Parked on the desert, Columbia had a decidedly unwarlike look. It survived its journey in remarkably fine style. A dozen or so of its 3 1,000 heat-shielding tiles had come unstuck during the thunderous ascent. But during its glowing, 2,700' F plunge through the atmosphere, a maneuver that has been likened to riding inside a meteor, not one was lost from the craft's underbelly. Only a few tiles were gouged and chipped, apparently by pebbles and other desert debris kicked up by the wheels after touchdown. After an initial going-over at Edwards Air Force Base, the shuttle will be placed atop a modified Boeing 747 for a slow, two-day piggyback return to Cape Canaveral, where the ship will be refitted for a second launch, probably in September. The astronauts will be Joe Engle, 48, and Richard Truly, 43, this mission's back-up crew.

They can hardly outdo Young, who has now made five space Rights, including a moon landing, and his rookie pilot, Bob Crippen, 43. Though their lift-off was delayed two days because of that computer failure, once they settled into the cockpit for the second try, everything went, well, like a rocket. Barely 45 min. off the launch pad, Columbia was circling the earth at an altitude of 150 miles. Before the end of the day it reached 170 miles. Meanwhile, two vessels steamed out to recover the 80-ton shells of two spent solid-fuel rockets that had parachuted into the Atlantic. When a nosey Soviet "trawler" edged into the site, the Coast Guard vessel Steadfast had to warn it off, then actually block its path, before the Russians backed off. The steel rocket frames were burned and bent a bit, but can probably be overhauled and refilled for another shot.

As always, there was in-flight banter between the astronauts and the Houston control center. When Crippen felt Houston was loading him with too many tasks at one time-realigning the inertial navigational unit, shooting a picture of the Southern Lights, confirming a message on the teletype-- he asked in mock seriousness: "You mean all that right now?" To jog the astronauts awake, Houston piped in a loud country and western ditty about the shuttle called The Mean Machine. There was a somewhat more serious moment when Vice President Bush got on the radio from Washington to congratulate them on behalf of the nation.

There were also a few minor glitches. During the first "night" in space-actually they saw the sun rise and set once during every 90-min. orbit-Young and Crippen complained about a chill in the cabin. The temperature had dropped to 37 F. "I was ready to break out the long undies," joked one of the frozen astronauts. The problem was quickly fixed with a signal from earth that pumped warm water into the cabin's temperature control system. Young and Crippen had less luck fixing a faulty flight data recorder that had stopped mysteriously. They tried to get to it with a screwdriver but found the panel over it had been too tightly screwed down (or "torqued," as NASA put it).

The most serious problem came on the second night when an alarm light flashed and a bell jolted Young and Crippen out of their reveries. It was a warning of a malfunction in a heating unit on one of the three auxiliary power units for Columbia's hydraulic systems, which control the landing gear and elevons. The heater keeps the unit's fuel from freezing up. A throw of a switch got it working again, but Columbia is such a masterpiece of engineering redundancy that any one of the units could have saved the day. Said Flight Director Neil Hutchinson: "It's absolutely amazing. We didn't have anything that is a show stopper."

The real "show stopper," of course, might have been the landing. But it was breathtakingly "nominal," NASA lingo for "perfect." Crossing the coast below Big Sur at Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound, or about 5,100 m.p.h., Crippen crowed: "What a way to come to California!" Young lost his cool only after he had artfully landed Columbia right on the runway's center line. Eager to make an exit, he urged Houston to get the reception crews to speed up their "sniffing" chores- ridding the ship of noxious gases with exhausts and fans. When he was finally allowed to emerge, 63 min. after touchdown, he bounded down the stairs, checked out the tiles and landing gear, then jubilantly jabbed the air with his fists. It was probably Young's most uncontrolled move of the entire flight.