Chapter 5 Col. Guion Bluford 1991 Black Engineer of the Year Guion Bluford was educated at Philadelphia’s Overbrook High School—alma mater of basketball great Wilt Chamberlain—and Bluford’s 1960 class also included the future NBA All-Star and coach Walt Hazzard, who headed for stardom at UCLA while Bluford went on to study aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University. John F. Kennedy was running for president of the United States, promising a “New Frontier” in the fight to extend American democracy, and inspiring young people everywhere to dedicate themselves to public service with the line, “ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Demonstrating its arrival as a power with global reach, the U.S.S.R. sent Sputnik I blasting into orbit in 1957 while Bluford was in high school, besting efforts by U.S. agencies to send up the first artificial satellite and frightening many Americans. In 1958, the United States answered with a Jupiter-Redstone missile, blasting into space to install Explorer I into low Earth orbit, demonstrating that the Soviets were not the only ones who could send brawny rockets around the world. Kennedy, now president, declared in a speech that Americans would be first to reach the moon, ramping up the priority of aerospace advances. The space race was on, and many in Bluford’s generation harbored fears that competition in building and testing big missiles would end in a nuclear holocaust. Defense budgets soared, and NASA grew into a giant agency with its own billion-dollar budget priorities and installations around the world. Bluford, an Air Force ROTC candidate and future rocket scientist, was in college preparing to become a warrior. In 1964, Bluford finished at Penn State as a distinguished ROTC graduate and began his active service with flight training at
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