Full Scale, Full Stock, Full Function On April 21, 1981, STS Columbia launched for the first time. Just as Yuri Gagarin’s first flight exactly 20 years earlier, Columbia opened up a new era of space flight. The Shuttle provided an unparalleled capability to service satellites in orbit, providing a flexible base of operations for seven astronauts for two weeks in low earth orbit. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that without the shuttle we wouldn’t have Hubble, the ISS, and many,