Yesterday I was able to watch the landing of the first “Space Shuttle,” the “Columbia,” and astronauts young & Crippen, because it most conveniently occurred at lunch time. How nice of them to schedule for a TV audience!
The landing was so flawless that it was boring—which it was designed to be, I suppose. It looked like a fat jet plane landing on a desert. I’m told this makes all our old splash landings, and one-time spacecraft, obsolete. I don’t doubt that the time will soon arrive when non-reusable spacecraft will be thought of as a prodigious waste of a primitive space technology.
Comments according to a local story in the Forum of local reactions seem to indicate it is a “shot in the arm’ for a U.S. tagged lately by a renewed inferiority complex (which we never have really outgrown ever since 1783, when the Revolutionary War enthusiasm wore away), and misery over nasty economic turns of the past couple years. It proves, apparently, that the U.S. still “can do it,” and is “still the best.” I wonder if it proves all that.
— April 5, 1981, Moorhead, Minn.
OtD 