Golden Torch Legacy Award
Col. Frederick D. Gregory
United States Air Force (Ret.)
Sitting in the pilot’s seat of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1985, Col. Frederick D. Gregory continued his high-flying career. The engineer, Air Force Academy graduate and Vietnam War veteran was beginning a seven-day mission to take experiments to the Spacelab and release a small communications satellite.
Col. Gregory was a long way from the segregated D.C. school system of his youth and the dreams of his father, who had died in 1977, a year before Gregory was accepted into the astronaut program.
“Francis Anderson Gregory was an amazing person,” Col. Gregory muses. “He was a graduate of Case Institute in Cleveland with a bachelor’s in electrical engineering, and then went to MIT for a master’s. But Negroes were not able to get jobs in those areas back then.”
His father gave Gregory many experiences, including air shows and other activities at the Air Force base near their home in Washington, D.C. Gregory graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1964, took a year of helicopter training and flew combat missions in Vietnam. He then was trained as a fighter pilot before going to the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School in 1970. Four years later, he became a research test pilot for NASA at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., which led to his entry into the astronaut corps in 1978.
After the Spacelab mission, Col. Gregory was named commander of two others — the first in 1989 and the second in 1991 — requiring nighttime launches from the Kennedy Space Center. When his last flight was completed, Col. Gregory had logged 455 hours in space. After his space flights, he served at NASA Headquarters in a variety of executive jobs before retiring from the position of deputy administrator in 2005.
Roger Witherspoon is a journalist and author based in New York.