Anxiety, awe of first shuttle flight recalled

By Tariq Malik

updated 4:20 p.m. ET April 10, 2006

Twenty-five years ago this week, NASA launched two astronauts into orbit aboard the first flight of the Columbia space shuttle.

But on April 12, 1981 when Columbia first left Earth, those two test pilots — STS-1 commander John Young and pilot Robert Crippen — carried with them the hopes of thousands of engineers, designers, flight controllers and spaceflight supporters eager for a new U.S. crewed spacecraft.

“There were literally tens of thousands of people that were involved,” said Crippen as he looked back on STS-1’s morning launch, which marked his first spaceflight. “John and I just got to do the best part.”

Young and Crippen spent 54.5 hours orbiting Earth to test what became NASA’s longest-running manned spacecraft and the world’s first reusable, winged rocketship. And while space shuttle system has never managed to reach its goals of quick turnaround and lower-cost launches, the spacecraft also represented a major departure from NASA’s capsule-based manned spacecraft.

“It was a totally different machine from what we were flying before,” said Young, who flew aboard NASA’s Gemini and Apollo vehicles before STS-1, in an interview. “We had about 23 guys in the Astronaut Office and they would have all killed to be on that first flight.”

Since Columbia’s STS-1 flight, NASA has launched 113 space shuttle missions with its orbiter fleet filled out by the Challenger, Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour vehicles. NASA honored its STS-1 astronauts by renaming the launch firing room used for their flight the Young Crippen Firing Room on Thursday.

Slide show NASA's highs and lows 45 years of achievements and tragedies in America's human spaceflight effort. more photos

Those missions were not all successful. In January 1986, the Challenger orbiter and its seven-astronaut crew were lost just after launch due to a faulty solid rocket booster that led to the shuttle’s destruction. Columbia and its STS-107 crew were later lost during reentry in 2003.

“It’s still a risky business,” Young said. “The shuttle has a proven one in 57 failure rate.”

Building Columbia
During the 1970s, NASA tapped Rockwell International – now part of Boeing – as primary contractor for the orbiter system, where engineers worked feverishly to ready the spacecraft for flight.

“It was an extremely busy time,” said Dwight Woolhouse, Boeing’s associate program director for orbiter development, who served as aerosurfaces subsystem manager for Columbia’s first flight. “Even up to a couple of months before that first flight we were still immersed in hardware tests. And yet, everybody really had this attitude that we were going to find a way to make this work.”

Columbia was heavier than its younger shuttle brethren, each of which weigh about 100 tons, by about 5,000 pounds (2,267 kilograms) since designers had yet to learn where other weight savings could be made, its builders said.

The push to use the spacecraft not only to launch astronauts and large satellites or other cargo in its school bus-sized payload bay, as well as the thousands of ceramic tiles that protected the orbiter from the intense heat of reentry, led to an increasing complexity that not only required everything to work properly for a safe flight, but also lengthened shuttle turnaround for future missions.

“There’s something like 43 independent major subsystems that must work perfectly for a flight,” said Bo Bejmuk, Boeing’s current orbiter program director who watched Columbia launch on its STS-1 mission as a freshly-appointed system integration manager. “I was a much younger guy then. And you sit there and you see the countdown and you see John Young’s face during the traditional [pre-launch] breakfast and you say ‘My God, I hope we were exactly right.’”

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