Ronald Erwin McNair was a South Carolina native, published physicist, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronaut. McNair was born in 1950 in Lake City, SC. His father was an auto mechanic and his mother worked as a high school teacher.

As a child, he was obsessed with Sputnik and would talk incessantly about the Russian satellite. Upon graduating from high school, McNair attended North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, NC where he graduated magna cum laude from the physics program. In 1977, NASA invited him to apply for the space program.

Of the 10,000 applicants, McNair was 1 out of 35 chosen to become an astronaut. To honor his accomplishments, Lake City renamed a street after him. Tragically, his life was cut short in 1986 when the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded due to known preventable engineering issues.