5,4 ...
We've gone for main engine start.
We have main engine start.
On April 12, 1981, the Space Shuttle launched for its first mission, STS-1.
There was a lot of excitement surrounding that launch. It would be the first time
that Americans had launched from American soil since the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975.
♫♫♫
Well, the first flight, our intent is primarily to make sure that the bird
will get up like we want it to and it'll come down like we wanted to.
The Space Shuttle would be a significant achievement. It would be the first of its
kind - a fully reusable vehicle for travel to low-Earth orbit.
The design and development of the Space Shuttle took 10 years.
The propulsion systems, the space shuttle main engines were
some of the most complex, highly advanced engines.
[engine noise]
They still exist today because the RS25s on the Space Launch System.
But for those people who don't understand the significance of this, one more time please,
why do you think this is so important? Why are you so satisfied with it?
Well it's a, it's a, it's an age long goal to be able to fly into
and out of space but even more than that, uh, I think it's a
remarkable way to get payloads up into space cheaply and economically.
It's what we've been trying to do for the last 10 years, routine access to space.
It's going to improve science and technology in this country. That's going to be remarkably
beneficial to everyone in this room in ways that we just can't even imagine.
Robert and I have spent the most exciting and interesting
two and a half days probably that we ever spent in our lives or ever spent again.
The spaceship Columbia is a phenomenal, it is a incredibly amazing piece of machinery
and anytime you can take something that big and put it into space and bring it back
land it on a runway you have just accomplished something just short of a miracle I believe.
[laughter]
I believe that as we stand here this afternoon, even those of us with the greatest imagination
cannot in any way project
the future that has been opened by the flight that John and Crip have just completed.
[applause]
The success of the STS-1 mission was the beginning of a long line of successes.
Overall, the Space Shuttle program
would verify that human beings could travel routinely to the low-Earth orbit.
While there were incredible risks involved and incredible things that happened along the way,
NASA never failed to come back to its mission and over the course of those three decades,
the Space Shuttle program led a number of successful missions
and really redefined what we know about the microgravity environment.
It enabled the building of one of the most successful
facilities human beings have ever designed-
the International Space Station and provided access to that space station for a long time.
It would go on to deliver a number of incredible observatories to low-Earth orbit- Hubble, Chandra,
Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and a number of other missions.
It was a remarkable success that has led us to this moment.
We can learn a lot from the Space Shuttle.
We can even improve upon the Space Shuttle.
But we'll never forget the lessons that it brought us.