 Thank you, Mr. Abbey, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for this opportunity to talk a little bit about SES83, as Mr. Abbey has just alluded to. It turned out to be a much different spaceflight from what we'd anticipated, but no less important in the sense that it gave a chance for all of us in this room, and in fact, all the NASA centers, the people who are listening to me around the country, to do what NASA does best, and that is, when a problem crops up, people spent that whole weekend of April 5th inside mission control working that fuel cell problem, coming up with options, coming up with ideas, trying to solve the problem, presenting options to the mission management team who then decided, hey, the right thing to do is to come home and let's think about it more when we get the crew and the vehicle safely down on Earth, and then we'll fly them again. So kudos to everybody in this audience and throughout the country who made that safe return of the vehicle and the crew a possibility. What I'd like to do now is introduce the crew perhaps in a little bit more depth for you. To my right is our pilot, Lieutenant Commander Susan Still from the United States Navy. She filled those very important front-right seat duties magnificently. It was her first flight and we were lucky to have her on board this mission. To her right, Dr. Janice Voss. Janice has her background, her academic degrees, her advanced degrees from MIT in both Aero and Astro. She was able to bring that academic background together with two prior space flights and the experience made her the right person to be a payload commander on this crew. To her right is mission specialist number two, Dr. Mike Gernhardt. Mike's a unique individual in the sense that he has a background academically in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, but he combines that with a lot of hands-on operational experience as a professional deep sea diver in the patrolling industry for a number of years. So I made him the right person to apply those skills as on the blue shift, the shift where Susan and I were sleeping. He was in charge of the orbiter and keeping the orbiter safe and running as a space lab while we were asleep and he ran the blue shift for us and did a great job there. The other experience, very experienced space flyer that we have on board is Dr. Don Thomas. Don has a background in materials science specializing in the semiconductor industry degrees from Case Western and Cornell and then a stand in the Bell AT&T labs prior to coming to us at NASA. Don and I had the very unique experience of flying together on our first flight on STS-65 back in 1994 on a mission which was very similar, almost identical to this one. Dual shift, long duration, laboratory mission. So we were able to bring, and Don in particular was able to bring that expertise to bear on STS-83 and it was magnificent having him and his experience on this mission. The last two individuals that I want to introduce to you are important in the sense that they were brought from outside the astronaut crew office because of their particular expertise. We have Dr. Roger Crouch, degrees from Tennessee Tech and Virginia Tech and his background is he was in charge of the NASA material science program for about a hundred years, is that right? Yeah. He was up at NASA headquarters really managing the material science, the microgravity science program for all of NASA for a number of years. So this was his opportunity to come back and apply not only his top level skills but also his hands-on researcher skills in the laboratory environment. We were lucky to have him on board. Finally, but certainly not least, we have Dr. Greg Lenteris. Greg has degrees from Stanford and from Princeton. His specialty is fire, combustion, which was important for this flight because that was one of two particular areas that we were trying to target all of our experiments on board Columbia and on board the microgravity science laboratory. So Greg was the right person to have on board that mission and he too on his first flight did a great job for us. So that's the crew and what we'd like to do at this time is roll the film for you. We have an 11 minute videotape to kind of show you what we plan and what actually happened on STS 83. Here's the patches designed to show in an artistic fashion combustion science and the material science that we were on board to do. Around the crew one more time, Susan Still, the pilot from Augusta, Georgia. There's Mike MS2, the flight engineer from Mansfield, Ohio. Janice Foss, payload commander from Rockford, Illinois. That's right. Cleveland, Ohio's representative, Don Thomas. Roger Crouch from Tennessee. Greg Lenteris from Numerist, New Jersey. So finally, the big day we've been training so hard for has come and what a beautiful day to go into space aboard Columbia. As we're all getting strapped in, I find that I'm not nervous at all. I'm mentally reviewing procedures and waiting with excitement for when I get to start moving switches in preparation for launch. Six seconds prior to T zero, the three main engines ignite and throttle up when the computers see good engines, the solid rocket boosters ignite. And there's no stopping us now. The vibrations I felt during launch were less than I had anticipated, which was nice. The acceleration off the launch pad was less than I've experienced catapulting off of aircraft carriers. But soon things got pretty exciting. When I started feeling the G forces build up pressing down on my chest, I knew I was accelerating faster than ever before. Zero to 17,000 miles, 17,500 miles per hour in only eight and a half minutes. Now that's pretty exciting. Now we're over 160 nautical miles from the Earth's surface. One of the first things we need to do when you get up into orbit to get into orbit configuration is open the payload bay doors. The shiny surface on the inside is a radiator. And we use that to get rid of the waste heat. I'm sure most of you know how all that works. But we have to get up with just a few hours or we have to come back because of all the waste heat that we generate on board. The next major activity for me and the payload team was getting the space lab activated. You see Roger coming in on the left there. I'm right behind him. This is our first trip into the space lab module after getting up into orbit. You can tell it's early in the flight because the module is still nice and clean. Everything is still packed away. That'll change pretty quick as we get things set up for flight. We have to get all the systems activated, the subsystem computer and the experiment computer, get that up and running so we can get heavily into science. You see Don Thomas here working on the world map computer and you can also see the space lab computer next to him. What was happening on the ground at first unknown to us but briefly made shortly made known to us was that we had a fuel cell two problem. Fuel cell two had high sub stack delta volts, which is a technical term for saying that there's the possibility that fuel cell two could have a fire. So at the upper right hand part of the screen, you see the flight control team meeting together trying to go over options, figure out what the right thing to do. The mission management team met and the right thing to do was to come on home. And here you see Chris Hadfield, our capcom telling us come on home on day four. One of the big results of the power down that we did was to shut off all non critical equipment on board. And when the first things to go back into space lab module was the lights. And you can see here I'm working with a flashlight in my mouth that was standard operating procedure for us back there to look at procedures and see what we were doing. And it made for a most interesting work experience back there. Before things got quite this interesting, the 32 science teams working in the payload operations control center at Marshall Space Flight Center had started replanting the scientific experiments. And the red team went to work doing the new p cap or the new plan for how the science was going to be carried out. The orbiter crew chipped in here. You see Susan helping on a Japanese furnished large isothermal furnace for some of the material science experiments. Greg's are doing some combustion here. Oh, that dawn doing material science still on the large isothermal furnace. I apologize for that. He's changing the samples here going with some of the samples that had shorter run times than what we'd previously anticipated doing. And you can see that he's working from a new p cap that had just been backed up that day. Mrs. Greg, sorry. Combustion was one of the important areas of research on our mission. And what I'm doing here is a suit formation experiment. So of course, is an important airborne pollutant. This is the igniter in the combustion chamber. You'll see the flame and ethylene air diffusion flame lighting. It's actually upside down here. It's forming soot. Our job at this point was to adjust the flow rate of the fuel in order to eliminate the suit formation and bring it just below the suit point. So the flow rate is being adjusted down. The next image is a laser extinction image of the same flame. And this is what the scientists on the ground used to quantify the suit formation rate in this particular flame. Another area of research was droplet combustion droplets, of course, are ubiquitous in many combustion using devices. I'm setting up the experiment here. In the next image, you'll see an actual droplet burn. The droplet is formed in between the center needles and then it stretched, released and then ignited. And then it burns from the burning rate of the droplet, the scientists can understand the chemical kinetics and the physics of the burning process. The next image is an ultraviolet image intensified. And you can see that the droplet burns all the way to extinction, which is exactly what the investigators wanted to try and see. I spent a lot of time during our four days working on the glove box experiments here. And this is one of the material science one from Northwestern University. We wouldn't have been able to do the great job we did up there without outstanding support here on the ground, both at the Johnson Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama at the Payload Operations Control Center. And our number one man there working with us was Paul Ronnie, our alternate payload specialist who did an outstanding job helping us get all the experiments done in time. We had a couple of experiments on board that were looking at hardware we might be using for the space station. This is an example of how we could upgrade an experiment as the station evolves, as you learn more about the science or improve the hardware to allow you to change experiments over the course of space station's life. This is the combustion module where at the beginning of the flight inserting the experiment mounting structure for the soot flame that Greg was talking about earlier. Halfway through the flight we'll change these out and put in a flame ball experiment that would be the second half of that combustion experiment. The very first full day on orbit, one of our first jobs was to activate some protein crystal growth experiments. And that's what Dawn and I are doing here. Protein crystals of course help the scientists on the ground understand the structure of the proteins for which they can then design drugs. Our job was to photograph the 35 millimeter photography, the activation process. One of the major challenges facing a 7 person crew like we had is to convert the ascent rocket into an orbiting laboratory. And basically you're trying to stow away about 10 pounds of potatoes in a 5 pound sack and then deploy all the various experiments. This is Janice taking an air sample in the lab, one of the tasks we do when we first activate the lab. And then here you see me working on the computer and I'm completely upside down on the ceiling and that's one of the things that we did a lot of is to try to spread the people out. Seven people on the middeck don't fit very well on the floor. Of course we have to get exercise and there's Jim doing the ergometer. Our exercise periods were compressed because of the short flight. But normally this is a very important part of our day. As you might imagine the view out the window was pretty impressive. This is the Baja Peninsula which is oriented kind of upside down. The United States is towards the bottom of the screen with Mexico up in the upper left-hand corner. This is part of the Middle East with the Nile River in the top portion of the screen. The Red Sea in the middle and Saudi Arabia towards the bottom. It's one of the prettiest parts of the world I think. This is Sinai Peninsula in the same area with the Gulf of Suez and Aqaba. You can see the Suez Canal up in the upper left. These pivot point irrigation circles are all over the deserts especially in the Middle East. They go down thousands of feet to bring up water for irrigation. One of the most spectacular sites we got to see from our short mission was Comet Hail Bop. Which you're looking at as a sequence of pictures here watching the comet actually set through the atmosphere and we're actually able to see it set beyond the limit of the earth here. You can see also the orange lights there that are down on the earth. Those are fires burning over Central Africa as we passed over there. The sunsets are spectacular although they're very short and they occur over like 10 seconds or so we get to see about 16 of them every day which makes up for the shortness. Well after a lot of unexpected quick work we had the vehicle and ship ready to come home. Here we are on the orbit day everybody suited up. Susan left flight engineer Mike there in the in the middle of me on the right. We did the deorbit burn. Made a safe and successful to fuel cell entry back into the earth's atmosphere and about this point at about Mach .9 is where I had the opportunity to fly the space shuttle for the first time. I had about 1000 practice shuttle training aircraft approaches but I had never as pilot had the opportunity to actually fly the shuttle and when I first took control of the vehicle manually I did a little pitch pulse to see how it flew. No roll pulse and I told Susan hey it's just like the STA and I think that's a tribute to our training people and system that a first-time flyer can feel that comfortable. Here we are rolling out on final approach. Don got a good view of the runway out there over over Susan's shoulder. At 2000 feet I did the preflair and at 300 feet Susan dropped the gear down. Right here we had a little bit of crosswind from my right to left as I was looking out the commander's window that was causing some concern by the people on the ground and you see that I did have to make a little correction back to the centerline to the left here and then stopped the rate by dipping the right wing down to have a zero cross the runway rate as we touched down. The vehicle touched down the whole landing task was well practiced in the shuttle training aircraft and I felt comfortable with it. As I lowered the nose Susan put the shoot out and the shoot causes a lot of drag or at least it seems that way after several days of zero gravity. The jerk that you get seems like a lot and you just have no desire to really put on the brakes you let the vehicle roll out with almost no braking. Susan drops the shoot at 60 knots and I do use the brakes here for about the first time to bring it to a full and complete stop. I found the brakes they weren't dragging I did find the nose will steering to be a fairly stiff in the sense that it reacted very quickly to any inputs that I made. After that after about an hour of medical testing we were able to get out and wave to the photographers who were gathered and here's the final word. Thanks to the hard work that's going on right now at the Kennedy Space Center that to be continued slogan is going to be true. On July 1st they're going to have the vehicle and the payload and us back out there and ready to go again and it's happening only because of the hard work that the engineers and the technicians down at the Cape are putting in on this unprecedented and record-setting turn of the vehicle and the payload. What we have next are a series of slides of some of the more interesting Earth observation sites that we that we were privileged to have the opportunity to look down on from about 160 nautical miles. This is Long Island the northern half of Long Island in the Bahamas and we didn't have a whole lot of time to look out the window but when I when I could I would look down particularly on the Bahamas which to me is the prettiest place in the world. Here you see the tongue of the ocean on the right hand side with a with a the shelf drops off from about 60 feet down to 6,000 feet and the picture doesn't really do it justice. I remember when I was in space looking at the window and just really awestruck at the beauty there and thinking that the only the second place in the world I don't want to be is there the Bahamas. The first place was was on the spaceship at the time and fortunately for us we landed we debriefed for a few days and then got two weeks off so I went straight down there and actually did some diving at this location and it was really special to to go underwater and see that environment and having your mind the same image of that place from space. It's very very awesome. This is the Nile River in Egypt and as you pass over Egypt and you see the brown deserts below you the two things that stand out one of them is the bend in the Nile River here at Luxor and what you're looking at is the Nile River on either side of the river itself. You can see the green agricultural areas where the growing crops all along the Nile and this is where the Valley of the Kings is where they found the King Tutankhamen and they're still discovering new tombs there today. Next. Another spectacular area on the Nile River is a little further down is the Aswan Dam and Lake Nassar here. The dam is just near the top center of the picture you can see it barely there a little gray structure crossing the Nile. The water levels were at near record level here when we flew over the Nile and Lake Nassar. It was due to the heavy rains that they've been having in Kenya over near the headwaters of the Nile since December of last year. This is the Indus River in Pakistan and what the scientists on the ground like to see from photos like this is the level of water in the rivers and the agricultural the amount of area the agriculture extends from the river boundaries and the buildup of the cities surrounding the river. This is the Mayan volcano in the Philippines it's the most active volcano in the Philippines. You can see the smoke still coming out the top it's erupted 47 times since the early 1600s. The most impressive part about this picture is that we were able to take it because typically there's cloud coverage over this area. They're reminding me that this is the gray well breeding ground located on the west coast of Baja. Now I'm not going to tell you that we can count whales from space at least 40 year old eyes can but what we can do is get the big picture that is what are the plankton blooms like what are the other large scale current changes that might be affecting the gray whales as they migrate down from Bering Sea down the coast of North America to this area where they feed and breed to begin the cycle for a new year. One thing that I always find fascinating is how you look at something from space and remind you of some small thing but you're seeing it on a much more tremendous scale. I see a picture like this and I think of a pebble in a stream. This is what looks like to me but what you're seeing is the peak of Guadalupe Island interacting with the atmosphere to create this wake on the leeward side of the island. I think it's fascinating just to watch how these things develop and how some really look to something as small as a pebble in water but the scientists can actually tell a lot about the environment around this island from an analyzing picture like this for example because the wake downstream of the island is a solid cloud bank they can tell that the winds at this time were less than five meters per second. Had the winds been higher you would see turbulent wakes like you see behind an airplane when the air is kind of humid and you'll see you actually see the wakes forming off the wings and you'll see the air the cloud patterns disturbed behind there with von Karman vortices forming. Since there are no vortices here they can tell at this time of year and these are other conditions the wind speeds are fairly low. We were fortunate enough especially myself who was the first time flyer to have Jim Halsall constantly telling us when things were happening that we had to be sure not to miss. Roger and I and the other crew members were spending a lot of time back in the laboratory but Jim finally said to me Greg come on up to the flight lab to the flight deck because you have to see at least one of these before we can go home and so I came up and this is what I saw it was a sunset and the difference to me was that you see this very very deep and gorgeous red at the same time as a very very bright almost a neon blue during the sunset and for me it was very very spectacular and beautiful the slide is good but it was even brighter and more gorgeous in space. Sometimes you go in and out of sunset you're able to see a little bit of three-dimensional structure and here you see the class Genesis the cloud formations and the changing cloud formations are always very dynamic and interesting here you see a cloud cover coming out of that cloud cover is a huge thunderstorm that's just balding up and in the sunset the glint off of that just gives it sort of a surreal kind of a quality.