It’s been forty years since NASA’s first spacecraft hovered in orbit and the space agency unveiled a new video to commemorate the debut flight, which opened access to space in a way never seen before .
NASA’s first spacecraft mission, STS-1 aboard the Columbia Orbit, took off on April 12, 1981 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center near Orlando. To get there, the flight had to overcome numerous budget, timeline and design challenges to get there. . Americans who attended the launch in Florida near Orlando jumped up and down and cheered, the new NASA video shows on YouTube.
Archive material shows how the crew started to space. In addition to a few lost heat shield tiles along the way, the flight went well and allowed the crew to return to normal after a two-day test flight, on 14 April. to, and get off as we please, ”crew member Bob Crippen told a news conference around that time.
In photos: NASA’s first spacecraft flight, STS-1 to Columbia
STS-1 was the first launch from U.S. soil since the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz test project; Americans were happy to see astronauts leave Florida again, in the same way that the debut of the commercial crew program in 2020 did after a nine-year drought from the United States. (The last launch of the shuttle was in 2011, although astronauts did fly between the Russian Soyuz spacecraft from Kazakhstan between the years.)
The shuttle program was unique in that it allowed astronauts to land on a runway, the NASA video shows, unlike any other human program before it. The program was more expensive to launch people than hoped for, but its performance was remarkable – launching famous observatories such as Hubble and Chandra, and assisting in the construction of the International Space Station.
The video shows some tips from the different types of astronauts who brought the shuttle into orbit. Sally Ride – is briefly shown in the video – was the first American woman in space in 1984 and was also revealed after her death as the first known LGBTQ + astronaut.
Related: Casio’s digital watch is 40 years old since the first spacecraft launch
Other examples of cultural milestones allowed include the first African-American (Guion Bluford), the first Asian-American (Ellison Onizuka), the first spacecraft commander (Eileen Collins) and numerous international astronauts, the latter arrangement leading to intergovernmental agreements eventually formed the backbone of the ISS program. In fact, the ISS was not the first space station with which a shuttle moored; it was the Russian-Soviet space station Mir during the shuttle Mir program of the 1990s.
The video also mentions that the shuttle continues during 30 years of missions and continues to return to its mandate to bring people into space. Although the video does not specifically mention this, the operations also included two fatal accidents – Challenger in 1986 (which killed Onizuka, the first teacher in space Christa McAuliffe and five others) and the Columbia Ramp in 2003 which killed seven more astronauts. These incidents each forced the suspension of the program while NASA addressed the underlying flaws of the shuttle. However, the shuttle continued both times and completed the first phase of the ISS construction.
2021 is also the tenth anniversary of the shuttle’s retirement; the last flight was STS-135, whose landing is shown in the video on July 21, 2011 (this is the one in the dark with the contrails flowing behind the wings of the shuttle). The legacy of the shuttle is still great after a decade, with Hubble still works well thanks to the efforts of multiple astronauts to repair and upgrade crew, and Lego releases one of the iconic orbits (Discovery) as a new set just a few weeks ago – not to mention the ISS that thrives after more than 20 years of continuous human occupation.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.