Robert Henry Lawrence Jr.

Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. was born on the second of October 1935 in Chicago, Illinois, to Robert Henry Lawrence Sr., a disabled veteran, and Gwendolyn Annette Williams, a civil servant. A gifted student, he graduated in the top ten percent of his class at Englewood High School at sixteen, and in 1956, at twenty, earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Bradley University, where he was commissioned through the Air Force ROTC.

Lawrence became a United States Air Force pilot and flew as an instructor, training German air-force pilots in the T-33. Pursuing science alongside aviation, he completed a doctorate in physical chemistry at The Ohio State University in 1965 — his dissertation examining tritium-induced exchange reactions in methane and ethane. He was, by any measure, both scholar and aviator, accumulating more than 2,500 flying hours, some 2,000 of them in jets.

On the thirtieth of June 1967, having completed the Air Force's Aerospace Research Pilot School, Major Lawrence was selected as an aerospace research pilot for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory programme — becoming the first African American chosen as an astronaut by any national space programme, and the only one of his group to hold a doctorate. His work on steep-descent gliding flight helped shape techniques later used by the Space Shuttle.

On the eighth of December 1967, while serving as instructor for another pilot practising those very landing techniques, Lawrence was killed when their F-104 Starfighter crashed at Edwards Air Force Base; he was thirty-two. For three decades his name was withheld from the astronauts' memorial; in 1997 that wrong was righted, and his name was at last engraved on the Space Mirror at Kennedy Space Center. He reached for the heavens and opened the way for those who followed. May he be forever honored.