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They can hardly outdo Young, who has now made five space flights, including a moon landing, and his rookie pilot, Bob Crippen, 43. Though their lift-off was delayed two days because of that computer failure, once they settled into the cockpit for the second try, everything went, well, like a rocket. Barely 45 min. off the launch pad, Columbia was circling the earth at an altitude of 150 miles. Before the end of the day it reached 170 miles. Meanwhile, two vessels steamed out to recover the 80-ton shells of two spent solid-fuel rockets that had parachuted into the Atlantic. When a nosey Soviet "trawler" edged into the site, the Coast Guard vessel Steadfast had to warn it off, then actually block its path, before the Russians backed off. The steel rocket frames were burned and bent a bit, but can probably be overhauled and refilled for another shot.
As always, there was in-flight banter between the astronauts and the Houston control center. When Crippen felt Houston was loading him with too many tasks at one time—realigning the inertial navigational unit, shooting a picture of the Southern Lights, confirming a message on the teletype—he asked in mock seriousness: "You mean all that right now?" To jog the astronauts awake, Houston piped in a loud country and western ditty about the shuttle called The Mean Machine. There was a somewhat more serious moment when Vice President Bush got on the radio from Washington to congratulate them on behalf of the nation.
There were also a few mi nor glitches. During the first "night" in space—actually they saw the sun rise and set once during every 90-min. orbit—Young and Crippen complained about a chill in the cabin. The temperature had drooped to 37° F. "I was ready to break out the long undies," joked one of the frozen astronauts. The problem was quickly fixed with a signal from earth that pumped warm water into the cabin's temperature control system. Young and Crippen had less luck fixing a faulty flight data recorder that had stopped mysteriously. They tried to get to it with a screwdriver but found the panel over it had been too tightly screwed down (or "torqued," as NASA put it).
The most serious problem came on the second night when an alarm light flashed and a bell jolted Young and Crippen out of their reveries. It was a warning of a malfunction in a heating unit on one of the three auxiliary power units for Columbia's hydraulic systems, which control the landing gear and elevens. The heater keeps the unit's fuel from freezing up. A throw of a switch got it working again, but Columbia is such a masterpiece of engineering redundancy that any one of the units could have saved the day. Said Flight Director Neil Hutchinson: "It's absolutely amazing. We didn't have anything that is a show stopper."