What It’s Like to Be First to Fly a Brand New Spacecraft

Later this week, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are expected to launch on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. If the mission is successful, the capsule will become only the fifth American spacecraft in history to be certified for human spaceflight. This will make Behnken and Hurley the newest members of an exclusive club of just seven spacecraft test pilots. The last time Americans boarded a spacecraft for the first time was in 1981, when NASA astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen took the space shuttle Columbia out for a few laps around Earth.

Young, who also flew the first mission for NASA’s Gemini program, passed away in 2018. This makes Crippen, now 82, the only living astronaut to have ever flown a spacecraft for the first time. WIRED called Crippen at his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, to learn how the Demo-2 flight might compare to the first shuttle flight and if he had any tips for the crew.

Like Behnken and Hurley, Crippen came out of the Air Force, where he served as a naval aviator before enrolling in test pilot school. In 1966, Crippen was selected as an astronaut candidate for the Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory, which was supposed to serve as a crewed platform for American military operations in space. But the program was canceled in 1969 after only a single uncrewed test flight, because the Vietnam War gutted the Air Force’s budget. “That was one of the low points in my life,” he says.

Still, only a few months after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, Crippen was selected as a NASA astronaut. By the time he completed his training, the Apollo program was finished and the agency was plotting the next big thing for human spaceflight: the shuttle program. Crippen was tapped