AHC: Minority Astronauts in the Space Race

Delta Force

Banned
With a 1962 PoD, get a minority (non-cacuasian) astronaut or cosmonaut into space during the Space Race. Bonus points if the astronaut or cosmonaut becomes the first person to walk on the Moon.
 
I have a dream...

Once drew up a timeline including Martin Luther King giving his famous speech not from Atlanta, but the moon. It did include sentient dolphins and no end of ASBs, never developed it but it was fun.:D
Seriously, could there be a black astronaut or is that pushing things too much?
 
Back In The Day, outside of the US, anything less than a WASP was a minority.
That said, I really really wish Neil Armstrong had audibly said, "Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky." It's the sort of thing an Ohio boy would have done.:eek::cool:

That said, a Russian cosmonaut from the outer regions would qualify in my book; maybe in tandem with the Apollo missions, or that too much of a twing?
 
Possibly an Astronaut but not the first man on the moon. America was still to racist. Maybe Apollo 12.

It would probably be a bit late for him to fly on one of the early Apollo missions but one of the later missions, say Apollo 15 or 16 might be do able.
 
Tough - to quote Sterling Archer, black male astronauts are rarer than unicorns. I don't think we've even had one aside from the aforementioned Robert Lawrence Jr.
 
A tough challenge indeed, as NASA's unspoken policy for many years was that astronauts must be male and they must be white. (I presume that the Soviet space program had similar racial/ethnic & gender biases.) :(:(

Let's not forget that in addition to racial/ethnic minorities, women were also excluded from both the American and Soviet (Valentina Tereshkova being the exception) programs. That said, there were 13 women who, as part of a privately funded program, underwent and passed the same Phase I physical examinations as did the astronauts selected by NASA for Project Mercury. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_13)
Those thirteen women were:
Myrtle Cagle
Jerrie Cobb
Janet Dietrich
Marion Dietrich
Wally Funk
Sarah Gorelick
Janey Hart
Jean Hixson
Rhea Hurrle
Gene Nora Stumbough
Irene Leverton
Jerri Sloan
Bernice Steadman

While it might be easier to get a white woman into space as opposed to a man of color, I'm not sure how to do it. These woman put up a valiant and persistent effort, but still, it was a quixotic quest. NASA's whole mindset, not to mention its regulations, would need to change. The press would need to be forced by public opinion to take these women and their abilities seriously, as would the male astronauts in the program. Political leaders, chief among them being LBJ, would need to be convinced that these women had "the right stuff" and that putting women in to space was a good thing to do. All that they did however, was worry that if women were let into the space program, blacks and other minorities demand to be let in as well.
 

Archibald

Banned
A forgotten factor is how IMPRACTICAL early space toilets were. Mercury, no issue - the flights were short. But Gemini and Apollo... the systems were horrific.
Space toilet was introduced (no pun) on Skylab. That book offers hilarious hindsight on the subject
(notably about the crucial issue of, how do you test a zero-G toilet on Earth 1-G solid ground ? obviously, on a plane doing zero-G parabolas... which only last 30 seconds. Which entails a lot of issues)

Poor Judith Resnik (who died on STS-51L) had failed toilets on its first shuttle flight in 1984.
To make a long story short, the urine that evacuated into a tank, and then into space forme icicles that threatened the shuttle heatshield.
So the astronauts were prohibited to pee - more exactly, they had to urinate into "emergency" old Apollo bags. No issue for the males, but they gently offered Resnik to pee into the toilet - there was still room into the tank without venting into space.

Alas, in a bout of heroic feminism, Resnik realized that, had the tank be full, and had she refused to pee into the Apollo bags, then the mission could have been interrupted by the fault of a women.
So she heroically decided to try and pee into the Apollo bags like his male fellows.

Once returned to Earth, at the usual post landing press conference she just said a single sentence on the subject. "Apollo bags just don't work for females. Period."

:D
 
Doesn't anybody remember the classic 'Louis Armstrong - First Man on the Moon' thread from the old board?

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
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