Video: 'NBC News Coverage of STS-1 The 1st Space Shuttle Mission' (25 videos; launch is on video #6 at 3:07)

(Sunday, April 12, 1981, 7:00:03 a.m. EST) — The world’s first reusable spacecraft, the space shuttle Columbia, with two crew members, astronauts John W. Young and Robert L. Crippen, lifted off this morning from Pad A, Launch Complex 39, at the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida.

Young and Crippen reached orbit and returned safely to earth two days later.

Video: 'The Eighties - NBC 1980's Retrospective (1989)' (Apr. 12, 1981, at 29:32)