Robert H. Lawrence Jr.

Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. was born on the second of October 1935 at Chicago, the son of Robert Henry Lawrence Sr. — a Cook County civil-service clerk — and Gwendolyn Lawrence, a homemaker. He was raised in the Black middle-class Englewood neighbourhood of the South Side of Chicago.

He was placed at six at the Englewood public schools and at twelve at the Englewood Technical High School at Chicago, completing the secondary education there at sixteen in 1952. He took the bachelor’s in chemistry at the Bradley University at Peoria, Illinois in 1956 — at twenty — having entered the institution at sixteen on full scholarship and graduated in three and a half years.

He took the doctorate in physical chemistry at the Ohio State University at Columbus in 1965 — the dissertation The Mechanism of the Tritium Beta-Decay-Induced Exchange Reactions of Methylbenzene at the Cyclotron Laboratory of Ohio State.

He was commissioned a second lieutenant of the United States Air Force in 1956 under the Reserve Officer Training Corps programme at Bradley University and served the Air Force as an aviation cadet from 1956 to 1958. He completed the multi-engine flight programme at Malden Air Force Base, Missouri and the experimental test-pilot programme at the Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California in 1967.

He accumulated by mid-1967 over twenty-five hundred hours of jet flight time across the F-86 Sabre, the F-104 Starfighter, and the F-101 Voodoo. He was the principal test pilot at the closing years of the 1960s of the United States Air Force aero-thermodynamic/elastic structural systems environmental tests at Edwards Air Force Base.

He was selected on the thirtieth of June 1967 — at thirty-one — as one of the seventeen astronauts of the United States Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory programme — the United States Department of Defense programme of a manned reconnaissance orbital platform that was to commence flight operations from 1971 onward. Lawrence was the first African American selected to a United States manned-space-flight programme.

He was killed on the eighth of December 1967 — five months after the MOL designation — at the Edwards Air Force Base in the crash of a Lockheed F-104D Starfighter trainer on which he was the rear-seat instructor pilot of a Major Harvey Royer. The aircraft was at the conclusion of a flare-recovery training exercise approximately one hundred feet above the runway when it stalled and impacted the runway. Royer ejected and survived; Lawrence’s rear-seat ejection seat malfunctioned and he died on impact. He was thirty-two.

The Manned Orbiting Laboratory programme was cancelled in 1969 before any of its astronauts had flown to space.

He was awarded the United States Astronaut Wings of the United States Department of Defense by retroactive review on the eighth of December 1997 — the thirtieth anniversary of his death — and his name was added to the Space Mirror Memorial at the John F. Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida in May 1997.

He is honored here as the first African American astronaut.