What is the current tally of ALL spacegoing people (astronauts + cosmonauts)?
The first Shuttle, Columbia, was launched on the 12th of April in 1981. As a result of that, the Shuttle program has just celebrated its 20th anniversary of flying. The two astronauts aboard were John Young; John was the mission commander. He had been a veteran of numerous flights, going back to the Gemini program, and was one of the men who had walked on the Moon, commander of Apollo 16. The other person; there was only two astronauts aboard that first flight, was Robert Crippen. He was a rookie at the time of that flight, he hadn’t flown in space before, had transferred over to NASA from the Department of Defense in the late 1960s, after the termination of a military space station program that they had underway over there called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, and he became a part of NASA, flew in that first mission, and then, of course, went on to command other Shuttle flights, later in the decade.
