Young and Crippen say shuttle should keep flying

Space shuttle should keep flying, members of first crew say


July 08, 2011|By Rich Phillips, CNN


Columbia lands at Edwards Air Force Base in California on April 14, 1981.
It wasn't like any other flight. The first one never is -- especially when your trip takes you away from the planet.

But the first space shuttle orbiter, Columbia, equipped with ejection seats, did exactly what it was supposed to do. It showed that this new winged spacecraft could safely launch, fly and return to Earth.

"They had trained us for just about everything you could think of," first shuttle pilot Bob Crippen said.

"We were ready for lots of emergencies, and thank goodness we didn't have any," he told CNN's John Zarrella.


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Crippen, a Navy pilot, was making his first spaceflight.

The commander was space veteran John Young, and Columbia was Young's fifth trip into space. In 1972, he commanded Apollo 16 and became one of only 12 men to walk on the moon.

The shuttle flight would put the U.S. back in the manned spaceflight business after the Apollo program ended in 1975.

Crippen and Young spoke exclusively to CNN about their historic first flight, the 30-year-old Space Shuttle Program and the future of spaceflight.

Young and Crippen blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 12, 1981.

But it was the manned flight that almost wasn't. There had been serious debate at NASA about whether this first flight would be manned or unmanned.

"I guess they could have made it all automatic, but it would have taken a big redesign of the whole control system," Young said. "That would have been a lot of money and a lot of delay."

Then, there were issues with the shuttle's thermal protection system; the tiles that encompass the orbiter's belly kept falling off.

"It's why we had ejection seats in the first one," Young said. "If things really went south, we could jump out, and we had parachutes."

Crippen said he knew there were risks.

"But I wouldn't have gone to fly it if I didn't think I would be able to get back down," he added.

After the technological kinks were worked out, the vehicle was ready to fly in 1981.

"It was only once we got inside of a minute [to launch] that I looked at John and said, 'I think we're actually going to do it,' " Crippen said. "That's when my heart rate went up."

Young wasn't as excited.

"I was bored to tears," he said.

Crippen added, with a laugh, that his main concern was: "Don't let me screw up."

Young and Crippen piloted Columbia around Earth 37 times. Their flight -- essentially a test flight verifying that flight systems worked well -- lasted two days, six hours and 20 minutes.


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