Quotes from John W. Young

The human race is at war. Our biggest enemy, pure and simple, is ignorance.

Buzz Aldrin, the lunar module pilot, was another sort of man altogether. A lot of the guys didn't care much for Buzz personally. He got on people's nerves and seemed to have an inordinate fascination with his own ideas and abilities. Frank Borman had made it clear to pretty much everyone that he didn't want Buzz on any of his crews. No doubt Buzz was a smart guy, with a doctorate in space rendezvous from MIT, but he thought he was smarter than he really was.

The answer was a big NO! In zero gravity, as soon as we touched a tile, we found ourselves being pushed away. Without a suitably positioned restraint system, we could not work to fix the damage. We would have damaged more tiles than we fixed. I asked that we not haul the MMU on the STS-1 mission, because it could not have helped us do tile repairs.

One thing really pissed us off during the flight. On the next to last day of the mission, the Soviets shot a laser at Challenger, tracking it. Though it was a low-powered laser, it was still enough to cause a malfunction of onboard equipment and temporarily blind the crew. The U.S. government made a formal diplomatic protest. The message was not as terse as the one I would have sent.

A Thiokol engineer by the name of Roger Boisjoly had been recommending for some time that the seal not be flown in cold temperatures because of its lack of resiliency. But Boisjoly was ignored.

As suggested earlier, postflight investigation found that the computer failures had been caused by particles in the GPC amplifiers. The general-purpose computers had not been given the normal zero-gravity "particle impact noise detection" tests. So, again, we were lucky that the computers did not totally fail. If GPC 2 had failed during entry and we had used the recommended procedures to fix it, we would have lost flight control of the orbiter. That would have been very bad for us.

Humans are actually far more likely to get taken out by an impact event or a supervolcano than we are to get killed in a crash of a commercial airliner.

Columbia got into orbit without any trouble, docked on schedule with the ISS, and successfully completed a multidisciplinary microgravity and Earth science research mission lasting more than two weeks.