[3] As of April 1981[update] Young and Crippen trained the longest for a space mission before flying in NASA history.

As no one had flown the shuttle before, they helped design the craft's controls, including 2,214 switches and displays in the cockpit — about three times as many on the Apollo command module — and many contingency procedures.

STS-1 carried 22 manuals, each three inches thick and together weighing 29 kg (64 lb); the procedure for an electronics failure from a cooling system malfunction had 255 steps.

[2] During the original planning stages for the early Space Shuttle missions, NASA management under the Carter Administration felt a need to undertake initial tests of the system prior to the first orbital flight.

[6] The NASA managers were swayed by Young questioning the need for the test, and the weight of his opinion was especially strong as he was someone who not only had been to the Moon twice, but had walked on it.

A launch attempt two days earlier was scrubbed because Columbia's four primary general purpose IBM System/4 Pi computers (GPCs) failed to provide correct timing to the backup flight system (BFS) when the GPCs were scheduled to transition from vehicle checkout to flight configuration mode.

The stack rocked "downwards" (towards the crew's feet), then back up to the vertical, at which point both Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) ignited.

The stack's combined northwards translation and climb above the launch tower's lightning rod were readily apparent to Young.

After clearing the tower the stack began a right roll (until the +Z axis or vertical fin pointed) to a launch azimuth of 067° True[8] (in order to achieve an orbital inclination of 40.30°), and pitched to a "heads down" attitude (to reduce loading on the wings[9]).

Columbia's main engines were throttled down to 65% thrust to transit the region of Max Q, the point during ascent when the shuttle undergoes maximum aerodynamic stress.

As they opened the doors the crew noticed that they had sustained damage to thermal protection system (TPS) tiles on the OMS pods.

They included: Crew Optical Alignment Sight (COAS) calibration, star tracker performance, Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) performance, manual and automatic RCS testing, radiation measurement, propellant crossfeeding, hydraulics functioning, fuel cell purging, and photography.

In Houston, the Crimson team headed by their Flight Director Don Puddy came on duty in FCR 1 for the mission's final shift.

Payload bay door closing was a critical milestone to ensure vehicle structural and thermal integrity for re-entry.

Meanwhile, Johnson Space Center (JSC) pilots Charlie Hayes and Ted Mendenhall were airborne over California's Edwards Air Force Base area in a Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA) performing a final check of landing weather conditions.

[14] Entry Interface (EI) was reached over the eastern Pacific Ocean 8,110 km (5,040 mi) from the landing site at a speed of around 28,240 km/h (17,550 mph).

EI is merely an arbitrarily defined geodetic altitude of 120,000 m (390,000 ft) employed by NASA for the purposes of trajectory computations and mission planning.

At about 100,000 m (330,000 ft) altitude a light pink air glow caused by entry heating became visible, and both crew members lowered their visors.

Columbia had to maneuver 583 km (362 mi) "cross range" of its orbital ground track to reach the planned landing site during the entry.

Consequently, a roll into a right bank was flown when the air density had increased sufficiently to raise dynamic pressure to 570 Pa (0.083 psi) (with speed still in excess of Mach 24 and approximately 78,000 m (256,000 ft) altitude).

A wide left turn was flown to line up with lake bed runway 23, whilst T-38 "Chase 1", crewed by astronauts Jon McBride and "Pinky" Nelson joined formation.

The ultimate launch date of STS-1 fell on the 20th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1, the first spaceflight to carry a human crew.

The beginning of the song "Hello Earth", on Kate Bush's 1985 Hounds of Love album, contains a short clip of dialogue between Columbia and Mission Control, during the last few minutes of its descent, beginning with "Columbia now at nine times the speed of sound..." In 2006, "Collateral Damage," the 12th episode of the ninth season of the long-running Canadian-American military science fiction television show Stargate SG-1, a childhood flashback shows that the character Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell witnessed the launch with his father live on television at the age of ten, one of the events that led to him becoming a United States Air Force pilot.

[36] I think it is only right that we mention a couple of guys that gave their lives a few weeks ago in our countdown demonstration test: John Bjornstad and Forrest Cole.

[38][39] At the conclusion of the test, pad workers were given clearance to return to work on the orbiter, even though the nitrogen had not yet been purged due to a recent procedural change.

Three technicians, John Bjornstad, Forrest Cole, and Nick Mullon, entered the compartment without air packs, unaware of the danger since nitrogen gas is odorless and colorless, and lost consciousnesses due to lack of oxygen.

[41][42][43][44][45] These were the first launchpad deaths at Cape Canaveral since the Apollo 1 fire, which killed three astronauts during preparations for the crewed Moon landing missions.

[39] The incident did not delay the launch of STS-1 less than a month later, but pilot Robert Crippen gave an on-orbit tribute to Bjornstad and Cole.

[38] A three-month inquiry determined a combination of a recent change in safety procedures and a miscommunication during the operations were the cause of the accident.

[38] The names of John Bjornstad, Forrest Cole and Nicholas Mullon are engraved on a monument at the US Space Walk of Fame in Florida.