Exactly twenty years after Gagarin's flight, NASA launched its first Space Shuttle, Columbia, on a two-day test mission. Commander John Young and pilot Robert Crippen proved that a winged orbiter could launch on rockets, function in orbit, and glide back to a runway landing, ushering in three decades of reusable spacecraft missions.
STS-1 was an audacious gamble: unlike every prior American crewed spacecraft, Columbia flew its first mission with astronauts aboard rather than testing the vehicle unmanned first. Engineers had never before asked a spacecraft's thermal protection system to survive reentry after already surviving launch, since the shuttle reused the same tiles repeatedly.
During the two-day flight, cameras spotted missing heat-shield tiles on the OMS pods, prompting quiet fears at Mission Control that Columbia might burn up on reentry like a much later disaster would prove possible. Crippen and Young were not told the full extent of the concern until after they landed safely at Edwards Air Force Base on April 14.
The date was no accident to space enthusiasts: it fell exactly two decades after Gagarin's Vostok 1 flight, a coincidence NASA embraced as a symbolic passing of the torch in human spaceflight, even as the Cold War rivalry that began it continued unabated.
Key people: John Young, Robert Crippen