April 12, 1981

STS-1

Columbia launches on STS-1, the first Space Shuttle mission

The Shuttle's first trip into orbit was also the first flight of the complete assembled spacecraft — and Young and Crippen were already aboard.

7:00:03 a.m. EST, 12 April 1981

Columbia lifted off from Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center at 7:00:03 a.m. EST on 12 April 1981, with commander John Young and pilot Robert Crippen aboard and about 6.8 million pounds of thrust beneath them.

The launch began the first orbital flight test of the complete Space Transportation System: orbiter, external tank and two solid rocket boosters. Crippen remembered roughly the first two minutes as exceptionally noisy and shaky while the solid boosters burned.

Orbit, and a look at the tiles

After booster and external-tank separation, two Orbital Maneuvering System burns placed Columbia in an approximately 150-mile circular orbit.

The crew opened the payload-bay doors, checked the spacecraft's major systems and observed missing thermal-protection tiles on the orbital-maneuvering pods. Postflight inspection found 16 tiles lost and another 148 damaged.

Crewed on its very first flight

STS-1 was the first flight of a new crewed American spacecraft conducted without a preceding uncrewed flight of that spacecraft design. NASA launched only after engineers corrected the computer-timing problem that had scrubbed the first attempt on 10 April.

That scrub is why the flight fell exactly twenty years after Yuri Gagarin's, a coincidence rather than the original schedule. The mission ran 2 days, 6 hours, 20 minutes and 53 seconds across 37 recorded revolutions, ending with a runway landing at Edwards Air Force Base on 14 April.

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