 Columbia, Houston, your wake-up this morning was provided by the 1980 U.S. Air Force Academy Drum and Bugle Corps. Good morning. Drum and Bugle Corps members up here and three former cadmigrads up here. And it was really happy hearing that song. Please copy that. This is Mission Control Houston. The wake-up music for the crew of Columbia this morning was provided by the 1980 Air Force Academy Drum and Bugle Corps featuring Cadet Susan Helms on Xylophone playing Flight of the Bumblebee. It's into what NASA hopes will be a record-setting mission. 17 days is the goal right now and joining us from space, traveling along at about 28,000 kilometers per hour, about 266 kilometers above the Earth. And I believe somewhere over Africa are five members of Columbia's crew. Let's begin with Commander Tom Henricks. Commander, first of all, the goal is 17 days. You on track right now, as I understand it, you're conserving power in an effort to stay up there and set that record. That's partly true. We plan to conserve power in any event with what we call a ruby power-down, which is an extended stay-on-orbit power-down. And midway through the midday, we hope that our management will give us the goal for that 17-day record. 17 days, I guess we have to put that in perspective a little bit because on the Russian Space Station mirror we heard last week that the crew, which has been up there for some months, will be delayed by 40 days. So the delay for the Russians exceeds our record by about three times. Give me a sense of how you and the other crew might feel about spending as long as 40 days or perhaps months in space. I'm Rick Lehan, I'm the MSR on the flight. And I actually look forward to spending more time in space after this. If we get the International Space Station up, we'll be staying up there for periods of two to three months at a time. And this shuttle flight is a prelude of things to come in that way. We're trying to figure out how the human body reacts in long-duration space travel. We get this data. We're getting good life sciences data. We'll be able to put that to work. Russians also have got some data and we'll be building a station with them and combining our resources and talents. So despite all the data that does exist between NASA and the Russians about longevity in space, there's still a lot we need to know. Is that correct? As I understand it, there are all kinds of problems. I guess you could call them problems, which astronauts encounter when they're in space, among them bone loss, muscle loss, problem sleeping, and not to mention the fact space adaptation sickness. Now, as I understand it, two-thirds of all astronauts have this space adaptation sickness and I'm not going to ask anybody here if they ever have had it. But if you could tell me what the symptoms are, how long it lasts, and what can be done about it. Okay, I'd be happy to take that one. We have been doing some excellent work up here looking for the answers of why and how those very things happen. A little bit of an example of some of the symptoms people can experience normally. The body experiences a major fluid shift immediately after the ascent is complete and this fluid shift can bring on a lot of strange symptoms such as fullness of the head, stumpy nose, stomach awareness and headaches and as it goes on and on, people get used to it and they adapt to 0G usually within hours. In our case, everybody here adapted very, very quickly. We've had just an outstanding flight from the standpoint of adaptation, so if the scientists were hoping to capture a lot of data on that on our crew, they're probably not going to get a whole lot. Our mission is looking at not only SMS, which is the space muscle sickness adaptation, but we're also looking at other areas of the life science arena to include our bone loss, which is a very, very important thing to look at when you're talking about long-duration space flight, because of bone mass losses that have been documented in the past. In addition, we've got a real special group of experiments here looking at muscular bone skeletal function and they're being done on the port velocity dynamometer machine, which we have in the background here. This has been going very well. We're hoping to bring back lots of good science for the life scientists back on Earth. In defense, you all are sort of acting as guinea pigs up there. We're going to want to talk a little bit about some of the tests that are ongoing, but let me introduce to you Alitza Vasiliva, who's sitting here beside me here at CNN Center. She has a couple of questions for you. Go ahead, Alitza. I'm interested, once you're back on Earth, how do you adapt to the Earth conditions again? What do you experience? You've had bone loss, you've had muscle loss, motion sickness. How do you feel when you get off the shuttle? You re-adapt to Earth. One of the things that happens is that you feel very heavy, because we've been floating around here. In our case, it'll be two and a half weeks. Also, your balance is a little bit off. Your inner ear, those little hair follicles tell you where gravity is. Well, we haven't been using them while we're up here in space, and so they're out of calibration. So you tend to stagger a bit, and you've never passed any policemen's DWI tests. But you re-adapt to gravity very quickly. In my case, after just one day, I go back to normal. Well, I must confess, looking at it all behind you, it looks a little bit like a health club, an orbiting health club. Now, tell me, what's it like exercising in space? I guess there's no weightlifting, right? No, believe it or not, it's pretty similar to what you would do back on Earth, except you just don't have the gravity that'll hold you down to things. So because of that, we have to use special seats, strapping different harnesses that'll keep us in one spot while we exercise. As you can see, if we let go, we just float away, and that can't happen. So right now, in the back of me, Chuck is on your gometer, and it's probably a little tough to see, but he's coming off now. He was just strapped down with a special seat and was using special pedals, racing pedals, actually, to keep himself in the contraption. And he's able to exercise and get up to about the same workload as you would down on Earth. It's actually more comfortable because you can kind of float and relax while you're exercising. Now everyone knows why they invented Velcro, I guess. Tell me, Dr. Linahan, we've been talking about the life science aspects as it relates to humans. You've got a lot of critters on board, which you're taking care of. How's all that doing? Give us kind of a broad brush on what you have going on there. We're flying some rodents and fish embryos. Actually, we're flying some white lab rats, 12 of them, and some fish embryos who study embryological development. And what we're really looking at there is they're spending their time up to space with us. And we're going to look at the developmental changes that might occur in the fish embryos due to a lack of gravity, or should I say microgravity, not a lack of gravity. And also look at the changes, physiological changes that might occur in the rats that we have and compare them to the physiology of humans when we get back, work a lot that way. I'm putting them on the treadmill. Let's talk to the payload specialist. I didn't catch who that is, who just got off the machine there. How do you feel? That's Dr. Chuck Brady, he's mission specialist number three. Well, great. In fact, exercising really helps you up here. First, a real good exercise I've had, and we're doing some studies on the maximal oxygen uptake that the body can do in space, but I feel wonderful coming off of it and good to be back with my crewmates here. You don't seem out of breath. I'm very impressed. You must be in good shape. We're coming aboard. We're signing off from Columbia, 146 miles over the air. This is Mission Control Houston. This television is from Columbia's cargo bay cameras showing the east coast of the United States. Columbia just now passing off the Atlantic seaboard. Thanks, Bob. Hanfield for Alfie. For Alfie? Susan, just to remind that oxygen tank valve should be open before the next pre-ST test for MS-1. It's scheduled in about 15 minutes from now. Okay, look, I'm going to... No, so we don't forget. Wait, the bag is spilling on the ECP control panel. It doesn't appear that it's spilling at all. And, of course, you know that the oxygen's still right.