ONE GIANT LEAP OF FAITH

TWO HUNDRED-THIRTEEN NAUTICAL MILES ABOVE THE EARTH, BERNARD HARRIS JR. HAD AN UNOBSTRUCTED CELESTIAL VIEW AS HE FLOATED OUT OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE DISCOVERY HATCH AND INTO HISTORY.

But his noticeable pause “for a little bit,” as he recalled, prompted NASA’s Mission Control to ask, “Why are you doing that?”

Harris was marveling at his surroundings, as space shuttle Discovery orbited at a dizzying 17,000 miles an hour, circling Earth once every 90 minutes. He gathered himself and quickly responded, “Oh, nothing.”

But the unfolding event was very much something. Mission STS-63, which launched Feb. 3, 1995, broke ground in many ways. It marked the first rendezvous of the American space shuttle with Russia’s space station Mir. Also on board, Eileen Collins, an American, became the first woman to pilot a space shuttle, and C. Michael Foale became the first British-born American astronaut to walk in space. And for payload commander Harris, who was on his second and final NASA mission, it was the improbable realization of a childhood dream, as he became the first African American to walk in space on Feb. 9, 1995.

“The little boy who was forced to use the back door of a [Waco] diner in the sixties because of his race had. “It was my day and I was flying pretty high!”