![]() ![]() Though the fully assembled Space Shuttle sat on the pad, ready for launch, it would not happen for another four months. ![]() Crippen was a rookie astronaut whose flight aboard STS-1 would be his first of four Shuttle missions.Īfter more than a year of delays, Columbia, stacked next to its external tank and solid rocket boosters, was rolled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building on December 29, 1980, and sent to Launch Complex 39 at the Kennedy Space Center. On Apollo 16, Young was the commander and spent nearly three days on the Moon. ![]() Young was a veteran astronaut whose first of six spaceflights was during the Gemini program. In December, Commander John Young and Pilot Robert Crippen, the two astronauts slated to take Columbia on her maiden voyage, took the orbiter's controls for a series of flight computer tests on the ground. On November 24, 1980, NASA moved the Shuttle out of the Orbiter Processing Facility and into the mammoth Vehicle Assembly Building, where it was mated with an external tank and two solid rocket boosters. Progress was being made, however, with more successful equipment tests and Columbia's heat shield nearing completion by the fall of 1980. These tiles, which were designed to protect Columbia from the intense heat of reentry on multiple trips into space, were prone to cracking and fell off the Shuttle easily, and engineers raced to fix the problem.įollowing a problematic test firing of the three Space Shuttle Main Engines, NASA pushed the launch back to 1980. However, difficulties in keeping the heat-shield tiles firmly affixed to Columbia-the first spaceworthy orbiter that was not yet fully built-would push the launch date back. After being piggybacked on a modified Boeing 747, Enterprise was released in flight and glided down to a series of flawless landings.īased on the successful tests of Enterprise, program managers set to launch the first orbital mission in by the end of 1979. Rockwell International, the company awarded the contract to design and develop the Space Shuttle, had already built a full-scale aerodynamically capable orbiter that was not rated to fly in space. On January 2, 1972, Nixon officially approved the Space Shuttle program, which was publicly announced three days later.īy the spring of 1977, the Shuttle program was well under way. After President Richard Nixon founded a Space Task Group in 1969, numerous designs for reusable, winged space vehicles were considered during a phased process. In the 1960s, NASA's efforts to plan for the future yielded a number of studies on reusable spacecraft that could be launched from a rocket and then return to Earth via a pilot-controlled landing. These included the Bell X-1, which became the first aircraft to fly faster than the speed of sound, and the North American X-15, which actually reached space several times and was the fastest and highest flying piloted vehicle until the Space Shuttle went into service. Rocket pioneers Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovskiy, Robert Goddard, and Hermann Oberth all wrote about reusable space vehicles during that decade, and in a series of famous articles for Colliers Weekly, American rocket scientist Wernher von Braun envisioned winged spacecraft that would travel to Mars and beyond.Įarly concepts and designs led into actual rocket-powered aircraft that edged closer and closer to space.
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