New Spaceship Prepares To Blast Off And Make History

Almost 40 years have passed since the last time NASA astronauts blasted off into space on a brand new spaceship.

Now, as NASA looks forward to Wednesday's planned test flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon with a pair of astronauts on board, some in the spaceflight community have a little bit of déjà vu.

The first space shuttle, Columbia, flew on April 12, 1981. Crowds gathered in Florida to watch this strange new spacecraft. It looked more like an airplane than the familiar bell-shaped capsules of the Apollo moon missions.

Wayne Hale's wife woke him up for the shuttle launch and he watched it on television in his bedroom, where he'd been trying to get a little sleep after working a prelaunch shift at Houston's Mission Control. He'd just come to NASA a few years before, and he says that a lot about that time was not so different from now.

"The substantially similar thing is that we've been waiting too long without being able to send Americans into orbit from America," says Hale, who went on to be a flight director for dozens of shuttle missions and head of the shuttle program.