Guion Bluford

Guion Bluford, born in 1942, United States astronaut and pilot, first African American to go into space. Bluford served as a mission specialist on four National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space shuttle missions.

Guion Stewart Bluford was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a B.S. degree in aerospace engineering in 1964. After graduation he entered active duty with the U.S. Air Force, where he served as a pilot during the Vietnam War (1959-1975). He earned an M.S. degree in aerospace engineering in 1974 and a Ph.D. degree in aerospace engineering and laser physics in 1978, both from the Air Force Institute of Technology. Bluford earned an M.B.A. degree in 1987 from the University of Houston—Clear Lake.

Bluford was selected as an astronaut candidate in 1978. He first went into space in August 1983, three years after the first black cosmonaut, Cuban cosmonaut Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, flew into space aboard the Soviet Union’s Soyuz 38 mission. Bluford’s 1983 mission aboard the space shuttle Challenger included the deployment of an Indian communications satellite and the first launch and landing of a space shuttle at night.

In November 1985 Bluford again flew aboard the space shuttle Challenger on a mission dedicated to German scientific experiments. Challenger carried Spacelab, a modular system that fits in the space shuttle’s huge cargo bay and provides extra room for astronauts to carry out scientific experiments. Bluford’s third spaceflight was aboard the space shuttle Discovery in April 1991. He supervised experiments for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the launch of a small DOD satellite.

Bluford flew aboard Discovery again on his last space shuttle mission in December 1992 on another DOD mission. This mission included studies of how muscle, blood, and bone are affected by the microgravity of space and a test of how small space debris can be tracked from the earth.

Bluford left NASA after his fourth mission to become a vice president at NYMA, Inc., an aerospace consulting firm in Maryland.