Space shuttle Columbia lifts off on its first flight in April 1981.
(LAUNCH SOUND)
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, launched Columbia from Kennedy Space Center on April twelfth nineteen eighty-one. The nation watched on television. The shuttle launch marked the completion of goals set nearly ten years earlier.
Columbia raced into the sky and into history. Its two million five hundred thousand moving parts made it the most complex and costly vehicle ever made. The spacecraft would repeat its first success twenty-seven times.
But Columbia and a crew of seven astronauts were lost on its twenty-eighth mission. On February first, two thousand three, Columbia broke up as it reentered the atmosphere.
The accident sped the retirement of NASA's remaining three shuttles.
BARBARA KLEIN: Seventeen years earlier, America mourned another accident. On January twenty-eight nineteen eighty-six, shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after take off.
President Ronald Reagan spoke of the lost crew.
RONALD REAGAN: "The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us with the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them. Nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye. And slipped the surly bonds of earth, to touch the face of God."
Both accidents showed the danger of manned space flight. But NASA studied its mistakes and worked to correct them.
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