Barely seven months after the first flight, Columbia flew again in November 1981 with Joe Engle and Richard Truly aboard. The point of the mission was almost philosophical: no spacecraft had ever been flown to orbit, recovered and then launched a second time. Reusability was the whole justification for the Shuttle, and STS-2 was where that idea stopped being a diagram and became a flown fact.
A failed fuel cell forced controllers to cut the planned five-day flight to just over two, but the crew still accomplished the mission's headline goal by putting the Canadian-built robotic arm through its first workout in orbit. The successful test of the manipulator arm pointed straight at the satellite deployments and repairs the fleet would spend the next three decades performing.
The significant thing about STS-2 was not where it went but that it went at all. When Columbia lifted off in November 1981 it became the first spacecraft in history to fly to orbit a second time — every capsule before it had been used once and either discarded or retired to a museum. Reusability was the entire economic argument for the Shuttle, and this was the flight that proved the airframe could be turned around.
The mission was cut in half almost immediately. One of the three fuel cells began to fail on the first day, and the flight rules trimmed a planned five days to a little over two. Joe Engle and Richard Truly compressed their test card and got through the priority items, including the first use in space of the Canadian-built robotic arm, which was unfolded and put through its paces on an empty payload bay.
Engle then did something no one else ever has. A former X-15 pilot who had already earned astronaut wings in the atmosphere, he flew the entire re-entry by hand, working through a programmed series of test manoeuvres from Mach 25 down — the only manual flight of a lifting entry from orbit ever performed. The data he gathered on how the orbiter actually handled, as opposed to how the simulations said it should, fed straight into the flight software everyone else flew on.
