Two trailblazing NASA astronauts, the first Black astronaut to complete a spacewalk and the woman who holds the U.S. record for most time spent in space, have been inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame.
Bernard Harris, the first Black astronaut to perform a spacewalk, took center stage at the 2025 U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame induction ceremony on May 31, where he received his induction medal and unveiled the plaque that will honor him at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, Collect Space reports.
Harris’ fellow inductee, Peggy Whitson, was unable to attend the ceremony as she is currently in quarantine ahead of her upcoming fifth spaceflight. Both retired NASA astronauts are the 110th and 111th members inducted into the Hall of Fame, which has honored American space pioneers since 1990 and features a dedicated building at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
Harris, 65, was selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in 1990 and completed his first mission, STS-55, aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1993. He returned to space in 1995 on STS-63 aboard Discovery, a mission originally intended as a practice run for docking with the Russian space station Mir, but through a turn of events, led to Harris making history.
“In truth, I didn’t know I was the first African American until I got back inside and I got the call that President Clinton wanted to talk to me,” Harris told the Orlando Sentinel. “I kind of went like, ‘What for?’”
Born in Temple, Texas, in 1956, Harris credits the Apollo 11 moonwalk by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as the moment that inspired him to pursue a career as an astronaut. He was 13 at the time history was made and recalls wrestling with the events surrounding the civil rights movement.
“I was old enough to go through the early 60s, the civil rights movement,” Harris said. “I could turn one channel and see some of the greatest accomplishments of human beings at that time, and turn the channel and see Blacks fighting for their right to vote or to exist, depending on what part of the country that they were in.”
He continued. “I came to the conclusion that even though I didn’t see anybody who looked like me in the program — there were no women in the program, no people of color in the program that we could see … But I decided that if I didn’t see someone who looked like me I would be the first to try and go break that ceiling.”
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