 Good morning and welcome to the Johnson Space Center. Thank you for joining us here this morning for the joint post-flight press conference for the STS-71 and Mir 18 crew members. Now to start the conference and to introduce the rest of the crew members is the commander of STS-71 Navy Captain Robert Hoot Gibson. Hoot. Thank You Arlene and welcome to the post-flight press conference for Mir 18 and STS-71. It was a bit of a complex mission and so I'm sure the debriefing will be done in a little bit of a complex way but first let me start off and introduce the the two crews that we have here in Houston today. Seated immediately to my right our mission pilot for STS-71 Charlie pre-court. Next to Charlie our payload commander and mission specialist number one Dr. Ellen Baker. Next to Ellen our flight engineer mission specialist number two Dr. Greg Harbaugh. Seated next to Greg our mission specialist number three and the Mir 18 backup crew member Dr. Bonnie Dunbar and then we have the crew of Mir 18 starting with the board engineer Mr. Gennady Strikolov the commander of Mir 18 Vladimir Dejurov and our very own cosmonaut researcher aboard Mir 18 Dr. Norm Thigard. So at this point I would like to have the the Mir 18 crew perhaps starting off with Dr. Thigard discuss Mir 18. Normie. Thanks. We actually as the Mir 18 crew began training in February late February of the 94 and in the course of about a year Bonnie and I went through a program that was a combination it was a combination of the sorts of things we would normally do as a candidate for a whole year just that alone and then at the same time we had to train specifically for the Mir 18 flight. So that made it a little bit intensive but not overly so and we found I think by the time that we were ready to fly we had managed to acquire enough expertise enough knowledge of the systems of Mir and Soyuz to feel fairly comfortable with the mission. I won't talk a lot about the mission now I'm sure there'll be questions but I will say that Volodja told me about a week before the shuttle got there that I had seen more than almost any cosmonaut ever sees because we had gone up on a Soyuz we had seen the arrival of a progress resupply ship we had done several transfers of modules from node to node at the at the attachment node and in addition of course we had seen the Spectre module come up there and finally the shuttle at with that I think what I'd like to do is go ahead and start in with our slide in our videos we'll start with the slides first and we'll we'll try and give you some commentary first of all no nothing we do ever starts out without the emblem or the patch that was the Mir 18 patch we all had a hand in the design of that patch and so we all we all feel some ownership for it it represents of course a launch our launch Mir 18 from Baikonur in Central Asia docking with the Mir station the three months stay and then finally the arrival of the shuttle and our return to earth at Kennedy Space Center in Florida the the first concern I guess I had because it was long duration spaceflight and we didn't have any recent experience with it is what do you need to do by way of exercise to make sure that you're in good shape when you come home there is an excellent program of physical conditioning on board the Mir station we had two treadmills and a bicycle shown here is the bicycle and when the Spectre module arrived of course we receive yet another bicycle so the space station Mir can adequately provide for physical exercise and it's my personal feeling although we are certainly studying it to see if that's true that the exercise is a benefit for those people when they upon return to earth I have already had experience on the Mir station however I had to get used to the station and you although the adaptation didn't take much time that was a very atmosphere that we were used to working on the station and this slide in particular shows you how we are studying atmosphere parameters and we were studying contaminations in the atmosphere and quality of the air I would like to say that station atmosphere practically has not changed for the five years that I have not been on the board of the station Dr. Thagard and myself were measuring these parameters many times many times in different points of the station in different modules and air quality was always good we have conducted a great amount of work and a very hard work on board of the Mir station especially it was a very hard work after Spectre module docking to the Mir station it was necessary for us to activate the module and to prepare it for docking with the shuttle in order to do that we had completely replaced and routed the necessary number of cables also we prepared the power supply system of the whole complex we also prepared the station for the docking with Atlantis it took a large amount of time but we were able to fulfill this completely and all of us Gennady Norm and myself were working on the same tasks at the same time also here on the slide you can see how we were working with the power supply system of the whole station we have replaced many accumulators on the station we were preparing for docking and we were maintaining the space station we're making sure that the work with the shuttle will be sufficient and this is a very brief minute of rest yes during the day we were getting very tired and when I saw a guitar that has been on board of the station for many years I was trying to play some music and Norm Thaggart took a picture of me with the guitar this is also one of the moments on board of the station certain systems are close to the crew quarters where Norm Thaggart was sleeping in particular this is a Mir station propulsion system control panel air quality control system is located here too sometimes we had to disturb Norm because we had to work with his systems he was very understandable and he was never upset at us here my jumpsuit is open because this picture was taken prior to Chibick's experiment and we had to put on the polter 24 hours in advance and you can see that polter is on at this time Norm Thaggart was making sure that halter is on on time and halter is off on time this was actually taken obviously during the sts-7 joint mission but this was a pretty standard view to be seen on station that is right in front of the dining table we had and that wound up being pretty much the center of activity if you needed to write anything down or do planning and a lot of the experiments I conducted were conducted right from that place and also when we held our video conferences during the course of the mission we were usually pictured just as you see there in front of the dining table with the camera looking in that direction and Veloja and Gennady here are preparing for their EVA and I saw a lot of this there is an actual model of the Mir station and they would on the eve of the EVAs of their space walks get out the model and discuss among themselves and how they were going to do it what handrails they would use what paths they would choose to get there they had trained for that of course before flight but by the time the EVAs occurred it had already been a couple of months and it was necessary to do these sorts of reviews and apparently it worked out very well because the EVAs of course were successful and perhaps Veloja would like to comment a little about EVA preparations yes I completely agree with Norman prior to an EVA we had to model everything and simulated a few times because with time after a certain period of time a certain part certain details you forget and in order to remember them again we had to simulate every stage of an EVA on the model also during the whole period of time we were able to perform five EVAs the most difficult were the first three EVAs where we had to retract the solar arrays and relocate it with this boom cargo boom to another module and the following deployment of the solar array is as shown on this slide so it would be able to operate normally within the whole complex but on a different module Gennady might want to comment on this one I found this fascinating Gennady basically is using a metal can lid for one of his schematics for work that he has to do we were proposed to perform a job to transfer a part of the power after we relocated the solar arrays to quant one module we were routing electrical cables for power transfer from this battery to other modules sometimes we were using all means even drawing schematics on such unusual parts this is a new module it's shown right after docking with the equipment that came in that module and as you can see on the slide we were not even able to uninstall it and activate it this yellow part is a mirasque equipment which is going to be installed by mere 19 crew by Anatoly Solovyov and Nikolai Budarin when they perform an EVA and I'm guilty of putting this slide in there the STS-70 crew 71 crew actually never saw this view this is the base block the core module and it's basically taken from that dining table that you saw before looking toward the central post which is the post from which the entire complex is controlled and we went through and did a bit of housekeeping just before the shuttle arrived but in the course of many months mission you do things for convenience and that is if you use an object you place it back in a place that's convenient for you however because we wanted to be good good host and present a nice clean station the 71 crew never saw this because the day before they arrived we went through especially Veloja in the core module and cleaned everything up and that's the slides I think we have a bit of a video perhaps about 15 minutes so maybe we can go right into the video and that is the mere 18 crew of course you could see the world and then the course of three months we got to see a lot of the world however we thought we'd show one that's familiar to a lot of our viewers that is Houston we had many passes over Houston this was one of the better passes it was almost directly over the city and as you can see it's virtually a cloudless day and as a Floridian I couldn't resist sticking this one in there we also had a lot of nice passes over Russia we didn't get so many good pictures over Russia simply because in those passes we were usually on communications with Mission Control Center in Moscow there is a I always wondered how do the cosmonauts come back looking like they're in reasonably good condition and their hair is all neat and everything and I found out and Gennady's prices were reasonable too only one dollar a symbolic price I had to pay him with beer with a haircut you have seen this picture already Gennady claims he doesn't play but actually he did a very nice job we did a lot of science during the flight this was early on I think the first metabolic session we tried to document as much of the science as we could with video Gennady we had to give him a certificate he's basically a qualified doctor now he did all of my blood draws and he did a nice job there was never a time when we didn't get the blood that we were supposed to get so I guess that's testimony to his proficiency we had had to I don't know if I ought to fully comment on that or not that was another one of our science experiments which involved a collection of biological samples and that bag was a biological samples floating about midair these were some of the air sampling slides or no I guess actually these these are the air sampling slides here the others were surface sampling but you can see the mirror station while clean still you can grow a few organisms fungi and the like but that would be true almost any place you picked here on earth in any event I can say that no one suffered from any infectious disease during the whole course of the flight again a little slide that bicycle I showed you before that I was sitting on could also be used for upper body exercises just by turning it around just as below just going here especially prior to an eva we had to work with our hands a lot so we should we would maintain our durability and save our strength for an eva we were very often using their government or both the hands exercises also twice a day we were exercising on the treadmill and once on a thermometer of course we were using the expander's also for maintaining our muscular strength we had to exercise a lot on the mirror station you can exercise in two places on board of the mirror station and also in the crystal my job there are two threadmills I've mentioned before the progress a resupply vehicle that came up there this is the progress and I apologize it probably would have been a lot more spectacular in the daytime however the system of docking is fully automated and it works very well in fact it works well enough that you can do it in the light or the dark depending on which is more convenient in this case it was more convenient to do it at dark so the entire docking sequence the final approach and docking were conducted in the dark it it did seem to me however that we got some pretty good photos when it got close in even though it was dark now this is the mirror station is seen from that progress vehicle there is a television camera mounted on the progress and here it is at this point it probably was no more than I would guess 25 or 30 feet away when it actually I took these pictures but when it actually docked I was within I was probably about where Gennady is located there from the docking node this is the docking node to which the progress is attached and we're opening the inner hatch I was going to say there was a no vibration nothing sensed or heard during the docking so it was very gentle and now you're looking at the docking cone of the progress vehicle itself and what we just opened there was again the hatch located on the station itself which is the receiving cone for that docking cone and it's pretty surprising how easy it is to open all of that and get access you do have to verify of course the pressure seals before you can start opening hatches all that went normally and you have a little tool that you use to unlatch the latch so that you can then open the hatch to the progress vehicle itself and I think after the hatch opens you can probably see a little bit of the wares that were stored inside we each for our benefit and to our joy received I think about five kilograms a piece of candies and foods and photographs and letters things from home so the resupply vehicles everyone looks forward to their arrival many of the systems on board the Mir station are regenerable but there will never be a station I suspect completely regenerable so it's still necessary to send up some supplies to the station using the progress vehicles those things amount to of course replenishment of the food supplies fuel because the station requires fuel to maintain attitude from time to time and water and again we're back in the EVA so we'll turn this over to Velodja to take you through the EVA sequences we had to spend a lot of time to prepare the spacesuit for an EVA check all systems of the spacesuit before an EVA and of course norm has helped us a lot as a third remember especially before an EVA when you have to put on the spacesuit it is very hard to work in it especially when you have to close the hatch and perform that kind of works always we would put on a spacesuit norm would help us it would close all hatches and then we would start communicate and work outside here you can see this is Gennady Strikalov is on the cargo boom and I'm helping him to move to the modules where the solar rays were retracted and on the top there is a box with the tools that you may need at any moment usually when we go EVA we take with us a little more of tools than we plan on the ground just in case for some unexpected events here you can see certain elements of EVA when we had to fix the cargo boom and move along the cargo boom yes now we were we're going to retract the solar ray norman is initiating a command to retract an electrical drive and we're just helping to fold the solar rays accurately so they would fit into a certain box and fit nicely in that box here you can see how the electrical drive itself works it was not a difficult job to retract the solar rays we were just helping the electrical drive the hard work was after we undocked the solar ray from the module and started relocating it as you see on the end of the cargo boom you see the battery its mass is approximately 800 kilograms and last a cosmonaut is on the same cargo boom and cosmonauts weighed together with a space suit is approximately 150 kilograms altogether the mass is usually one ton at the end of the cargo boom it was hard to control it because there were large moments of inertia and when you stop to control the cargo boom it still continues to move there is strong oscillation momentums and it was hard to control them well of course the public probably actually received more attention or got more attention from the docking and the approach however i think as you have seen from the video that proceeded before a lot went on before the shuttle could come up there those five EVAs had to take place and had to be successful and they were we had to move the modules from node to node because the crystal module needed to be located on what we call the minus x axis because that is the axis to which the shuttle will dock that all went beautifully thanks to good help from the soup and to a lot of hard work by the loge and gennady it's amazing i could not believe that you could sustain that much of a workload for that long a period of time but they did and they did beautifully however i think at the last we were all glad to see the shuttle come up there and not the least of the reason was just the sure the sheer beauty of seeing the shuttle because it is a beautiful vehicle no question about it and to look out through a window someone asked me well did you watch the docking on the on the monitor and i said no i looked at it through the window and that is a thrill i'll never forget so we managed to get a lot of good video as the shuttle came up there at times actually the behavior of the shuttle was too good because what happens is the movements are so precise and so controlled that it looks as though there is no motion and that you're looking at a model and not a real shuttle i had mentioned before when the progress came up and docked i heard and or felt nothing when the spectra module came up we heard nothing but we could feel just a very slight vibration however in the shuttle we're looking at a hundred ton vehicle and when it docked with the station there was definite motion of the station and perhaps at the end you can actually see a little bit of camera motion at the moment of docking again so well controlled that the only way you could tell that there was a relative motion between the station and the shuttle was the vertical tail has a tile separation lines and you could gradually see those tile separation lines that just disappear under the docking node on the crystal module but it was as though we had it on a fishing line and we're just slowly reeling it in very controlled very precise i had thought beforehand that we'd all be a bit nervous looking out and seeing two large objects so close in space but when you saw how well controlled it was all of that went away i don't think any of us were nervous except hoot might want to comment about sweaty palms or something while he was operating the controls but from our side though we never had a moment of concern at all in a smiling face of charlie even was calming us down even more and i think yes that was actually the moment because it did move us a little bit and i was trying to brace myself there in the window to stay steady with the photography