CENTRE — Thirty years ago this month Cedar Bluff resident Dee Clifton found herself in the California desert, her eyes desperately scanning the skies for a helicopter.

Dee wasn't stranded, or seeking rescue. In fact, she was far from alone as she and about 200,000 other spectators stood alongside the flight line at Edwards Air Force Base to witness the conclusion of the first orbital test flight of the first fully functional space shuttle.

“The helicopter was the first sign that Columbia was on its way,” she said.

Dee knew more than most about the procedures and scheduled sequence of events of April 14, 1981 because her then-husband was an Air Force officer responsible for the upkeep of a portion of the 25-mile-long dry lake bed that would serve as a landing strip for Columbia.

Two days earlier, schoolchildren and space enthusiasts across the nation had held their breath as the Columbia, carrying astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen, blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on the first-ever orbital flight of the space shuttle.

Networks carried the launch live as NASA moved past the era of the Apollo moon missions of the 1970s, embarking on a new adventure in space dedicated mainly to low-Earth orbit missions and construction of an international space station.

The shuttle was still a work in progress when it left Launch Pad 39A on April 12, the only orbiter every to launch with a white external tank (the paint job was dropped after the second shuttle launch in order to save weight). Young and Crippen stayed aloft for 36 orbits over two days before returning to Earth.

That's the part of the flight Clifton still remembers most vividly, even though so much time has passed.

“Gosh, it seems like a hundred years ago,” she said last week.

“There are pictures where you can see the thick, black crisscrossed lines on the runway,” she continued. “They used oil trucks to lay down those lines. That was my husband's job, and he also cleared all the debris away from the runway before the landing."

Clifton said it probably wasn't all that hot in the desert at Edwards that morning, but her husband's previous Air Force assignment had done little to get them acclimated to West Coast weather.

"We had just come from Goosebay Newfoundland, Canada, so it seemed really hot," she said. "I'm sure it wasn't as hot as we thought, though."

Clifton, who moved to Cedar Bluff in 1986 to be near her retired parents, said the most memorable moment came when a helicopter began circling high over the runway, indicating that Columbia was on its final approach.

"There were a lot of VIPs and a large band," she said. "All the sudden it got really quiet. The two chase planes made a pass and then you could just see a glint off the nose of the shuttle, way off in the sky."

She said the band leader must have been in contact with the control tower in order to perfectly time what happened next.

"I still can't say this without crying," she said. "It was a very moving moment. Just when you could see that glint of Columbia in the distance, the band started playing the Star Spangled Banner. Grown men were crying."