The Untold Story of Black Astronauts Finally Gets Spotlight

With their new documentary The Space Race (premiering on National Geographic Feb. 12 and streaming on Disney+ and Hulu Feb. 13), directors Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and Lisa Cortés have a specific, admirable goal: to spotlight the under-discussed stories of Black astronauts during the height of NASA’s space program.

Through archival footage and contemporary interviews with principal figures, The Space Race traces a historical lineage from the early 1960s through the present day of Black pilots and engineers whose contributions to space exploration have been systemically marginalized for more than half a century. But while the film broadly achieves its aim of correcting a biased historical record by allowing primary historical actors to control their respective narratives, it falters structurally and tonally by adopting too broad a scope of inquiry.

The Space Race gets the most mileage from the extraordinary stories of two men, former test pilot Edward Dwight and former astronaut Guion Bluford. As he tells it, Dwight was selected to join the U.S. Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School in 1961 largely because of political pressure from National Urban League’s Whitney Young, who pressed upon the recently elected President John F. Kennedy to find a Black astronaut. Dwight subsequently became both a political pawn of the government, as his selection into the program became international news, and a genuine pioneer who faced severe prejudice from within the program, including from commandant Chuck Yeager, who reportedly told the school’s staff and participants that “Washington is trying to cram a n----- down our throats.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.