Ronald McNair

Ronald Erwin McNair was born on the twenty-first of October 1950 at Lake City, South Carolina, the second of three sons of Carl McNair — an auto-body repairman — and Pearl Montgomery McNair, a high-school graduate and homemaker who across her life would complete her own bachelor's and master's degrees alongside the education of her three sons. He attended the segregated Carver High School of Lake City and at nine attempted to check out books from the Lake City public library — closed to Black patrons by Jim Crow ordinance. His mother, behind him in the queue, supported his refusal to leave the desk. The librarian called the police; the police told Pearl McNair that her son could borrow the books on the condition that she was responsible for their return. The Lake City library is now named the Ronald E. McNair Life History Center.

He graduated valedictorian of Carver's last segregated class in 1967. He took the bachelor's degree in physics magna cum laude at the historically Black North Carolina A and T State University in 1971 and entered the doctoral programme in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the same fall. He completed the Ph.D. in 1976 with a dissertation on chemical and high-pressure carbon-dioxide laser physics under Michael Feld. He was a fifth-degree black belt in karate by the same year — the discipline he had practiced since fifteen.

He joined the Hughes Research Laboratories at Malibu in 1976 as a laser physicist and conducted there until 1978 the work on tunable infrared lasers that established his early scientific reputation. He was selected to the NASA astronaut corps in 1978 — the same selection group as Guion Bluford and Frederick Gregory — making him one of the first three African American NASA astronauts.

His first spaceflight, STS-41-B aboard Challenger from the third to the eleventh of February 1984, made him the second African American in space, after Bluford. He served as mission specialist conducting the deployment of two communications satellites and the first tests of the manned manoeuvring unit.

His second flight — STS-51-L aboard Challenger from the twenty-eighth of January 1986 — was scheduled to deploy the second tracking-and-data-relay satellite, to deploy the Spartan-Halley solar observatory for observations of Halley's Comet, and to broadcast on space-to-ground link a saxophone performance Dr. McNair had composed for Jean-Michel Jarre's Rendez-vous. The Space Shuttle Challenger broke up seventy-three seconds after liftoff at eleven thirty-nine on the morning of the twenty-eighth of January 1986. Dr. McNair was killed with his six crewmates. He was thirty-five.

He is honored here as the second African American in space.