On this day in 1983, at 2:32 in the morning Eastern time, Challenger left Pad 39A on STS-8 — the first night launch of the shuttle programme. Weather had held the count for a few minutes, which is why it went up in the small hours rather than the merely late ones. Liftoff thrust from the two solid boosters and three main engines came to roughly seven million pounds, and in the dark all of that becomes light: the exhaust plume lit the cloud deck and the coastline for a long way in both directions, an orange dawn arriving hours early and lasting under two minutes. Six days later the same orbiter came down at Edwards in the dark too, the programme's first night landing.

Aboard were five people, and one of them was Guion Bluford — Guy Bluford, aerospace engineer, Air Force pilot, mission specialist — the first African American to go to space. He has said, more or less, that he wanted to be remembered as someone who did the job well. He did. The mission met all its planned research objectives, including deploying a communications satellite for India and running medical experiments on how bodies adapt to falling.

It is worth adding the sober part: afterwards, engineers found that a solid rocket booster nozzle had eroded far closer to failure than anyone knew at the time. The crew came home safe, and the finding fed straight into what people understood about those joints and linings.

The photograph below is the middeck: two crew members floating among stowage lockers and bungee cords, one harnessed into the treadmill. That is what the inside of a spectacle looks like — cables, straps, work.

If you are somewhere with a clear sky tonight, look up for a minute. Sometimes the bright moving dot is somebody's ordinary Sunday shift.