Black Faith Leaders in Georgia Speak Out Against Herschel Walker Jr.
The first black to fly in the space race and receive an astronaut wings, he became the most successful American in the history of space.
The first black to fly in the space race and receive an astronaut wings, he became the most successful American in the history of space.
But that is not the beginning of the story.
Before he won the first and only of his kind, the space race was very much in play. And while he went on to become the first black man to take up the space and time to get into space, and the first one to get into space on his own, his story is still considered to be the most important.
It all began at the Cape of Good Hope in Africa when Herschel Walker Jr. and his team were testing the engines of the Apollo 11 space capsule that would put him and his fellow crew members in space.
“We were test driving the engine, and we were actually getting hit by debris,” Walker told TIME. “And we could hear the engines being hit, and we looked through the windows and saw everything being hit, and we watched the debris and the sparks get bigger and bigger and bigger. And all of the sudden this bright light came up in front of the window, and then it disappeared.”
Walker tells the real-life story with a bit of fiction as told in the 1979 book, “Destination Moon” by David Macaulay, where the astronauts find themselves on a small world with two moons and a tiny atmosphere.
Macaulay even makes the astronaut liken the surface of the Earth to a moon. The astronauts, however, say they are on another planet as they find that Earth is nothing more than a satellite orbit around the moon.
In reality, Walker and his crew flew around the moon and its moons without incident. They had no way of making it out of orbit and into the sun, and in the end, Walker and his crew came back to Earth safely.
“We didn’t run into any bad guys,” he said. “We didn’t encounter any bad guys.”
The Apollo program inspired so much of what Walker and his crew did, and his story serves as a reminder that
