STS-1 was the mission that turned science fiction into reality — the first flight of a reusable spacecraft, and the only crewed maiden voyage of a new vehicle in NASA history. No uncrewed orbital test was ever conducted. On April 12, 1981, exactly twenty years after Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight, Space Shuttle Columbia roared off Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, carried aloft by twin solid rocket boosters and three main engines fed by the massive external tank.

Commander John Young, the most experienced astronaut in NASA history with flights on Gemini 3, Gemini 10, Apollo 10, and Apollo 16 (where he walked on the Moon), was paired with rookie Pilot Robert Crippen. Together they became the smallest crew ever to fly on the Shuttle — just two people in a vehicle designed for seven. The launch was watched by an estimated 2,500 reporters and hundreds of thousands of spectators lining the Florida coast.

Columbia orbited Earth 37 times over two days at roughly 150 miles altitude, while Young and Crippen methodically tested the orbiter’s systems: the orbital maneuvering engines, the payload bay doors, the thermal protection system, and the flight controls. The crew discovered that 16 heat shield tiles had been lost during ascent and another 148 were damaged — a sobering finding that would haunt the Shuttle program for decades. Despite this, the thermal protection system performed well enough to protect Columbia during the fiery re-entry.

On April 14, Columbia glided unpowered to a perfect landing on the dry lakebed of Runway 23 at Edwards Air Force Base, California. The landing was the first time a spacecraft had returned from orbit to land on a runway like an airplane. The mission proved that the Space Shuttle concept worked — a reusable spacecraft that could launch like a rocket and land like a glider. Columbia would go on to fly 27 more missions before its tragic loss during STS-107 in 2003.