STS-1 Full Mission - Historical Narration and Footage - First Shuttle Flight, Launch, Landing, 1981 

John Young is the only astronaut to pilot: a Gemini capsule, An Apollo capsule, a lunar module, a lunar rover, and a space shuttle. Legend

Thanks for posting this. It’s great to see my late cousin John Young again. He was a humble man and a really character. He might have been one of the first on the Moon instead of Armstrong or Aldrin if it weren’t for him smuggling a corned beef sandwich onto his Gemini mission (look it up), but he still holds the land speed record on the Moon when he decided to see how fast the Lunar Rover would go! He inspired me to become a pilot and I think of him every time I fly.

She flew well. Rip Challenger and Columbia. Rip to the crew who lost their lives on both shuttles. Despite the crashes, she is amazing

Hard to understate how bold this was. Even with the Saturn rockets, they live tested each component, then flew the whole thing unmanned a few times to shake out the problems. The shuttle was assembled and had to launch, orbit, go through the fiery RE-ENTRY, and land unpowered all for the first time.

I watched this back then when I was 10 and immediately wanted one of those Revell plastic model kits of the Shuttle. Got one the week after. It is still on display in my office.

It was the first ever space flight of a completely new space transport system, and with a crew on board at once. We must pay tribute to the courage of John Young and Robert Crippen who brilliantly performed the flight. Thanks for this video! I am especially pleased to remember this flight, because in 1995 John Young personally answered my letter. Russia, St. Petersburg.

We watched this in the Netherlands live on TV, and I even recorded the sound from the TV speaker with a microphone on a tape recorder! I was too young when the Saturn Vs were launched, and somehow always regretted missing that, so I definitely wanted to catch this momentous occasion.

13:29 - the SRB ignition was so violent that it permanently bend the rear body flap, which was used to help control orientation during descent - the crew were never told of this, and if they had - the pilot mentioned they would have bailed out after SRB burn and Columbia would have been lost then and there.

I just love how John is running down the stairs after landing and is like “hold up, hold up! Lemme check on my aircraft!” A true pilot 😅

It amazes me that so many people remember the two accidents but they forget all the things the shuttle accomplished and call the program a failure.

After watching the Apollo splashdowns, the real game-changer for me was when Columbia's landing gear came out. I thought--Wow--it really is going to land like an airplane! 😀

I was in kindergarten for the moon landing and a senior in high school for this. Both were huge memories in my life.

I cut out of school on 4/10/81 to watch the launch but was disappointed when the launch was scrubbed. On the 12th, I woke up early and was tuned to channel 7 watching Frank Reynolds, Gene Cernan and Jules Bergman describing the magnificent launch. I’ll never forget when Bergman stated, “American thunder in the skies.”

Awesome video. Can't help but play "Countdown" by Rush in my head at the same time. They used actual NASA audio for the song. Godspeed Columbia and Challenger, never forgotten.

I was there. I was 15 at the time. My dad worked for Dreyden Flight Research center at Edwards. We had viewing much closer than the general public was allowed. We had been several hours early and we went on a walk around Edwards and my dad found an arrowhead that was later dated to more than 3000 years old. I still have that arrowhead today. My dad knew all of these test pilots and astronauts and I remember having boxes full of regalia that was given to my dad over the years the shuttle was being developed. It was great being part of a historical event.

RIP John Young (along with the crews of the ill-fated STS-51-L & STS-107 misisons). He was one of 3 men who have been to the Moon twice (Apollos 10 & 16) along with Jim Lovell & the late great Eugene Cernan. I remember watching the launch on TV. It had been aborted to a computer glitch and the actual launch took place on the 20th anniversary of the first manned orbital spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin. Joe Engle ended up commanding STS-2.

I remember watching this mission on TV, I always loved the Columbia and was heart broken when she and her crew were lost. I remember the look in John Young's eyes, I cannot imagine how he must have felt. Thank you for posting this.

"Quite frankly we're not worried about any other tiles being loose". Yep.

I remember watching this live when I was in 3rd grade. We were glued to the TV. We were all too young to remember the moon landing, so to us, this was a really big deal. I was in 8th grade when we lost Challenger and was watching it at school too...as were many school kids due to the first teacher in space. The shuttle program is a part of my childhood. I'm very glad I got to take my daughter, when she was in 3rd grade, to see the very last shuttle to launch. We got to visit the launch pad with the shuttle on it. Being that close to it was amazing.

A bold, prophetic statement from Hutchinson, "...quite frankly we're not worried about any other tiles being loose...".

I remember watching Columbia’s first flight on TV at school. I was in 2nd grade, and I remember being fascinated by it all. I also remember when we lost Columbia and Challenger. Both sad, heartbreaking events. 🙏🏻💔🕊️😢

I was there for the launch. Had VIP tickets for a front row seat

I remember vividly ABC's Frank Reynolds being so excited he referred to the SRBs as 'Solid Bocket Roosters'!! 😝😝😝

I'm so happy I was born in during the Space Shuttle Program. I got to witness space travel become a normal occurrence! And now that I'm fully grown, the internet is showing me all of the things I missed growing up. Wonderful time to be here!

I saw the landing on public viewing side at E.A.F.B.. The double sonic boom was always great to hear. 7 months later, again I got to see STS2 land on the eastern viewing side. However, it was from an ambulance because I got in a motorcycle wreck t-boning a p/u truck. I lived in the Antelope Valley at the time. Thanks for posting this.

It is undeniable. This has got to be the greatest test flight in history.

Has to be one of the bravest test flights of all time. So many moments of this flight, life was pretty much dependent on computer analysis, simulation, and predictions.

Retro Space HD, thank you very much for such an amazing video. I love the Space Shuttle Program and especially the STS-1 mission with these brave men who, faced with the dangers of this inaugural flight, fulfilled their mission and made history. Long live John Young and Robert Crippen, the best crew for the first Shuttle flight into space. Hail Space Shuttle Columbia, thank you very much. Congratulations 👍👨‍🚀 

Wow, don't make it look so old. I remember watching this live. Both the take-off and the landing, as well as the test glide off of the 747.

Boy, that took me back to my school days. I recently read John Youngs book. Very interesting.

Columbia was always my favorite shuttle and this an amazing tribute to her and the space shuttle program as a whole!

I was in my high school's marching band. We marched in a parade in honor of the Columbia's first mission. I was sickened by Columbia's break up over Texas in 2003.

Really cool to see how happy John Young is after landing

I never get tired of watching old space shuttle launches...thumbs up man!!

I was born in 1976 and lived in the desert in SoCal until 1980. We have pictures of the Enterprise test flights

Took the most courage of any spaceflight. Untested vehicle (except for glide flights) where anything could have happened.

I was 14 years old in 1981, ever interested in the shuttle program, i remember have seen the launch and landing in Mexican TV news, 26:50 see you mañana, the great Columbia!

It was a miracle this flight made it back in one piece. From the STS-1 wiki entry : ------- Mission anomalies STS-1 was the first orbital test flight of what NASA claims was, at the time, the most complex flying machine ever built. Roughly 70 anomalies were observed during and after the flight, owing to the many components and systems that could not otherwise be adequately tested. Notable anomalies included: - Similar to the first Saturn V launch in 1967, engineers underestimated the amount of noise and vibration produced by the Space Shuttle. Shock waves from the SRB thrust were deflected up into the orbiter's tail section, which flexed the wing flaps and bent several fuel tank supports; Columbia could have had trouble landing if the flaps had been damaged. An improved sound suppression system was later installed in LC-39A to damp vibrations. - Pilot Crippen reported that, throughout the first stage of the launch up to SRB separation, he saw "white stuff" coming off the External Tank and splattering the windows, which was probably the white paint covering the External Tank's thermal foam. - The astronauts' on-orbit visual inspection showed significant damage to the thermal protection tiles on the OMS/RCS pods at the orbiter's aft end, and John Young reported that two tiles on the nose looked like someone had taken "big bites out of them". The U.S. Air Force also photographed the orbiter using a KH-11 KENNEN reconnaissance satellite. Due to the top secret nature of the satellite, only a small number of NASA personnel were aware of this, and they had arranged for the photography prior to the launch as a precaution to make sure no damage had been done to the thermal tiles on the underside of the orbiter, as there had never been a flight of a crewed spacecraft before where the heat shield was exposed to the vacuum of space for the entire duration of the mission. Young and Crippen were instructed to perform maneuvers with the RCS thrusters to align Columbia so that the KH-11 could photograph it, but were not informed of the reason for them. Aligning the shuttle's low Earth orbit with the KH-11's polar orbit was a somewhat tricky move, and launch on April 12 was scheduled for a few minutes after the launch window opened, due to the need to get the KH-11 into correct orientation for imaging the shuttle. Images obtained confirmed that damage to Columbia was not serious. Post-flight inspection of Columbia confirmed that approximately 16 undensified tiles near the OMS pod had been lost during ascent. - Columbia's aerodynamics at high Mach numbers during reentry were found to differ significantly in some respects from those estimated in pre-flight testing. A misprediction of the location of the center of pressure (due to using an ideal gas model instead of a real gas model) caused the computer to have to extend the body flap by sixteen degrees rather than the expected eight or nine. Also, the first roll manoeuvre resulted in lateral and directional oscillations during which side slip angles of up to 4° were reached. This was twice as high as predicted. Analysis attributed the cause to unexpectedly large rolling moments due yaw RCS jet firings. During the early stages of entry, orbiter roll control is achieved as a result of sideslip modulation. - The orbiter's heat shield was damaged when an overpressure wave from the solid rocket booster caused a forward Reaction control system (RCS) oxidizer strut to fail. - The same overpressure wave also forced the orbiter body flap - an extension on the orbiter's underbelly that helps to control pitch during reentry - into an angle well beyond the point where cracking or rupture of its hydraulic system would have been expected. Such damage would have made a controlled descent impossible, with John Young later admitting that had the crew known about this, they would have flown the shuttle up to a safe altitude and ejected, causing Columbia to be lost on the first flight. Young had reservations about ejection as a safe abort mode due to the fact that the SRBs were firing throughout the ejection window, but he justified taking this risk because, in his view, an inoperative body flap would have made landing and descent "extremely difficult if not impossible." - The strike plate next to the forward latch of Columbia's external tank door was melted and distorted due to excess heat exposure during reentry. This heat was attributed to an improperly installed tile adjacent to the plate. - During remarks at a 2003 gathering, John Young stated that a protruding tile gap filler ducted hot gas into the right main landing gear well, which caused significant damage, including the buckling of the landing gear door. He said that neither he nor Crippen were told about this incident and he was not aware that it had happened until reading the postflight mission report for STS-1, also adding that the gas leak was noted in the report, but not the buckling of the landing door. (The buckling of the door is in fact in the anomaly report, anomaly STS-1-V-49). Despite these problems, the STS-1 mission was completed successfully, and in most respects Columbia performed optimally. After some modifications to the Shuttle and to the launch and reentry procedures, Columbia flew the next four Shuttle missions. -------

Very sobering foreshadowing when he talked about the debris coming off the external tank and hitting the shuttle Columbia. I wasn't born for Challenger. I was around for Columbia and watched in horror from Fort Worth as she disintegrated.

Thank you, Retro, for the look back. Remember it well, getting up early to watch it, (was 19 YO), though I don't recall ever seeing that shot of the external fuel tank drifting away after detaching. What a shot! All the best.

This is FANTASTIC!!! What a great compilation. Thank you for putting this together!

Congratulations. This is an excellent introduction to the Shuttle program, and overview of the first heroic flight. Hail Columbia!

This was excellent ! Really liked the narration by the Young and Crippen. Thank you for a great video !

Even in Japan, it was broadcast repeatedly despite several postponements. I was a high school student at the time. The few seconds from ignition to launch felt very long. And the TV screen continued to show it until the SSME vanished into a faint glow after dumping the SRBs.

5:12 RIP Nichelle Nichols... 😥

I was taken back in time with this video and more so with including Nichelle Nichols who recently passed away.

John Young was such a badass.

14:35, so retrospective of Columbia’s last flight. John Young was the perfect man to fly that first flight.

14:21 I still get chills when they say "Go at throttle up". R.I.P Challenger crew.

Simply amazing! This is your best video yet!

THAT was fantastic! Thank you. My dad was stationed at Tinker AFB in Midwest City, OK when we got to see the "piggy back" shuttle fly in for refueling. Awesome.

Great vid thank you. The only RCS test I had never seen was shuttle. This should be posted in the nasaspaceflight shuttle forums! You deserve the views.

The start of day 3 in the shuttle has phenomenal camera quality for 40+ years ago

Awesome! 100% pure awesome! Great job…and a great service to history.

Wonderful video for a gorgeous ship. Thank you for the reminder of how cool these flights were.

Thankyou for posting this, absolutely brilliant.

This is just excellent. Thank you for this!

Very well done. Thanks for posting this!

I remember watching the landing live at school in 6th grade. What a space craft!

I remember when a reporter asked John Young how his heart rate remained low. He said, “you either understand the situation or you don’t. I understood the situation”!

Incredible editing on all your videos!

I know it well. I was actually employed for them at age 17 and supported it and many others.

Ouch-hearing how they were so dismissive of the tiles coming off is so sad in light of Columbia in 2003.

Just amazing! Thank you for this.

Stunning work

I remember this day so well, it was very exciting. Some unintentional foreshadowing of the foam and heat shield issues (they never really got on top to of that) and you also see the beginnings of the shirt-sleeve myth, that the shuttle was really just an airplane that could go to space (it wasn't) and that all the refinements of a modern airliner would make using it a breeze. The reality was it was a hypersonic hazmat freight truck operating mostly within an envelope that was absolutely hostile to human survival, and prior to Challenger outcomes, no effective escape system. The Soviet Buran was an interesting project in this regard because they absolutely refused a solid-fuel booster system and had an atmospheric escape method but the thing was so expensive it was doomed to fail and only flew one unmanned mission. That said I'm glad the STS existed and that all those engineers got to contribute so much.

Amazing work. Thank you for sharing.

My mother was so excellent I asked her if I could skip school that day so I could watch it live and she said no problem.

The water was not to "keep things cool" it's to muffle the sound so the launch tower doesn't literally shake apart

I was in 8th grade in Tampa, FL when this happened. We were all let out of class to watch this and even on the other side of the peninsula, it was amazing to see!

Thanks for the video mate

This is great footage, the best I've seen

Love this so much Thank you for sharing it.

Even in the 70s it looked like it was from the 80s! A perfect design. I remember watching this launch on TV in 1981.

Excellent work. Thanks.

Outstanding documentary!

love that Nichelle Nicholls got to do that. Mustve been a hell of a lot of fun

As a rush fan, it was cool to hear the coms that were used in the song countdown which was about this launch. Rush were guests at the launch. I was in 1st grade when this happened and we watched launches at school on TV.

Watched this live as it happened back in the day.

Rush wrote a song about the launch of Colombia. It is from the album "Signals" entitled "Countdown. Some of the actual audio is on the track.

I was a kid and I remember it, live on TV.

You did an amazing job in putting this together. Born in 1978 in germany my first memory is sadly the challenger disaster which happened to be on my farthers birthday.

Good Documentary like a tv documentary thank you 🙏

Amazing movie! Thanks

This is marvelous

Absolutely amazing .

I much appreciate that you’re presenting the original video without stretching it out to 16:9, and in general, keeping everything honest! Unfortunately, sometimes the filters you used to clean up the footage turned on and off, but hey, no biggie!

It's amazing to think that upon congressional approval in 1972, an entire program consisting of entirely new designs, including the solid rocket boosters, orbiters (commonly referred to as the shuttles), the orbiter's engines and the external tank was built and launched within 9 years. The Artemis moon program has been in development and build stage for almost 20 years, although it didn't officially become the Space Launch System (later renamed Artemis) until 2010, some of which morphed out of the Constellation project started in 2005.

Great work here.

Waited years for this new,amazing reusable space ship take off. A BBC tv programme first made me aware of the space shuttle in 1978 so by launch time many years had passed from its initial launch year anyway it didn’t stop me staying at home to watch take off. To get into the feel I even pushed back the sofa/couch so that I was literally looking into the ceiling😂😂I was 13 afterall

I was 20 when this baby launched. Never foresaw what would happen in 1986 and 2003.

I agree with other posters, this is very good. An enthusiastic, well done. Knowing what we know now, on her 28th flight, Columbia left Earth for the last time on Jan. 16, 2003. The STS program was a success, but it went on too long.

I remember hearing on local Houston news at the time the shuttle was ordered to invert while flying over Kilauea Observatory. That let Ground evaluate the tile loss on Columbia's underneath.

its interesting how quickly the main point of the shuttle, that it was supposed to be routine and low cost, was forgotten on the part of NASA as a whole.

It's really interesting to me how the ET was painted white for the first few STS missions and now the unpainted orange tank is the signature look of the shuttle.

It seems like we went backwards from there,it was 1981 with basic computers etc…Shows how good it is when it’s not just a military budget

1. This is amazing! 2. This understates how much the Media freaked out b/c of the few tiles lost on the top of the fuselage 🤷‍♂️🙂

If memory serves, the launch got scrubed shortly before the scheduled Friday window and was postponed until Sunday due to some technical issue.

@8:57 Classic Styx t-shirt on technician

Completely and totally awesome,¡!!!!!!!!!!