First Black space commander: Col. Frederick Gregory makes history with second pioneering space effort

Ebony, May, 1990 by Dalton Narine

First Black Space Commander

WHEN the space shuttle Discovery--with five crew members, including one woman, aboard--returned from space and swooped over California's Mojave Desert to a flawless landing at Edwards Air Force Base, the astronaut at the controls of the $2 billion spacecraft was 49-year-old Col. Frederick D. Gregory, the first Black to command a space shuttle mission. But hardly anyone knew.

Shrouded in secrecy, STS-33, as the five-day mission was dubbed, carried a classified military payload into space. The news embargo that prevented the press from reporting on the top-secret mission all but obscured the fact that history had been made by the Black astronaut who flew and landed Discovery, and directed the deployment of the shuttle's classified cargo.

But Gregory had indeed made history, quietly, as he has throughout his career at NASA. This "commanding" performance aboard Discovery was not his first pioneering effort in space. Gregory also was the first Black astronaut to pilot a space shuttle when, with a seven-member, all-male crew, he flew Challenger during a seven-day mission in April 1985.

Commanding the secret Discovery mission, however, caps a career that already has been filled with distinctions. In a sense, the peculiar nature of the operation was perfectly suited to the "quietly aggressive" Air Force Officer from Houston.

"He does everything to the max," says Curtis M. Graves, deputy director for civil affairs at NASA in Washington, D.C., and a friend of the colonel's. "He flies aggressively, even hunts and fishes with unusual dedication."

Ironically, flying in outer space was not the station in life to which Col. Gregory aspired. His dream was to pilot military airplanes. "Oh, he was adventuresome," says his mother, Nora Drew Gregory, whose brother, Dr. Charles Drew, was a pioneer in blood plasma research in the late 1930s. "The guiding light in his life was his father, who was an educator."

It was from his father, Francis A. Gregory, now deceased, that Col. Gregory inherited a precocious passion for speed. When he was 10 years old, he raced a small aluminum boat in waters off Columbia Beach near his boyhood home in Washington, D.C.

Though boating was fund, young Fred longed for wings. "I always wanted to fly," he says, "but I almost didn't achieve my dreams." Entrance into the Air Force Academy requires the sponsorship of a congressman, and Gregory's hopes of finding a congressional sponsor seemed slim. Luckily, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the late New York congressman, sponsored Gregory's admission. Years later, the class of 1964 would be remembered for producing 25 generals and a Black ast ronaut who earned his degree in military engineering.

Upon graduation, Col. Gregory opted to fly helicopters. Early in his career, he won numerous military decorations, including the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1967 for braving small arms fire while rescuing four marines from a downed chopper in Vietnam. Following his return from the war, he flew F-4 Phantoms and was an air Force test pilot for three years until 1974 when he took a temporary duty assignment as a test pilot for NASA. His "next logical step" was outer space.

He has found the space shuttle missions to be an interesting chalenge. Largely, the missions entail conducting a variety of scientific experiments, recording the results, and deploying and retrieving military and civilian payloads.

Adapting to weightless life in the shuttle was uncomfortable at the outset of the trip, the colonel says, "but we quickly adjusted." The crew got along well despite varied ethnic and religious backgrounds, ranging from Mormon to Mongolian. "[Up there] we're basically colorless," Col. Gregory says. "We all had a common goal--to learn what we could from space."

When he wasn't involved in experiments, Col. Gregory whiled away the hours listening to the music of entertainers such as James Ingram and Aretha Franklin, and musing over the orderliness of Earth and its fixture in the solar system. "Up there your views of the Supreme Being are mighty strong," he says.

When he's not trekking among the stars, Col. Gregory catches up on family life with his wife, Barbara, and their children, Lt. Frederick Gregory Jr., an Air Force aeroengineer, and heather Lynn Gregory, a social worker in San Diego. But he gets restless quickly.

"After returning from space," says Barbara Gregory, a clinical social worker in Galveston, Texas, "he finds an overall reduced level of activity. Tediousness sets in, so he spends much of his free time speaking to students and groups around the country."

And how does she keep him down-to-earth?

"Oh, I've got a long list of home projects I've been saving for him," she says with a laugh.