(2 of 9)
In the astonishing complexity of the craft's design, in its peerless performance certainly in the cool performance of its astronauts—possessors of what Tom Wolfe calls "the right stuff"—Columbia was a much needed reaffirmation of U.S. technological prowess. It came at a moment when many Americans, and much of the world as well, were questioning that very capability. The doubts grew out of a succession of U.S. setbacks: from the defeat in Viet Nam to the downed rescue helicopters in the Iranian desert, from the debacle of Three Mile Island to Detroit's apparent defenselessness against the onslaught of Japanese cars. The flaming power of Columbia's rockets seemed to lift Americans out of their collective sense of futility and gloom. At last they had a few things to cheer: an extraordinary spacecraft—the most daring flying machine ever built—and two brave and skilled men at its helm. As President Reagan told the astronauts, "Through you, we feel as giants once again."
Jubilant giants, at that. "The shuttle will become the DC-3 of space," exulted veteran Astronaut Deke Slayton, boss of orbital flight-test crews, referring to the sturdy Douglas aircraft that opened new routes for commercial aviation in the mid-1930s. Columbia's maiden space voyage brought to mind the first flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk, Lindbergh's lone-eagle crossing of the Atlantic, even the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, which would turn a land of remote frontiers into a nation. Princeton's prophet of space colonization, Physicist Gerard O'Neill, saw the flight as a first step toward establishing mining facilities on the moon. Still others spoke of the shuttle's potential role in scientific research, in space manufacturing, in the eventual tapping of solar energy in orbit, in controlling the new "high ground" of space against Soviet incursion.
From the instant of Columbia's touchdown, a moment watched by tens of millions of television viewers in the U.S. and perhaps hundreds of millions more round the world, Americans seemed to go into orbit themselves. "Terrific!" shouted Dennis O'Connell, a truck driver from Queens, N.Y., as he paused in a Manhattan pub to watch the landing. "It shows everybody we're still No. 1." Mrs. Alicia Hoerter, a Louisville grandmother, could barely contain her excitement or her puns. "Columbia, the gem of a notion!" she exulted. "First, it's a rocket, then it's a spaceship, then it's a plane." In a packed Georgia Tech ballroom, great whoops of joy went up when John Young, class of '52, put Columbia down on the desert floor, and a band struck up "I'm a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech."