April 12, 1981 - Columbia launches America back into space
Following a frustrating delay two days earlier, the United States' Space Shuttle program began as Columbia embarked upon its first mission. It would be the first of 135 missions involving five shuttles over 30 years. The launch put Americans back into space for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1975. President Ronald Reagan watched on television from the White House as he recovered from an assassination attempt. Members of the public jammed the area around Kennedy Space Center to get a view of the spectacle at 7 a.m. on Sunday morning. The scheduled launch the Friday before was scrubbed by a computer problem, disappointing half a million spectators and frustrating astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen. Young set a record by becoming the first human to go into space five times. He had flown on the first manned Gemini mission in 1965 and would pilot one more shuttle flight in 1983. Read the story in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Shuttle Sails Flawlessly Into Heavens • Check out NASA's multimedia retrospective on the Space Shuttle program