Although NASA Pilot Victor  Glover is on target to be the first Black man on the moon, Air Force Col. Guion Bluford Jr. was the first African American to fly in space. On Aug. 30, 1983, the Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off from Kennedy Space Center,  Fla., with Bluford aboard that mission, said Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III in a speech at the Black Engineer of the Year Awards STEM Conference earlier this year in National Harbor, Maryland. 

Bluford became a NASA astronaut in August 1979. His technical assignments included working with space station operations, the remote manipulator system, Spacelab systems and experiments, space shuttle systems, payload safety issues, and verifying flight software in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory and the Flight Systems Laboratory. A veteran of four space flights, he was a mission specialist on Space Transport System-8, STS 61-A, STS-39 and STS-53. Bluford logged a total of 688 hours in space. He retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1993 and left NASA the same year. A few years after his historic 1983 mission, Bluford was named Black Engineer of the Year.