Edward Joseph Dwight Jr. (born September 9, 1933) is an American sculptor, author, retired test pilot, and astronaut.

In 1961, at the direction of President John F. Kennedy, Dwight became the first African American to enter the Air Force training program from which NASA selected astronauts.

[1] Although he completed training at the Aerospace Research Pilot School in 1963[1] and advanced to the second round of the program, he was controversially not selected for the Astronaut Corps.

[2][3] Dwight eventually traveled into space as part of the Blue Origin NS-25 mission in 2024, becoming the oldest person to ever participate in a spaceflight, a record previously held by William Shatner.

While delivering newspapers, he saw Air Force pilot Dayton Ragland, a Black man from Kansas City, on the front page of The Call.

[15] He completed his airman and cadet pre-flight training at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas.

[17] In 1961, Chuck Yeager was running the Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS), a U.S. Air Force program that had sent some of its graduates into the NASA Astronaut Corps.

However, in Dwight's telling, this meeting happened in 1959, when Whitney Young was an unknown college administrator and Kennedy was a senator from Massachusetts.

[15] Soon after he completed the "Black Frontier in the American West" exhibit, Dwight created a series of more than seventy bronze sculptures at the St. Louis Arch Museum at the request of the National Park Service.

In 2024, Dwight was selected for a suborbital spaceflight mission and flew on Blue Origin's New Shepard NS-25, sponsored by Space For Humanity on May 19, 2024.

[4] The others members of the crew were Mason Angel, Sylvain Chiron, Carol Schaller, Kenneth Hess and Thotakura Gopichand.

[29] Victor J. Glover, former NASA administrator Charles Bolden, Leland D. Melvin, Bernard A. Harris Jr. and Livingston L. Holder Jr. attended the launch.

[35] In 1997, he was the lead sculptor on the statue of the Madonna and Child for the Our Mother of Africa Chapel, a structure devoted to African-American Catholics in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest church in North America.