American engineer and Professor of Engineering at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 1963, he became part of the first cohort of African American engineers to work at NASA in the Deep South, working on the Apollo 11 mission that sent the first man to the Moon.
Watson was raised in St. Joseph, Louisiana where he grew up picking cotton, as had his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. He recalled that as a youngster, he liked to take things apart and put them back together, a prelude to his future career in engineering. As a teenager, he worked in a hardware store where his boss took an interest in his report card and noticed he had a talent for mathematics and science. His boss told him that he would make a good engineer someday. While Watson didn’t know what an engineer did, he followed his curiosity to the public library and started reading about engineering. Around this time, he also developed an interest in space. He pursued these interests in college, majoring in engineering at Southern University, a historically black university in Baton Rouge.
Watson began his career at NASA working in the Quality Assurance Laboratory, testing various components of the space capsule — wires, screws, and hoses, simulating how they would react in outer space to ensure they would retain their integrity during a space flight. He took advantage of training opportunities at MSFC in order to better understand the inner workings of engines and, with that new expertise, he began working in a propulsion lab to test the Saturn IB rocket. There, he also worked on developing the heat shield for the rocket, which keeps it from absorbing excessive heat and prevents it from exploding. In 1966, he moved to New Orleans to work at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility. There, he worked on the thermodynamics of the Saturn V rocket, which would later power Apollo 11 to the Moon. He later continued work on the rocket moving to Huntington Beach, California.
In 1968, Watson returned to Louisiana and began working as a professor at Southern University, teaching thermodynamics at the university.[9] He also founded the company Minority Engineers of Louisiana, the first Black-run engineering consulting company in the Deep South. At Southern University’s Founders’ Day ceremonies in 2016, Watson was awarded the President’s Medal of Honor. In July 2019, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, he expressed pride in his work and gratitude for the opportunity he was given to create a legacy. He thanked his alma mater, Southern University, for helping him become a “bridge over troubled water” for their black students.
“We felt that the whole image of Black people was riding on us as professionals and we could not fail.”
Morgan m. Watson
