The unsung astronaut

HOUSTON - Maj. Robert H. Lawrence, America’s first black astronaut, had already traveled far by the time he was selected as a military astronaut in 1967. His death later that year in a tragic accident not only cut short a promising career, it led full recognition of his accomplishments and hard-won status to be obscured for decades. Only after his supporters traveled their own difficult journey was Lawrence accorded his proper place in space history.

Lawrence was a 31-year-old Air Force officer when he was selected in 1967 to join a small team of military officers training for a planned small space station. The Pentagon's "Manned Orbiting Laboratory," or MOL, was intended to explore the value of military space missions for astronauts. Two-man crews would be launched aboard advanced Gemini capsules and spend a month or more in orbit, practicing visual reconnaissance and communications intercepts and other national security tasks.

NASA astronauts had already made ten orbital flights aboard Gemini spacecraft, and had just begun the Apollo program and its race to the moon. But the 1960s space race wasn’t just about peaceful exploration, and both the Soviet Union and the United States were also developing manned space systems for military purposes.

Just two years later, however, the MOL project was canceled as its costs soared and as unmanned military satellites became more sophisticated. The astronaut team was disbanded, some returning to their parent services and the youngest ones transferring to NASA. Had Bob Lawrence lived, he likely would have been among the group sent to NASA, all of whom later flew in the space shuttle program.

Instead, Lawrence's death in a Dec. 8, 1967 jet crash made him the only member of the MOL team to lose his life in the line of duty on that program. The crash itself soon became entwined with garbled stories and widespread misunderstanding. Sometimes called a "training flight" or a "space shuttle landing test," the true nature of the flight -– and the enormity of the loss -– remained elusive for decades, and this contributed to Lawrence’s remaining the "unsung astronaut."

In 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts left a memorial plaque on the moon that named fourteen American and Russian names. Lawrence was not included. When, in the wake of the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986, a private foundation built a memorial at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Lawrence’s name was again omitted.

If in the end the difficulties turned out to have been more connected with the color of his uniform -- Air Force blue -– than of his skin, the fact remains that Lawrence's legacy was allowed to go unheralded for decades.

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