LAWRENCE JR., ROBERT HENRY(2 October 1935–8 December 1967), United States Air Force officer and the first African American astronaut selected for any national space program.
Lawrence was born in Chicago, to Gwendolyn Duncan and Robert H. Lawrence Sr. As a child, he was a chess enthusiast and loved to build model airplanes. He attended Englewood High School, where he graduated in the top 10 percent of his class in 1952, and then studied at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where he enrolled in the Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). By the time he received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry, Lawrence had achieved distinction as Cadet Commander in the ROTC program and was commissioned as second lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve Program.
Lawrence completed his flight training at Malden Air Force Base in Missouri and was designated a US Air Force pilot at the age of twenty-one. His first assignment took him to West Germany, where he worked as a fighter pilot and instructor in the T-33 training aircraft until 1960.
In 1965 Lawrence earned a PhD in physical chemistry from Ohio State University with the dissertation “The Mechanism of Tritium Beta Ray Induced Exchange Reaction of Deuterium with Methane and Ethane in the Gas Phase.” On June 30, 1967, Lawrence was selected for the Air Force’s Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL) program, the precursor to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Space Shuttle Program. The MOL program was run by the US Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office with the aim of obtaining high-resolution imagery of America’s Cold War adversaries from mini space stations in low polar Earth orbit. Lawrence was the only selected MOL astronaut with a doctorate.
Lawrence tragically died in a plane crash on December 8, 1967, while serving as an instructor for flaring techniques for landing that were later used in the Space Shuttle program. Though both he and the pilot in training ejected from the F-104 Starfighter supersonic jet, Lawrence’s seat ejected sideways, and he was killed on impact.
The MOL program was canceled by the Nixon Administration in June 1969, and all astronauts in the program under the age of thirty-five were transferred to NASA. This group of astronauts— Karol Bobko, Robert Crippen, Gordon Fullerton, Henry Hartsfield, Robert Overmyer, Don Peterson, and Richard Truly—flew on the Space Shuttle in the 1980s. Had he survived, it is likely that Lawrence would have piloted one of the early Space Shuttle missions.
The Air Force did not officially recognize Lawrence as an astronaut atthe time of his death, and his name was not placed on the Astronauts Memorial Foundation’s Space Mirror Memorial at Kennedy Space Center at the time of its construction in 1991. This decision was predicated on the Air Force’s definition of an astronaut, which only includes those who have both completed training and flown in space, even though under NASA’s definition, Lawrence would have been considered an astronaut the moment he was accepted into the program. After pushback from his family, community members, and historians, Lawrence’s name was added to the memorial in 1997.
Endowed scholarships and lectureships named for Lawrence have been granted to minority chemistry and biochemistry students at Bradley University since 2001. In 2020 NASA commemorated Lawrence among a group of twenty-seven pioneering African American, Hispanic, and Native American astronauts by naming asteroids after them. Robertlawrence92892 is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Tavares Strachan dedicated his sculpture ENOCH (2018) to Lawrence. The 3U satellite launched via Spaceflights SSO-A: SmallSat Express mission from Vandenberg Airforce Base on a SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket on December 3, 2018. It circled the Earth for three years in a sun-synchronous orbit before reentering on December 21, 2021.