next nine years. STS-61A in 1985 carried Germany's first dedicated Spacelab mission, with eight crew members running 76 experiments over an eight-day flight. STS-39 followed in 1991, an unclassified Pentagon research flight testing sensors meant to track missiles for the Strategic Defense Initiative; STS-53 closed out his flying career in December 1992, on a mission that was classified. Across four missions he logged more than 688 hours in space, a little over 28 days.

He retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1993 and left NASA the same year, moving into engineering management: a vice presidency at the engineering firm NYMA, then another running microgravity research and operations at Northrop Grumman. In 2003 he served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, examining the disaster that killed seven astronauts flying the same shuttle program he had helped open twenty years earlier. He was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2010 and the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2019, and NASA had already given him its Distinguished Service Medal in 1994.

Where the story stands now

Bluford is in his eighties now, one of three Black astronauts from that 1978 class. McNair died in the Challenger disaster in January 1986, a little over two years after Bluford had flown that same orbiter into orbit and home again without incident. Gregory went on to become NASA's deputy administrator.

A STEM academy in Baltimore carries Bluford's name, and so does an engineering building Penn State opened at its Innovation Park in 2021. The Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned a piece for him, "Hold Fast to Dreams," premiered in 2017. NASA's astronaut corps now includes dozens of Black astronauts who came in through the door his flight opened, whether he asked to be the one holding it or not.

Sources

• NASA, "40 Years Ago: STS-8, the First African American in Space, and the First Space Shuttle Night Launch and Landing" (nasa.gov)
• Wikipedia, "STS-8," for crew roles, payload mass, and launch/landing timestamps
• Wikipedia, "Guion Bluford" and "NASA Astronaut Group 8," for education, military record, mission-by-mission spaceflight data, the 1978 selection numbers, and post-NASA career
• Capitol Technology University, "Dr. Guion Bluford: The First African American in Space Despite Wanting to be Number 2"
• National Aviation Hall of Fame, enshrinee biography for Guion "Guy" S. Bluford Jr.
• Wikipedia, "Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez," for the September 18, 1980 Soyuz 38 flight