Photo: NASA via Retro Space Images
April 12, 1981: Space Shuttle Columbia launched this day from the LC-39A pad at Kennedy Space Center in
Florida. The STS-1 mission lasted just two days, circling the Earth 37 times, before landing at Edwards Air Force Base
in California. Columbia carried a crew of two – mission commander John W. Young and pilot Robert L. Crippen.
It was the first American manned space flight since the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July of 1975, and also marked
the only time a maiden test flight of a new U.S. spacecraft system carried a human crew.