More info:Blue Origin
Making history as the oldest to ever do so, 90-year-old Ed Dwight finally fulfilled his dream to reach space
Image credits:Blue Origin
“Fantastic! A life-changing experience. Everyone needs to do this!” Dwight recalled the special moment above the Kármán Line, the imaginary barrier that separates Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. “I didn’t know I needed this in my life, but now I need it in my life.”
No matter the age, Dwight has no plans to stop pursuing his dreams: “It’s like getting a taste of honey. I want a whole jar of that. I want to go into orbit. I want to go around the Earth and see the whole Earth. That’s what I want to do now.”
In past several years, space tourism has gained lots of attention from billionaires such as Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson, and has rapidly expanded. Blue Origin has not revealed its ticket prices, yet, for example, the company’s competitor in the suborbital tourism business, Virgin Galactic, currently charges $450,000 for a seat on its VSS Unity spacecraft.
Dwight was born on the 9th of September, 1933, in Kansas City, where he grew up near Fairfax Airport, a municipal airport that was turned into an Army Air Force base during World War II. Since the airfield was within walking distance, he would often go to marvel at the planes, expecting that one of the pilots would give him a ride.
“They’d say to me, ‘Hey kid, would you clean my airplane? I’ll give you a dime,'” Dwight shared the memories. But he wanted more than that, he wanted to fly.
It took years before Dwight decided to become a pilot himself, mainly because at the time, it was the white man’s domain. It all changed when he accidentally saw in a newspaper an image of a Black pilot in Korea.
“Oh my God, they’re letting Black people fly,” Dwight thought back then. “I went straight to the recruitment office and said, ‘I want to fly.’ My first flight was the mostexhilarating thingin the world. There were no streets or stop signs up there. You were free as a bird.”
As the main attention of America at the time was on the space race, the eyes of Black America were on Dwight.
“I received about 1,500 pieces of mail a week, which were stored in large containers at Edwards Air Force Base. Some of it came to my mother in Kansas City. Most of my mail was just addressed to Astronaut Dwight, Kansas City, Kansas,” he recalled more memories. And yet despite hugepublic attention, the opportunity to become first Black astronaut disappeared since he was never selected for the space program for reasons that remain unknown until today.
Starting from 1966, Dwight spent a decade as an entrepreneur before shifting his path to sculpture as a way to tell the story of Black history. He spent decades creating large-scale monuments of such iconic Black figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. He created more than 20,000 gallery works and 130 public works were installed in museums and public spaces across the U.S. and Canada.
Image credits:Space for Humanity
On the 19th of May, Ed Dwight became the 21st Black American astronaut to fly into space and the oldest one in history to do so.
The internet was full of heartwarming messages for Ed Dwight
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