Dr. Bernard Harris Jr. grew up in Texas as NASA was developing and always had an interest in science — but once he watched man land on the moon, even at 13, he began to have astronaut dreams.
“I knew what I wanted to do,” he tells PEOPLE. “I wanted to follow the footsteps of these great men, human beings, that had done something for the very first time in human history.”
That’s exactly what he did.
Now Harris — who became the first Black person to perform a spacewalk and recently released his second book, Embracing Infinite Possibilities — will be inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on Saturday, May 31.