Columbia lifts off with four aboard, the biggest crew yet, and two commercial satellites in the bay
Four test flights had shown that the Space Shuttle could reach orbit and come home. At 7:19 a.m. EST on November 11, 1982, Columbia left Kennedy Space Center on STS-5, the first operational mission of the program. Four crew members rode aboard, the largest crew any spacecraft had carried, and the payload bay held two Hughes-built satellites, SBS-3 for Satellite Business Systems and Anik-C3 for Telesat Canada. It was also the first shuttle flight on which the crew did not wear pressure suits for launch.
STS-5 was the flight on which the American shuttle stopped being a test vehicle and started taking on customers, among them a Canadian satellite operator. Columbia's four-person crew and commercial cargo presented the program as a working spacecraft that other organizations could use.
QHow long did Columbia sit on the ground before it ever flew, and where did those days go?
Columbia spent 610 days in the Orbiter Processing Facility, another 35 days in the Vehicle Assembly Building, and 105 days on Pad 39A before it lifted off on STS-1 on April 12, 1981. That adds up to 750 days of ground work for a vehicle that then reached orbit. The count covers three separate sites at Kennedy Space Center, each with its own stage of preparation: processing the orbiter, stacking it with its launch hardware, and waiting on the pad. By the time of STS-5, Columbia had moved well past that first long wait and was flying its fifth mission.
QWhy did Columbia carry ejection seats borrowed from the SR-71 spy plane?
Columbia flew with ejection seats based on those from the SR-71 Blackbird during its first six flights, and they stayed aboard until 1983. STS-5 falls inside that span, so the seats were still installed in Columbia's cabin on the first operational mission, though they had been deactivated after STS-4. They were one of several features that set Columbia apart from the orbiters built after it, including test instrumentation and black chines. Columbia was also the heaviest of the five orbiters that flew in space. When originally built it weighed about 1,000 kilograms more than Challenger and 3,600 kilograms more than Endeavour.
QWhat do the five points of the blue star on the STS-5 mission patch stand for?
The five points of the blue star on the patch indicate the flight's numerical designation in the Space Transportation System's mission sequence. Each point counts one flight, so the star reads as a five. The patch carries the mission number in its design rather than only in its lettering. STS stands for Space Transportation System, the formal name of the shuttle program, and STS-5 was the fifth entry in that numbered sequence after the four test flights.
