DR BERNARD HARRIS JR. - “WE STILL NEED TO HAVE MORE DIVERSITY IN THE ASTRONAUT CORPS”

A veteran astronaut now serving as a flag bearer for STEM education, Dr Bernard Harris Jr. speaks to All About Space about his time as a Space Shuttle astronaut, coloured representation in the current astronaut corps and whether he’d still like to go to the Moon

- Lee Cavendish

BIO

Dr Bernard Harris Jr.

Harris is a veteran astronaut, logging over 438 hours in space in two Space Shuttle missions: STS-55 and STS-63, serving as a mission specialist and payload commander, respectively. During STS-63, Harris became the first African-American to perform a spacewalk. Having left NASA in 1996, Harris is now Chief Executive Officer at National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI).

What inspired you to become an astronaut?

The main inspiration was when we landed on the Moon in 1969, and I watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take the first steps on the Moon. I was excited about following in their footsteps. I was 13 years old at the time. And so I got a chance to see that and be inspired, even though I was looking at it on black-and-white television because that’s all we had back in that day.

And turning that dream into a reality, was that an extremely difficult journey?

Yeah, a journey to become an astronaut is not an easy one. And I’m smiling as I’m saying that. It’s so easy to see something that you like and that you want to do and have a dream of maybe one day doing that. It’s a different story in making that dream a reality. And with that said, you can never accomplish anything without having a dream, or goal, of doing it, and so that goal led me to do a little research on what it took to be an astronaut.