Ronald Mcnair 1950-1986

With the odds of race and circumstance stacked against him, Ronald McNair attended segregated schools in Lake City, S.C. (current pop. 5,636), and itched to explore a world beyond and above his own. Irene Jones, his first- grade teacher, remembered him as a bright loner who, on the playground, would "lie flat on his back, stare up at the sky and just smile." That was Sputnik time, when America was racing to catch up to the Soviets. Later it would rely on the help of seven crew-cut white pilots, extraordinary role models for a rural Southern black youth who picked tobacco to earn pocket money. In 1984 McNair became the second black man in space (after Guion Bluford in 1983), flawlessly launching a $75 million communications satellite from Challenger's cargo bay and lightening the mood by wearing a black beret and dark glasses and holding a movie clapper board. His name badge read CECIL B. MCNAIR.

Jesse Jackson, a classmate at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University at Greensboro, said McNair saw participation in the space program as "the highest way he could contribute to the system that gave him so much." But McNair did not win an honored place in that system without a struggle. In a 1984 speech to students at the University of South Carolina, he recalled feeling discouraged as a college freshman until a guidance counselor urged him to pursue physics "because I think you're good enough." Fortified by those words, McNair went on to earn honors galore. Among them: being named a Presidential Scholar and Ford Foundation Fellow, and a doctorate in physics from M.I.T., where he helped develop specialized lasers. Along the way he acquired impressive skills as a saxophonist and fifth-degree black-belt karate instructor.

McNair was working at Hughes Research Laboratories in California in 1977 when he heard that NASA was looking for a few good scientists. "I figured if they were sincere about the qualifications," he said, "I had a good chance at it." They were sincere, he had the qualifications, and in 1978 he joined the space program. "The true courage of space flight," he told students, * "is not sitting aboard 6 million lbs. of fire and thunder as one rockets away from this planet. True courage comes in enduring . . . persevering, the preparation and believing in oneself."

Even on his first Challenger flight, McNair did not forget his roots; he joked with Lake City residents about looking for his hometown from space. When a stranger asked where he was from, he would answer simply, "Lake City." McNair spoke often about returning to his home state. "As excited as Ron was about the space program," said J.D. Waugh, dean of U.S.C.'s college of engineering, "he felt it was time to put that part of his life behind him. He had two kids, and he wanted to think about what was best for them." McNair leaves behind him those two children and millions more who know what stars he was reaching for, what price he was willing to pay.