Launch of STS-1

Space Shuttle Columbia climbs skyward on STS-1, the first flight of the Space Shuttle program and the first time NASA sent astronauts into orbit aboard a spacecraft that had never flown before. John Young and Robert Crippen spent two days testing Columbia's systems before gliding to a runway landing in California — a milestone that, by coincidence, fell exactly twenty years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.