On April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to
reach Earth orbit. Launching from Baikonur Cosmodrome on Vostok-1, he
flew for 108 minutes and nearly circled the planet before landing in
Kazakhstan. From a porthole at his feet, he could view our blue planet as a sphere. He declared: “It is indescribably beautiful.”
On April 12, 1981, astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen rode the
space shuttle Columbia into the sky, launching from Cape Canaveral in
the world's first reusable space vehicle. It was the first time in
history that a new spacecraft was launched on its maiden voyage with a
crew aboard. Thirty years and 513 million miles later, the NASA space
shuttle fleet—Discovery, Endeavour, Atlantis, together with Columbia and
Challenger (both lost)—has carried 350 people into orbit on 133
flights.
In honor of this double anniversary, Earth Observatory offers this
astronaut photograph of part of the region where many historians say the
march of civilization began: the “Fertile Crescent” of
the Middle East. Known to many as “the cradle of civilization,” the
stretch of land astride the Tigris and Euphrates rivers nurtured several
of the earliest known cities and empires.
Astronauts on flight STS-1 captured this view of Iran, Iraq, and
Kuwait through a viewport on the space shuttle on April 13, 1981. The
photo was taken with a handheld camera on the 15th orbit around Earth,
during a flight that lasted 54 hours.
The
space shuttle has “helped us improve communications on Earth and
understand our home planet better,” said NASA Administrator Charles
Bolden on April 12, 2011. “It's set scientific satellites like Magellan
and Ulysses speeding on their missions into the solar system, and
launched Hubble and Chandra to explore the universe. It's enabled
construction of the International Space Station, our foothold for human
exploration, which is leading to breakthroughs in human health and
microgravity research.”
It all started fifty years ago this day. The United Nations has declared April 12 to be the International Day of Human Space Flight.
Astronaut photograph STS001-8-230
was acquired on April 2, 1981, with a Hasselblad medium format camera
using an 80 mm lens, and is provided by the Image Science & Analysis
Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the first Shuttle Flight crew.
The image in this article has been enhanced to improve contrast. Lens
artifacts have been removed. Additional images taken by astronauts and
cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by Mike Carlowicz.
- Instrument:
- Space Shuttle - Medium Format Camera