Robert H. Lawrence Jr. trailblazing astronaut

Created for Cities and Memory's Shortwave project, this piece starts from the real shortwave audio from the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster to tell the real story of Robert H. Lawrence Jr., a United States Air Force officer and the first African-American astronaut.

"Shortwave radio is one of the most fascinating sonic worlds – capturing vital moments in world history as well as the thrill of pirate radio, clandestine radio stations, secretive number stations, military and spy radio. All of humanity is truly out there to be listened to at the turn of a dial – and it’s been remixed and reimagined in the Shortwave Transmissions project."

Shortwave is a project by Cities and Memory citiesandmemory.com/shortwave/

The image is by artist Tavares Strachan. I Belong Here (White), 2012

Voice Romeo M. Minutolo
Production, editing & sound design M.Cristina Marras
[03/10/2021]

What is Art, in all the wrong places?

Characters who can't always be trusted. Because they often don't see the difference between sound and noise, between countryside and abandoned building, between fiction and reality.
I explore sound, speak languages and talk to strangers. This is my work.
AIR Member. www.cristinamarras.com

"Who gets to determine who belongs where?
And where is here?
And why does it matter?"

Does ‘here’ matter when you are floating, immersed in a weightless soup up in the air, between planets, where my human mind cannot possibly figure to comprehend, the scale of it all…

And yet…

And yet he was at the verge of space, my hero, who flew to the skies never to came back

[challenger audio]

No, you’ve got it all wrong, of my hero I am certain you have never heard the name, because if people of a certain age remember exactly what they were doing when they heard the news of the challenger exploding, with its cargo of human ingenuity… my hero, no one remembers.

He was a highly accomplished pilot with 2,500 flying hours, 2,000 in jets, and earned a PhD in physical chemistry from The Ohio State University in 1965, and he was only selected astronaut with a doctorate. But Robert Henry Lawrence Jr was also the first African American astronaut selected for space travel.

Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. was serving as instructor to another pilot who was practicing the steep descent glide technique, the same landing techniques that they later used in the Space Shuttle Program.

The student pilot flying the F-104 Starfighter supersonic jet at Edward Air Force base in California made an approach to land but flared too late, causing the jet to crash. The pilot of the plane ejected successfully.

By the time Robert Henry Lawrence Jr ejected the plane had rolled onto its side and was on fire.

Robert Henry Lawrence Jr was killed instantly.

And this, you see, is the saddest of ironies, that my astronaut hero, America's first Black astronaut, never left the earth.

And jet, I cannot but imagine his trailblazing figure transmuting into a cascade of colour, a million of fireworks illuminating and inhabiting liminal skies with all the dancing souls of all women, men, dogs and ape, who dispersed, pulverised and evanesced in space.