Hi, this is Dave Isay founder of Storycore.

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It's the Storycore podcast from NPR.

I'm Camille Kishani.

In this episode, we're headed to Outer Space.

Lots of kids look about the sky and imagine what it might be like to travel beyond Earth's atmosphere.

And we'll hear about three who got a chance to find out,

either by going to space themselves or helping those who did.

We're going to start with physicist Ronald E. McNair,

the second black astronaut to enter space.

His brother Carl told a friend at Storycore that Ron always showed the courage he would need for a voyage like that,

starting with when he was a young boy growing up in South Carolina.

When he was nine years old, Ron,

without my parents or myself knowing his whereabouts,

he decided to take a mile walk from our home down to the library,

which was of course public library, but not so public for black folks.

When you're talking about 1959.

So as he was walking in there,

...