The Space Race

[DanaK]

Nat Geo documentary on Black astronauts. Premieres Feb 12 on Nat Geo and streams on Disney+ and Hulu the following day

Press release and trailer http://www.thefutoncritic.com/video/2024/01/29/video-the-space-race-official-trailer-national-geographic-524311/20240129ngc01/

[Bastet]

I'm glad you created this forum; I read about the documentary last summer after it debuted at Tribeca, but hadn't come across any promos for it so I did not realize it's about to air on TV.  It got good reviews, and I look forward to it.

[Bastet]

I finally sat down and watched this, and it's great.

I'm not engaging in the Oppression Olympics, as for any given situation it may be that white women had it harder in America or Black men did (and, of course, Black women were doubly marginalized, and that's before we get into the rest of intersectionality), but in the case of space exploration:  How many people who know Sally Ride was the first American woman in space can name Guy Bluford, or even recognize has face as “Oh, the first Black American in space, what’s his name” even though their historic missions were only two months apart?

I loved hearing from Ed Dwight.  I'm far from an expert, but more knowledgeable than the average bear about both the space program and Black history.  While I knew the basics about how the criteria for inviting pilots to apply to the astronaut program was purposely set up to eliminate most Black pilots (including all the Tuskegee Airmen), I didn’t know the specifics of his story, being courted as the first Black candidate (as JFK had promised in courting the Black vote) and trotted out for PR yet ultimately set up to fail.

And I didn’t know Chuck Yeager had been such a racist asshole to him, and about him (saying Washington was trying to cram a [n-word] down their throats and they couldn’t let him graduate), although I’m horribly unsurprised.

I was also not surprised to learn that while he was out there trying to break a racial barrier and encouraging Black kids interested in science and space to believe they could pursue it, he got flak for talking about that rather than the struggle.  To have any chance at all of succeeding, he had to play the government’s game, but the fundamental point about the gulf between the money and attention spent on technical prowess versus social injustice was spot on, and something to grapple with.  I didn’t note who later said it, but it was pointed out that the space program was just a particular example of how Black people had to navigate leaving one foot in their community while stepping the other into the white world in order to be successful.

The segment on Afrofuturism as the one way to visualize Black people in space was also interesting, and something I’d never thought about.

What I did know well was how the space shuttle program was big shift in terms of who NASA recruited, actively pitching it to women and people of color (and scientists and engineers, not just test pilots).  Fred Gregory (the first Black shuttle commander) was interviewed for the Challenger documentary on Netflix, too, talking about how that video of Nichelle Nichols felt like she was talking directly to him, and I got a kick out of it both times.

Bluford’s description of himself was touching – an introvert, treasuring the few friends he has but not wanting to socialize otherwise, to the extent he outright avoided the flight director everyone else was schmoozing, and sometimes needing to be reminded he’s better than he thinks he is – as was him saying he couldn’t think about the historical impact of his flight while he was up there, because he had to make sure he did a good job, so when he got back down people would say yeah, okay, we can send African Americans into space.  The pressure!

I love that, while he didn't want to only fly once so readily signed on to a second mission, he alsofelt a responsibility to use his fame to make sure the rest of them got to fly, too.

I am plain embarrassed that the segment on the Black men in between Dwight and Bluford was news to me.  I’d never heard of Bob Lawrence, despite the fact enough people at the time knew his name for his widow to receive more than one letter saying they’re glad he’s dead because “now there will be no c***s on the moon”!  I also didn’t know about Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, the Black Cuban who Russia quite deliberately beat the US to the punch in sending up, whose flight was ignored by American media because the combination of Russia AND Cuba was just too much for them to handle.

It always makes me sad seeing footage of Ron McNair (who was killed on Challenger); he was such a terribly talented and interesting person.  I think he got more of his due in this than in the otherwise excellent Challenger documentary, and was touched to hear Charlie Bolden (first – and only, I believe – Black NASA Administrator, who delightfully invited and paid tribute to Dwight at his confirmation hearing) say he wouldn’t have even applied to the astronaut program if not for McNair, and that when he briefly doubted if he should stick with it after the Challenger disaster, he know McNair would be pissed at him if he just walked away rather than being part of finding out what happened in the hopes it would never happen again.

Bolden was used particularly well throughout given his extensive experience, but good interviews all around.  Another highlight was Victor Glover talking about keeping a painting of George Floyd with him for his six months on the ISS, and his conflicting feelings about this country sending him to space as its representative but allowing such atrocities to regularly happen back home.  I liked hearing how many of the other Black astronauts were on his conference call, asking how they could help him navigate such a fraught time (in the wake of Floyd’s murder) while he’s so far away.  It’s nice that brought them together in a new way – “the Afronauts”.

Obviously, given how I’ve gone on, I recommend this.  My only complaint is I wish it had not been so exclusively focused on the men; even Mae Jemison got only a brief mention, and the only footage of even the smallest length is a sweet phone call between Jessica Watkins and Dwight.  If you want to tell the story of Black men in the space program, fine, and in an ideal world we’d also have someone out there telling the story of the Black women in the program, but we don’t live in that world, so if you’re going to keep talking about “Black astronauts” but only in terms of men’s experiences, please at some point acknowledge your limited focus.

Edited March 19 by Bastet
To hopefully fix wonky formatting; shouldn't have posted during site glitch, I guess