African-American astronauts are Americans of African descent who have been part of an astronaut program, whether or not they have traveled into space. African-Americans who have been passengers on space-tourist flights are also included in this article, although there is dispute over whether such passengers become "astronauts." [1]
| # | Image | Name & birth date | Notes | Missions & launch dates | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  | Guion Bluford November 22, 1942 | First African-American astronaut in space | [2] | |
| 2 |  | Ronald McNair October 21, 1950 †January 28, 1986 | First Baháʼí in space; died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster | [2] | |
| 3 |  | Frederick D. Gregory January 7, 1941 | First African American to pilot and command a Space Shuttle mission; acting Administrator of NASA, 2005 | [2] | |
| 4 |  | Charles Bolden August 19, 1946 | Administrator of NASA, July 17, 2009 – January 20, 2017 | [2] | |
| 5 |  | Mae Jemison October 17, 1956 | First African-American woman in space |
| [2] |
| 6 |  | Bernard A. Harris Jr. June 26, 1956 | First African American to walk in space | [2] | |
| 7 |  | Winston E. Scott August 6, 1950 | Veteran of three spacewalks | [2] | |
| 8 |  | Robert Curbeam March 5, 1962 | Veteran of seven spacewalks | [2] | |
| 9 |  | Michael P. Anderson December 25, 1959 †February 1, 2003 | Died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster | [2] | |
| 10 |  | Stephanie Wilson September 27, 1966 | [2] | ||
| 11 |  | Joan Higginbotham August 3, 1964 |
| [2] | |
| 12 |  | Alvin Drew November 5, 1962 | Veteran of two spacewalks, February 28 and March 2, 2011 | [2] | |
| 13 |  | Leland D. Melvin February 15, 1964 | Associate Administrator for Education at NASA | [2] | |
| 14 |  | Robert Satcher September 22, 1965 | EVA November 19 and November 23, 2009 |
| [2] |
| 15 |  | Victor J. Glover April 30, 1976 | Joined ISS Expedition 64 as first African-American on an ISS Expedition |
| [3] [4] |
| 16 |  | Sian Proctor March 28, 1970 | First African American female Spacecraft Pilot, as part of Inspiration4. First African American commercial Astronaut. |
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| 17 |  | Michael Strahan November 21, 1971 | First African American space tourist |
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| 18 |  | Jessica Watkins May 14, 1988 | First African American woman to be an ISS expedition crew member |
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| 19 | Jaison Robinson September 25, 1980 |
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| 20 |  | Jeanette J. Epps November 2, 1970 | On August 4, 2023, NASA announced that Epps would join SpaceX Crew-8 that launched to space on March 4, 2024. [5] |
| [6] |
| 21 |  | Ed Dwight September 9, 1933 | Considered as the first African-American astronaut candidate, Ed Dwight made it to the second round of an Air Force program from which NASA selected astronauts, but was not selected by NASA to be an astronaut. Resigned from the Air Force in 1966 due to racial politics. In May, 2024, Dwight flew on a Blue Origin space tourist launch that traveled more than 100 km above Earth's surface, becoming at age 90 the oldest person to have flown to space. |
| [7] [8] |
| Image | Name & birth date | Notes | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. October 2, 1935 †December 8, 1967 | First African-American astronaut; selected for astronaut training in 1967 for the MOL program; died in an aircraft accident | [9] |
 | Livingston L. Holder Jr. September 29, 1956 | USAF astronaut in the Manned Spaceflight Engineer Program | [10] |
| Michael E. Belt September 9, 1957 | Astronaut, payload specialist from TERRA SCOUT – US Army Project; retired January 12, 1991. Although he did not fly any shuttle missions during his time as an astronaut, he was the back-up payload specialist to Thomas J. Hennen for the STS-44 mission which deployed a military satellite, undergoing 9 months of astronaut training for the role [11] He was selected as an astronaut through the US Army's Terra Scout program which was created specifically to support STS-44. [12] | [6] | |
 | Yvonne Cagle April 24, 1959 | In NASA management | [6] |
An astronaut is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member aboard a spacecraft. Although generally reserved for professional space travelers, the term is sometimes applied to anyone who travels into space, including scientists, politicians, journalists, and tourists.
Apollo 17 was the eleventh and final mission of NASA's Apollo program, the sixth and most recent time humans have set foot on the Moon or traveled beyond low Earth orbit. Commander Gene Cernan and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt walked on the Moon, while Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans orbited above. Schmitt was the only professional geologist to land on the Moon; he was selected in place of Joe Engle, as NASA had been under pressure to send a scientist to the Moon. The mission's heavy emphasis on science meant the inclusion of a number of new experiments, including a biological experiment containing five mice that was carried in the command module.
Human spaceflight is spaceflight with a crew or passengers aboard a spacecraft, often with the spacecraft being operated directly by the onboard human crew. Spacecraft can also be remotely operated from ground stations on Earth, or autonomously, without any direct human involvement. People trained for spaceflight are called astronauts, cosmonauts (Russian), or taikonauts (Chinese); and non-professionals are referred to as spaceflight participants or spacefarers.
The Space Shuttle program was the fourth human spaceflight program carried out by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which accomplished routine transportation for Earth-to-orbit crew and cargo from 1981 to 2011. Its official program name was Space Transportation System (STS), taken from a 1969 plan for a system of reusable spacecraft where it was the only item funded for development, as a proposed nuclear shuttle in the plan was cancelled in 1972. It flew 135 missions and carried 355 astronauts from 16 countries, many on multiple trips.
Space tourism is human space travel for recreational purposes. There are several different types of space tourism, including orbital, suborbital and lunar space tourism. Tourists are motivated by the possibility of viewing Earth from space, feeling weightlessness, experiencing extremely high speed and something unusual, and contributing to science.
Human spaceflight programs have been conducted, started, or planned by multiple countries and companies. Until the 21st century, human spaceflight programs were sponsored exclusively by governments, through either the military or civilian space agencies. With the launch of the privately funded SpaceShipOne in 2004, a new category of human spaceflight programs – commercial human spaceflight – arrived. By the end of 2022, three countries and one private company (SpaceX) had successfully launched humans to Earth orbit, and two private companies had launched humans on a suborbital trajectory.
A payload specialist (PS) was an individual selected and trained by commercial or research organizations for flights of a specific payload on a NASA Space Shuttle mission. People assigned as payload specialists included individuals selected by the research community, a company or consortium flying a commercial payload aboard the spacecraft, and non-NASA astronauts designated by international partners.
New Shepard is a fully reusable sub-orbital launch vehicle developed for space tourism by Blue Origin. The vehicle is named after Alan Shepard, who became the first American to travel into space and the fifth person to walk on the Moon. The vehicle is capable of vertical takeoff and landings. Additionally, it is also capable of carrying humans and customer payloads into a sub-orbital trajectory.
Spaceflight participant is the term used by NASA, Roscosmos, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for people who travel into space, but are not professional astronauts.
The Boeing Starliner is a spacecraft designed to transport crew to and from the International Space Station (ISS) and other low-Earth-orbit destinations. Developed by Boeing under NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP), it consists of a reusable crew capsule and an expendable service module.
Development of the Commercial Crew Program (CCDev) began in the second round of the program, which was rescoped from a smaller technology development program for human spaceflight to a competitive development program that would produce the spacecraft to be used to provide crew transportation services to and from the International Space Station (ISS). To implement the program, NASA awarded a series of competitive fixed-price contracts to private vendors starting in 2011. Operational contracts to fly astronauts were awarded in September 2014 to SpaceX and Boeing, and NASA expected each company to complete development and achieve crew rating in 2017. Each company performed an uncrewed orbital test flight in 2019.
Women have flown and worked in outer space since almost the beginning of human spaceflight. A considerable number of women from a range of countries have worked in space, though overall women are still significantly less often chosen to go to space than men, and by June, 2020 constitute only 12% of all astronauts who have been to space. Yet, the proportion of women among space travelers is increasing substantially over time. The first woman to fly in space was Soviet Valentina Tereshkova, aboard the Vostok 6 space capsule on June 16–19, 1963. Tereshkova was a textile-factory assembly worker, rather than a pilot like the male cosmonauts flying at the time, chosen for propaganda value, her devotion to the Communist Party, and her years of experience in sport parachuting, which she used on landing after ejecting from her capsule. Women were not qualified as space pilots and workers co-equal to their male counterparts until 1982. By October 2021, most of the 70 women who have been to space have been United States citizens, with missions on the Space Shuttle and on the International Space Station. Other countries have flown one, two or three women in human spaceflight programs. Additionally one woman of dual Iranian-US citizenship has participated as a tourist on a US spaceflight.
Dragon 2 is a class of partially reusable spacecraft developed, manufactured, and operated by American space company SpaceX for flights to the International Space Station (ISS) and private spaceflight missions. The spacecraft, which consists of a reusable space capsule and an expendable trunk module, has two variants: the 4-person Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon, a replacement for the Dragon 1 cargo capsule. The spacecraft launches atop a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket, and the capsule returns to Earth through splashdown.
Lunar tourism may be possible in the future if trips to the Moon are made available to a private audience. Some space tourism startup companies are planning to offer tourism on or around the Moon, and estimate this to be possible sometime between 2023 and 2043.
The dearMoonproject was a proposed lunar tourism mission conceived and financed by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. It would have seen Maezawa and eight civilian artists fly a circumlunar trajectory around the Moon aboard a SpaceX Starship spacecraft.
The Artemis program is a Moon exploration program led by the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), formally established in 2017 via Space Policy Directive 1. It is intended to reestablish a human presence on the Moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The program's stated long-term goal is to establish a permanent base on the Moon to facilitate human missions to Mars.
Axiom Mission 1 was a privately funded and operated crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The mission was operated by Axiom Space out of Axiom's Mission Control Center MCC-A in Houston, Texas. The flight launched on 8 April 2022 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft used was a SpaceX Crew Dragon. The crew consisted of Michael López-Alegría, a Spaniard-American and a professionally trained astronaut hired by Axiom, Eytan Stibbe from Israel, Larry Connor from the United States, and Mark Pathy from Canada.
Starship HLS is a lunar lander variant of the Starship spacecraft that is slated to transfer astronauts from a lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon and back. It is being designed and built by SpaceX under the Human Landing System contract to NASA as a critical element of NASA's Artemis program to land a crew on the Moon.
The Commercial Crew Program (CCP) provides commercially operated crew transportation service to and from the International Space Station (ISS) under contract to NASA, conducting crew rotations between the expeditions of the International Space Station program. American space manufacturer SpaceX began providing service in 2020, using the Crew Dragon spacecraft, and NASA plans to add Boeing when its Boeing Starliner spacecraft becomes operational no earlier than 2025. NASA has contracted for six operational missions from Boeing and fourteen from SpaceX, ensuring sufficient support for ISS through 2030.
the title of astronaut is more than just a distinction for those space travelers serving as envoys of mankind as they explore worlds beyond earth's atmosphere. It is a mark of someone granted special status under international law; a status that will be questioned as more space tourists and entrepreneurs take to the skies.
Four other African-Americans were selected by NASA as astronauts that did not have the opportunity to fly in space: Livingston Holder, Michael E. Belt, Yvonne Cagle, and Jeanette J. Epps. Each of these dedicated people believed in the advancement of human knowledge and space exploration, and some made the ultimate sacrifice doing what they felt was worth the risk for this endeavor.
Dwight completed that challenge and reached the edge of space at the age of 90, making him the oldest person to venture to such heights, according to a spokesperson from Blue Origin.
He became a satellite countdown controller, worked on classified missions and earned a position with the competitive Manned Spaceflight Engineer program. While training as an astronaut, he witnessed the faces of NASA's space shuttle program shift to include women and minorities, along with the white men who first inspired him.
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