Looking back, decades later, it's easy to lose sight of how quickly things unfolded.
It was only 20 years. Exactly 20 years, to the day, between Yuri Gagarin starting it all, and John Young and Bob Crippen starting it anew.
The exact timing was coincidence; it wasn't supposed to happen that way. Were it not for a computer issue, the first launch of the space shuttle would have taken place on April 10, 1981, two days before the anniversary of the April 12, 1961 flight of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin as the first human in orbit. But fate had other plans, and April 12 further secured its place as the most significant date in the history of human spaceflight.
With the human space age now a year past the half-century mark, it's remarkable how much history took place between those two April launches.
Less than a month later, Alan Shepard told flight controllers to "light this candle." It would be almost another year before Scott Carpenter wished the first American in orbit, "Godspeed, John Glenn."
Three years after that, the Mercury program had concluded and the Gemini program begun. Alexey Leonov became the first person to conduct a spacewalk, followed quickly by American Ed White. Within less than two years, there had been rendezvous and dockings and spacewalks and the Gemini program was over, and America suffered the first major tragedy of its space program as Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in the Apollo 1 pad fire.
Less than two years later, Apollo 7 had already marked America's return to flight and the beginning of the Apollo program, and the Apollo 8 crew had wished a merry Christmas to "all of you -- all of you on the good Earth" from orbit around the moon. Come summer, the Eagle landed, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface. The following April, Jim Lovell told Houston "we've had a problem here," days before the safe return of Apollo 13.
And all of that occurred just within the first decade after Gagarin's launch. During the next decade, lunar missions would resume nine months after Apollo 13, and continue for just shy of two more years, before Gene Cernan took the last step on the surface of the moon. Skylab would
launch and see three record-setting missions before a dramatic reentry, during which the Soviet Union also began a robust series of space station missions. The two nations would meet in space for the first time during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The space shuttle would fly --
albeit not in space -- as Enterprise demonstrated the orbiters' airworthiness in a series of glide flights.
The launch of STS-1 marked the beginning of a new era in American spaceflight, one with a bit more continuity, for better or worse. While Apollo had been the previous longest American spaceflight program, at seven years from first flight to last (longer than Mercury and Gemini put together), the space shuttle would fly for more than 30 years. It would fly as the only American human space program for just shy of two decades before being joined by the International Space Station.
Today, America stands once again at the beginning of another new era in human spaceflight, as work is underway on the next generation of vehicles that will carry astronauts into space. The future is once again wide open.
Visitors to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center can stand in the shadow of that April day, 31 years ago -- quite literally, by observing the engines on the Pathfinder space shuttle mock-up, one of which flew on Columbia on the STS-1 launch -- and imagine just what excitement the next 20 years may hold.
Contributing Author: David Hitt
