With all engines burning at full tilt, the countdown hit zero. The booster ignition produced a dazzling flame, and a harsh staccato crackle shook the 3,500 spectators gathered along the beaches and roadways of Cape Canaveral. Explosive bolts anchoring the behemoth to the pad were severed and at 7 A.M. EDT, allowing seven million pounds of thrust to loft the first shuttle into the sky.
From their seats in Columbia’s cockpit, Young and Crippen felt the vehicle rock back and forth. The incessant vibrations rendered their instruments blurry, but not unreadable. Those vibrations diminished when the boosters were discarded, and Columbia, powered by her engines, sailed smoothly into orbit.
Throughout it all, Young’s heart rate climbed no higher than 90 beats per minute, while Crippen’s peaked at almost 130. Young later joked that his old heart simply refused to beat any quicker. But Flight Director Neil Hutchinson offered another explanation: The cool, unflappable Young must have been asleep the whole time.
Two days later, Columbia performed a searing hypersonic descent to land on the dry lakebed runway at Edwards Air Force Base in California. It posed an ultimate test for the patchwork of tiles on the spacecraft’s airframe, designed to protect it from the extreme thermal stresses of reentry. During descent, as temperatures doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled, ionized gases around the shuttle morphed from salmon-pink to reddish-orange. The astronauts could only marvel at the hellfires raging a few inches in front of their noses.
As expected, this plasma sheath around the fast-moving shuttle severed radio communications for 20 uncomfortable minutes. Finally, though, the blackout ended, and contact was re-established. “What a way to come to California,” Crippen jubilantly remarked.
But for spectators on the ground, more attuned to the serene approaches of commercial jets, the shuttle’s precipitous descent and phenomenal speed caused hearts to pound. Barreling through the azure sky at an angle some seven times steeper than an airliner — and at almost twice the speed — Young pulled back on the stick, morphing the craft from a falling brick into a flying machine of exquisite grace.
At 10:20 A.M. PDT, Columbia touched down at 212 miles per hour (341 km/h), with her wheels kicking up a rooster-tail of hard-packed sand. As the shuttle came to a halt after a 1.9-mile (3 km) rollout, Young’s characteristic drawl came over the airwaves.
Young asked mission control’s Joe Allen: “Do I have to take it to the hangar, Joe?” Allen chuckled before answering with “We’re gonna dust it off first.”