By Don Valentine
Dr. Harris stepped out of the space shuttle Discovery in orbit on February 9, 1995, shattering expectations for the brothers of Kappa Alpha Psi. This auspicious landmark for Black America had been a goal for Dr. Ben since he was a kid. He told the Houston Chronicle, “I also remember, I think it was in the beginning of high school, writing a letter to NASA and saying, ‘I would like to be an astronaut, what do I need to do?’ And so they sent back this list of requirements. One of them was to have an advanced degree in a STEM field. So I started looking at careers that could lead me to NASA. One of those was aerospace engineering, and the other one was medicine. And the medicine stuck.” He pushed past exhaustion and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the University of Houston and a doctorate in medicine from Texas Tech. Dr. Ben completed his residency at the Mayo Clinic in 1985 and was rewarded with training as a flight surgeon at the Aerospace School of Medicine.
He revealed what it was like up there in an interview with Space Magazine: “I flew on two missions, the first one being Columbia and the second Discovery. My first mission lasted about two weeks, and my second one was nine days. … [In the space shuttle,] we’re able to go from zero to 17,500 miles per hour and reach an initial altitude of around 200 miles in about eight and a half minutes. So it’s a very exciting ride. You’re pushed back in your seat to three and a half times your weight, and you go from that to zero gravity in just a split second when the main engines cut off. Then you know you’re in orbit.” Dr. Ben’s captivating explanation continued, “… I could look inside and see my fellow crew members as we all went around the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour. That allows us to orbit every 90 minutes and see a sunset or sunrise every 45 minutes. So it’s pretty awesome.”
The enormity for our people was not lost: “It’s about breaking the ceiling; it’s about providing a different perspective so that when people think about spaceflight, they just don’t think about White guys going into space or White guys doing a spacewalk. They can see people of color and women as equal participants in the next frontier, which is spaceflight. And I felt very proud to be part of that moment.
Black Press: Telling the Stories Mainstream Media Ignores.
