Had the White House, Kennedy, etc., been willing to do things the right way -- instead of demanding instant political gratification -- they probably could have found some real potential astronaut candidates.

In addition to Major Lawrence, there was a black fighter pilot by the name of Emmett Hatch -- who had flown with Yeager and whom Yeager actually thought would have excelled in the program. (In reminiscences Hatch spoke highly of Yeager as well, BTW.)

But for whatever reason Maj Hatch "didn't want to get involved" with the astronaut program, and wound up flying in Vietnam instead.

Despite being on PBS, nothing was made of his blackness, other than the artifact of him being the first. He was killed in action during a training exercise. He was highly regarded by the other astronauts interviewed as one of the best, if not the best, pure pilot among them. He had a PhD in Chemistry.

It might be presumptuous or accurate to guess that Mr. Lawrence wouldn't have needed a squawk from Bobby Kennedy to make the cut, had he survived. One wonders about the effects, possibly killing AA in its crib, had there coincidentally been more, qualified black men with the right stuff in the right places at the right times.

I also haven't been following the current NASA missions with too much interest, but I did see that the first Tweet was sent from space, and that the astronauts were busy answering questions from teenagers like how do they go to the bathroom and what happens if you sneeze in your space suit?

Perhaps NASA will continue at least to contribute accidentally useful inventions like water filters, cordless power tools, shoe insoles, smoke detectors, ear thermometers, memory foam, scratch resistant lenses, and invisible braces. I just hope Skittles don't start falling from the sky.

"One wonders how many blank spots will be left in our history books after they are fully conformed to leftist ideology, and if forty years from now students will know more about the Stonewall riot than they do about Apollo 11 and the America that gave birth to that remarkable achievement."

#2 "Today, NASA and its projects are just playthings for the bureaucrats and politicians. So who cares about them? Nothing really is at stake."

I tend rather to agree with Cardinal John Henry Newman's belief in the value of knowledge for its own sake. Every expenditure need not have a practical outcome to be valuable. If that were not true, we would probably have fewer museums and symphony orchestras.

The other is that only the top 11 out of the 26 members of Dwight's class made the cut to continue on in training, and Dwight wasn't one of them.

Hence the Air Force ponied up more training funds so that more pilots could be passed; since Dwight couldn't make the cut, there was no cut.

Chuck Yeager -- who was head of the aerospace test pilot school -- had some interesting commentary on the matter:

"The White House, Congress, and civil rights groups came at me with meat cleavers, and the only way I could save my head was to prove I wasn't a damned bigot....

The Kennedy administration, especially Bobby Kennedy, went to the Air Force and said, 'I want a colored guy in the space program.'

LeMay said, 'I have a hornet's nest back here, and they want a black guy.'

I said, 'Well General, you know this is all published, and open and aboveboard.'

He said, 'Don't tell me problems; tell me solutions.'"

So Yeager came up with the idea of passing everybody in the course, and then letting NASA have the politically hot-potato of deciding who they wanted to take into the astronaut program.

Yeager described Dwight as

"an average pilot with an average academic background.... He was a nice guy, but he was just not qualified to be in the school. It was primer stuff for Dwight. Basically, he could not hack the program. All of the staff tutored him and tried like mad. It was a shame."

"Dwight said we were picking on him. There was none of that. He wasn't aware of everything that went on in the school. In fact, the guys on the staff busted their butts to try to get him through the course, and it just didn't work."

Of course Yeager's own status and success are clearly the result of his overprivileged, elite-white-country-clubber background...

Thanks. You are right, Wolfe says that the Kennedy Administration applied political pressure for Ed Dwight to be admitted into the space program, but he never became an astronaut. Wolfe also writes this with respect to the Dwight case, which has some relevance to the discussion: "The whole thing was baffling. On the upper reaches of the great ziggarut the subject of race had never been introduced before. The unspoken premise was that you either had the right stuff or you didn't, and no other variable mattered."