‘The Space Race’ Review: Why Was NASA So White? – The New York Times

The story of mans foray into space is a thrilling one, encompassing war, technological innovation and the power of imagination. The story of the Black mans foray into space the subject of the documentary The Space Race comprises a different set of milestones. For African Americans who dreamed of traveling beyond the earths atmosphere, the barriers werent just physical or scientific, but also social and political.

Directed by Lisa Cortes and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, The Space Race offers an alternative history of American space travel through interviews with pioneering figures including Ed Dwight, an Air Force captain who was the first Black trainee at the Aerospace Research Pilot School; and Guy Bluford, who became the first African American to go to space almost two decades later, in 1983.

But the films most fascinating revelation is that the Soviets beat the Americans in sending a Black person to space in 1980 with Arnaldo Tamayo Mndez, a Cuban pilot an achievement that never got its due during the Cold War.

This fact, mentioned only cursorily, reinforces the limitations of the movie (which also, it should be noted, features hardly any stories of Black women). A theme running through the interviews is that for the U.S. government, sending a Black astronaut to space was more a matter of propaganda than racial justice. Cortes and de Mendoza capture these contradictions through archival footage of Civil Rights leaders excoriating the nation for spending millions on space travel while poverty decimated communities on the ground.

But for the most part, The Space Race doesnt quite interrogate these tokenizing narratives, leaving the central question unaddressed: Can the glorified achievements of a few result in change for the many?

The Space Race Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Disney+ and Hulu.

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'The Space Race' Review: Why Was NASA So White? - The New York Times