Into the Black - Rowland White

Rowland White

Category: Science

Narrator: Eric Meyers

Tags: Science, History, Military

On 12th April 1981 a revolutionary new spacecraft blasted off from Florida on her maiden flight. NASAs Space Shuttle Columbia was the most advanced flying machine ever built - the high watermark of post-war aviation development. A direct descendant of the record-breaking X-planes the likes of which Chuck Yeager had tested in the skies over the Mojave Desert, Columbia was a winged rocket plane, the size of an airliner, capable of flying to space and back before being made ready to fly again. She was the worlds first real spaceship., The Shuttles Commander, moonwalker John Young, was already a veteran of five spaceflights. Alongside him, Pilot Bob Crippen was making his first, but Crip, taken in by the space agency after the cancellation of a top secret military space station programme in 1969, had worked on the Shuttles development for a decade. Never before had a crew been so well prepared for their mission., Yet less than an hour after Young and Crippens spectacular departure from the