Columbia launched on STS-1 on 12 April 1981 with John Young and Robert Crippen aboard. Its winged orbiter returned to a runway, demonstrating the Shuttle’s approach to reusable spacecraft operations. It belongs here because that architecture supported later satellite work and station construction. Reusable did not mean wholly reusable, cheap or risk-free: the program required extensive support and later suffered the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
Source: 1981: Columbia’s first Shuttle flight.
Image credit: NASA · Public domain. Resized and JPEG compressed.
