Space Shuttle Columbia STS-1 (1981): The First Shuttle Flight

STS-1 was the first flight of the Space Shuttle, NASA’s partly reusable spacecraft. On 12 April 1981 the orbiter Columbia lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen, circled Earth 37 times and glided to a landing in California two days later. The flight proved that a winged spacecraft could launch like a rocket and land like an aeroplane, and it began a programme that dominated American human spaceflight for 30 years.

Background: a reusable spaceship

By the late 1960s NASA was looking beyond the Apollo Moon landings. Planners wanted a vehicle that could be flown again and again, carrying satellites, laboratories and crews to orbit far more cheaply than throwaway rockets. On 5 January 1972 President Richard Nixon approved the development of the Space Shuttle.

The final design had three main parts. The orbiter, a delta-winged craft about the size of a mid-sized airliner, carried the crew, a large cargo bay and three main engines. A huge external tank supplied liquid hydrogen and oxygen to those engines and was discarded on each flight. Two solid rocket boosters provided most of the thrust at lift-off and were recovered from the ocean for reuse.

The Shuttle’s shape was strongly influenced by the US Air Force, which agreed to use it for military satellites. The Air Force wanted a cargo bay about 18 metres (60 feet) long and 4.6 metres (15 feet) wide, and the ability to manoeuvre more than 1,000 nautical miles to either side of its orbital path during re-entry. These demands led to the large orbiter and its broad delta wing.

The orbiter’s three main engines, burning liquid hydrogen and oxygen, were the first large rocket engines designed to be reused on many flights. Their development was difficult, and several test-stand failures and fires in the late 1970s added to the delays.

To survive the heat of re-entry, the orbiter was covered with more than 30,000 silica tiles and other insulation. The tiles proved difficult to attach, and their problems were one of several reasons the first flight slipped by about two years. In 1977 a test orbiter, Enterprise, made a series of approach and landing tests after being released from the back of a Boeing 747.

The crew

The commander, John Young, was the most experienced astronaut in NASA. He had flown on Gemini 3 and Gemini 10, orbited the Moon on Apollo 10 and walked on its surface during Apollo 16 in 1972. STS-1 was his fifth spaceflight.

The pilot, Robert Crippen, was a former US Navy aviator who had joined NASA in 1969 from a cancelled military space station programme. STS-1 was his first flight into space. For the first four Shuttle test flights the orbiter carried ejection seats for its two-person crew, though they could be used only in a narrow part of the ascent and landing.

The flight

A first launch attempt on 10 April 1981 was halted because the Shuttle’s main and backup flight computers could not synchronise. Two days later, at 7:00 a.m. Eastern time on 12 April, Columbia lifted off from Launch Complex 39A. By coincidence, the date was exactly 20 years after Yuri Gagarin’s first human spaceflight.

No American crew had ever ridden a new rocket without first testing it uncrewed, and no crewed vehicle had used solid rocket boosters, which cannot be shut down once lit. The ascent went largely as planned. The boosters separated about two minutes into the flight, and the external tank was released just before the orbiter reached orbit.

Once in space, the crew opened the cargo bay doors, which also served as radiators to shed heat. Television pictures showed that several heat-protection tiles were missing from the engine pods at the rear. Engineers judged that these areas were not critical for re-entry.

Columbia carried no satellite or scientific payload. Instead its cargo bay held a package of development flight instrumentation, which recorded temperatures, pressures and stresses throughout the flight so engineers could compare the real vehicle with their predictions. During the mission Young and Crippen tested the orbiter’s manoeuvring engines, computers and systems. They spent about 54 hours in space and completed 37 orbits.

Landing

On 14 April Columbia fired its engines to leave orbit and re-entered the atmosphere at about 25 times the speed of sound, protected by its tiles. With no engines for the landing, the orbiter glided like an unpowered aircraft. Young brought Columbia down on a runway on the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in California, watched by a large crowd.

The landing was smooth, and the flight was hailed as a success. After the landing Columbia was carried back to Florida on top of a modified Boeing 747, the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, to be prepared for its second flight, STS-2, which took place in November 1981. It was the first time a crewed orbital spacecraft had been flown into space a second time. Inspections found that a pressure wave from the booster ignition had been stronger than predicted and had caused some damage near the nose, leading to changes in the launch pad’s water sound-suppression system.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1972, 5 January: President Nixon approves the Space Shuttle programme.
• 1977, August–October: The test orbiter Enterprise makes free-flight approach and landing tests.
• 1979, March: Columbia is delivered to the Kennedy Space Center, where tile work continues for many months.
• 1981, 10 April: The first launch attempt is scrubbed because of a computer timing problem.
• 1981, 12 April: Columbia lifts off on STS-1 with John Young and Robert Crippen.
• 1981, 14 April: Columbia lands at Edwards Air Force Base after 37 orbits.
• 1982, November: STS-5 becomes the first operational Shuttle mission, deploying commercial satellites.
• 2011, 21 July: Atlantis lands at the end of STS-135, the final Shuttle mission.

The programme it launched

STS-1 was followed by three more test flights, and in November 1982 STS-5 began regular operations. Over 30 years five orbiters, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, flew 135 missions. They launched satellites and planetary probes, carried the Spacelab laboratory, deployed and repaired the Hubble Space Telescope, docked with the Russian Mir station and assembled much of the International Space Station.

The Shuttle never achieved the low costs and rapid turnaround its planners had promised, and it suffered two disasters. The Challenger broke apart shortly after launch in January 1986, and Columbia, the orbiter of STS-1, was destroyed during re-entry in February 2003. Each accident killed seven astronauts. The programme ended in 2011.

Before its loss, Columbia flew 28 missions, including the first Spacelab laboratory flight in 1983 and a Hubble servicing mission in 2002. John Young commanded that 1983 Spacelab flight, his sixth and last trip into space. Robert Crippen went on to command three more Shuttle missions in 1983 and 1984 and later directed the Kennedy Space Center.

Why it matters

STS-1 showed that a reusable, winged spacecraft could carry people to orbit and back. It ended a six-year gap in American human spaceflight that had followed the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975, and the programme it opened shaped space exploration for three decades.