Ronald McNair

Ronald Erwin McNair was born on 21 October 1950 in Lake City, South Carolina, into a family of modest means during the height of racial segregation in the American South, working in the local cotton fields as a boy to help support his household, and graduating valedictorian of his high school class.

McNair earned a bachelor's degree in physics magna cum laude from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 1971, before completing a PhD in physics at MIT in 1976 at age 26, becoming a recognised expert in laser physics while also winning the AAU Karate gold medal the same year, having earned a fifth-degree black belt.

After graduate school, McNair became a staff physicist at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California, specialising in chemical and high-pressure lasers, work that brought him into close contact with the space programme and inspired him to apply for NASA's astronaut corps.

In January 1978 McNair was selected by NASA as one of just 35 candidates from a pool of 10,000 applicants, becoming one of the first three Black Americans chosen for the astronaut programme; he flew his first mission aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in February 1984, becoming the second African American in space, logging 191 hours in orbit and operating the robotic arm during Bruce McCandless's historic untethered spacewalk.

McNair was selected for a second mission, STS-51-L, intending to become the first person to record an original piece of music in space using his saxophone; on 28 January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after launch, killing McNair and his six crewmates. He was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 2004, and numerous schools, scholarships and a NASA facility have since been named in his honour.