STS-1 (Columbia)
STS-1 — the first orbital flight of the Space Shuttle (April 1981). John Young and Robert Crippen flew Columbia on the maiden test of a crewed spacecraft that had never flown uncrewed first.
Key facts
Mission & specifications
Mission
- Operator
- NASA
- Launched
- April 12, 1981
- Status
- Completed
Trajectory
- Distance from the Sun
- 1.01 AU
- Distance from Earth
- 387,570 km
- Distance from Venus
- 0.646 AU
Mission
STS-1 was one of the boldest test flights in history. On 12 April 1981 — twenty years to the day after Gagarin's first spaceflight — John Young and Robert Crippen rode the Space Shuttle Columbia into orbit on its very first launch. No spacecraft had ever carried a crew on its maiden flight before: the Shuttle was so complex that there was no way to test it fully uncrewed, so two astronauts flew the first one. Young, a veteran of Gemini and Apollo who had walked on the Moon, commanded; Crippen, on his first flight, was the pilot. Over two days they checked out the new vehicle and proved it could reach orbit, work in space, and — the hardest part — survive the fiery re-entry behind its thermal tiles and land like a glider on a dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base. The flight was not flawless: the overpressure of liftoff damaged the orbiter and several heat-shield tiles were lost, a quiet foreshadowing of the fragility that would later prove deadly. But STS-1 worked, and it opened the Shuttle era — thirty years of flights from the same launch pads that had sent Apollo to the Moon.
- 1981Columbia launchesLaunch
Young and Crippen ride the first Shuttle to orbit — a crewed maiden flight.
- 1981First crewed maiden flightMilestone
No spacecraft had ever carried a crew on its first launch; the Shuttle was too complex to test fully uncrewed.
- 1981Glider landing at EdwardsMission end
Columbia re-enters and lands on a dry lakebed, proving the reusable orbiter works.
Images
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