Flightdeck Friday Special Edition: The Space Shuttle – Thirty Years of Dreams, Sweat and Tears

The dream was given form and fire on April 12, 1981 with the launch of STS-1, the world’s first reusable spaceplane — the Shuttle Columbia. At the controls were a crew of only two, Astronauts John W. Young, commander for the mission, and Robert Crippen (both Naval Aviators) for this first “test flight” which would last 54 hours and recover at Edwards AFB in a powerless glide. Thirty years later we are on the eve of one of two remaining flights for the shuttle fleet. Waiting in the wings, still under development is an evolutionary outgrowth of the Apollo program – a conical spacecraft launched on a partially expendable booster to carry astronauts to the ISS and return via a water landing. An underwhelming development — back to the future, as it were. The intervening years have seen extraordinary triumph and unyielding pain as the human experience was painted across the cosmos. American ingenuity and enterprise given form and function. Born of a merger of the idealism of space exploration and hard realities of the Cold War, the Shuttle was supposed to take the extraordinary efforts of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs and turn it into a regular occurrence.

And it almost did – twice.

Each time though, we were reminded again of the terrible toll exacted when boundaries are pushed and knowledge expanded; while a system’s fundamental flaws were revealed, forcing an endgame determination. Still, along the way a semi-permanent habitat was built in low Earth orbit, satellites launched to look deep into space and give us new perspectives on Earth and scientific and industrial experiments performed.

But in 1981, that all lay in the future and now – now the Dream is given fire and form: