Engineering film footage of the final shuttle launch

When Chris Ferguson climbed into the commander’s seat of the shuttle Atlantis five years ago for the spaceship’s final flight, he didn’t know what turn his career would take when he returned to Earth. Now the former F-14 fighter pilot helps lead Boeing’s development of the CST-100 Starliner space taxi, one of two U.S.-built commercial spacecraft selected by NASA to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

America’s first space shuttle launched on this day 35 years ago as the reusable flying machine, Columbia, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center with John Young and Bob Crippen aboard.

It was 1986 and the U.S. Air Force was on the cusp of something unprecedented in human spaceflight — launching a space shuttle crew from California and paving the way for people to fly true polar missions.