The reusable spacecraft era began on April 12, 1981 with the launch of NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia. Piloted by astronauts John W. Young and Robert L. Crippen, the orbiter lifted off from Cape Canaveral and touched down at Edwards AFB, California two days and six hours later. Aviation Week devoted 16 pages of its April 20 issue the mission, reporting that it “affirmed the integrity of the vehicle’s propulsion, avionics, and structural systems through the most challenging ascent profile ever flown by a space vehicle.”
An accompanying editorial proclaimed that the shuttle “is designed to change spaceflight to a routine airline -analogous turnaround.” But while the shuttle would perform many tasks – the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope and carrying sections of the International Space Station to orbit among them – NASA never came close to meeting its original goal of 50 missions a year and carrying cargo for hundreds of dollars a pound. The fleet was retired on July 21, 2011 after 135 missions, two of them resulting in the deaths of 14 astronauts and the losses of the Challenger and Columbia orbiters.
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