Astronaut Robert Lawrence as Command Pilot Apollo 18

[MarkWhittington]

One of the slams against the Apollo Program was that it was basically a white boys operation (no minorities, no women involved.) There were very, very few African American test pilots available for the astronaut corps at the time, or so the excuse went.

It turns out that there was one black astronaut, Robert Lawrence, who was involved in the Air Force's Manned Orbiting Labortory program in the mid sixties. In OTL Lawrence was killed in a crash of his F 104 in 1967. Let's suppose he was not and he is rotated into NASA with the rest of the MOL astronauts when that program was cancelled.

President Nixon decides that NASA's sole astronaut of color needs a flight, so Apollo 18 is not cancelled and is duly sent to the Moon sometime in the Spring or Summer of 1973. It is successful. Effects?

[Tyr]

Gets slammed as a cynical ploy to prove its not a white boy's program.

[Mike Stearns]

Yeah, I don't that the effects would be very great. We'd remember him as the first black man to walk on the moon, but that about it.