 We think our path symbolizes the teamwork, not only here at the Johnson Space Center, but across the NASA contractor team and bridging the oceans all the way over to Russia. I think the successful accomplishment of Shannon's long-duration mission and our successful docking and joint operations aboard the Mir is a testimony to that fact. We had a pretty spectacular night launch at the end of our day. Let me tell you, there wasn't anybody that was dozing off on the flight deck, though, because as soon as we cleared the tower, the master alarm started going off. It seemed like they were going off all the way to main engine cutoff about eight and a half minutes later. Right after main engine cutoff, I said, tell the Mir that Atlantis is underway, and then we heard that Shannon even saw us all the way to main engine cutoff from the Mir, which was pretty spectacular. Right after we got on orbit, you could see it was a night launch, but where we were in the world, it was already daytime, and we saw the sunrise on orbit and immediately put Terry to work, not only on the APU subsystem, but also on the overhead panel. And this is what starts turning what is a rocket ship there for eight and a half minutes into a spacecraft for 10 days. It's just an amazingly versatile ship that we have, the orbiter. And as you can see here, Terry's in the overhead panel, and we're reconfiguring getting ready to do our ohms to burn. One of the things you might have noticed in that slide was that I wasn't sweating. One of my fellow crew members pointed out that that was the first time he had seen anyone get to orbit and not be drenched, and that's in large measure to the liquid cooling garment that we wear under our space suit now. And I tell you, we'd all like to thank the people that came up with that for us. Once we got on orbit, we had a few days to do science before we docked with the mirror. This is one of our experiments. Carl Walz is holding something called MGM, or it's called the Mechanics of Granular Materials. And it studies the behavior of materials like sand, which is what's in that container, or any other granular material, and we hope that with this experiment, engineers will be able to use the information to strengthen building codes in earthquake areas, get more information about what triggers avalanches, steady beach erosion, even the behavior of materials in silos. It was a good experiment and they got good information out of it. Next slide, please. Bill, can you back up one? I just wanted to say one more thing, please. You might notice Carl's hat there. He was wishing that he had a St. Louis Cardinal hat on. Next slide, please. We call this slide the attack of water bags. One of the things we transferred to Mir was water. Unlike us where we make water with our fuel cells when we produce electricity, they don't make water and it has to be carried up to them. And they use it, they break it apart to get their breathing oxygen, and of course they use it in their galley to drink and rehydrate food with. Each of those bags weighs about 100 pounds. We transferred 20 of them. I think it was a new record, over 2,000 pounds of water. And we figured, well, we filled eight of them before we docked. When the hatch opened, the first thing I wanted to do was, because you can see they're like sea cows floating around, was, well, Larry, where do you want all this water? And he said, just keep it on the shuttle until you get ready to leave. But we managed to find a spot for it and get it over to the Mir. Next slide, please. This is basically how we started our day. We didn't really launch with a flight plan. It was tip-stepped to us the first thing every morning. You can see the tips machine there and the roll of paper that comes out. It was pretty extensive and it took us a while to cut and paste into our flight plan every day. Jay also has on a headphone there. That's connected to our VHF radio. We use that for ship-to-ship conversation with the Mir, and also for an experiment called Sarex, which turned out to be a really good deal, and I'm sure it'll be important to long-duration crew members, because each of the crew members on 79 got to make a personal phone call to their families. I can tell you that's a real boost for morale after you've been up there for a while. We also used it to find out sports scores, things like that, with random contacts. Just to the right of Jay is one of our freezers, the blue box there. That was used to return biological samples from Shannon's stay on Mir back to Earth. Next slide. On Flight Day 4, we got ready to do our rendezvous. Bill got back to his commander's chair and picked out the rendezvous checklist and did a series of burns, of course, to start our preparation for the rendezvous. You just can't imagine what a breathtaking sight it is to see something in a crew optical sight. That is the Mir at approximately 600 feet away. Of course, we could see it much further out as the brightest star in the sky, but as soon as we had done all our mid-course correction burns, you could start to see a little glimmer, and then you'd see detail in the solar rays and then the modules. But I think this picture here at 600 feet shows you just what a remarkable complex it is that they've assembled over the last 10 years. Of course, the difference between our flight and the previous one was the orbiter was a little different with a double space-hab module. And the other thing was the Mir was a little bit different because during Shannon's stay on board, the Perota, which means nature, science module had arrived. So we had a different orbiter configuration and a different Mir configuration. This is a shot that Shannon took of our arrival, and we're inside 170 feet at this point. You can see towards the aft part of the payload bay, the double space-hab module, and then towards the forward part you can see the orbiter docking system with the androgynous docking adapter there at the top, the black part. You can also see our KU band radar slung over there on top of the radiator on the right-hand side of the orbiter. We've got our noses pressed to those overhead windows, those two little windows there, looking at Shannon because she's looking at us, as you might imagine. And you can also see the reaction control jets kind of around the periphery of the orbiter there. This is a picture shortly after we were docked, and we show you this because another change to the Mir configuration from the previous flight was in the upper corner of the picture you can see the cooperative solar array, which was deployed during Shannon's mission by Yuri Onofrienko and Yuri Usuchov. That array extends down below the nose of the orbiter during the approach. The other thing that you see extending over the forward part of the payload bay is one of the base block arrays on the Mir station that extended down within a couple feet of the overhead window. You can see it in its unfettered position right now after we've arrived and the solar arrays are trying to track the sun and gather solar energy. But during the actual docking, that particular array was cutting across the left-hand overhead window. Well, after we got the hatchers open, we got down to what I considered was the primary purpose of SDS-79. And that was the crew exchange. To accomplish this crew exchange, we had to get John Suit from the shuttle over to Mir and his seat liner and all the periphery equipment that he needed for the Soyuz in case they have to use the Soyuz as an emergency escape vehicle. And then we had to get John in his suit and then he had to get in the Soyuz and do a pressure check. And after the pressure check on the Scafandra came out okay, then the Russians would accept John as a crew person for Mir. Next slide. We got John Suit checked out and it was deemed okay. Then it was time to take my Scafandra out of the Soyuz where he'd been, you know, for the entire flight and bring it over to the shuttle and get ready to come home. And there Sasha's helping me get that out. He's the board engineer that's now up on Mir. Next slide. And this is the shot of Valeri, the commander that's now up there on Mir in the base plot. This was the third commander that I had worked with since March. So that's not bad. And then right after this shot then I was officially a member of the shuttle crew so then I was with my fourth commander. And that's not a bad way to work, you know. 40 different commanders in six months. It was pretty good. Well in addition to John and Shannon's personal gear and the transfer of that over very early in the mission, we also had for the first time a double spacehab. And part of that spacehab is where we had most of the other logistics and supplies that we were going to transfer over to Mir and then used to return the items from Mir that Shannon and the Russians were sending home. This kind of became a transfer headquarters here in this corner. That's where we kept our paperwork and our procedures. You can see there something that's also unique is the brown cloth lockers in front of me. Those were for weight savings in spacehab and you can of course see the regular hard lockers over my right shoulder. So we had a variety of different things. We could stow items in large and small. Behind my back there is where we had three batteries we were taking up to Mir and also right behind my head you can see a couple of the powered science experiments that we later were going to transfer to Mir. Also notice the colored labels on those cloth lockers. The blue ones meant they already had the return items in them. Pink ones meant items still to go to Mir and white cards meant items not to be transferred. As I mentioned we transferred some Russian things over. This is a piece of Russian hardware weight about 250 pounds. It's a gyrodine. This is Bill transferring it from spacehab through the tunnel almost into the ODS module and he'd make a straight up turn out of the picture here to go up into the Mir. These gyrodines they have several on Mir and they're used for attitude control. This is our most valuable transfer item and that Shannon is, this is much like a couple of days later in the mission, Shannon is where the gyrodine came from and she assured us she didn't weigh quite as much and we did move her for entry. Transferred us some scientific samples over just to leave in microgravity for a long period of time. This is actually a crystal growth large doer. It's actually like a big thermos bottle that used liquid nitrogen for cooling and we placed it over in Covant one behind a panel and it'll stay there until STS-81 goes and retrieves it as we retrieved two that the STS-76 crew had left over in Covant. Well you know I spent a year in building one doing management training and this is what I really spent most of my time doing. This is up on the flight deck, a typical flight deck picture. You can see the camera equipment back behind me there. One of our seats there behind me that we use on Ascent and Entry and pretty much where we spent a lot of time taking pictures out the window and you could always see mirror as you looked out the window overhead there. This was obviously a staged picture because I don't think we ever saw Tom like this the entire mission other than when they were taking this. I'll tell you he had total control of the transfer ops from start to finish. I don't think I ever saw him relax. Well here's John working in his new home on mirror. This is the pre-rota module and on the left and on the right are racks, U.S. standard equipment racks like the ones we have in the space shuttle and they're filled with the scientific equipment that we transferred from the mid-deck and the space have over to mirror. And in the foreground you can see a French experiment called Alice and so here's John in his laboratory working very hard and he just started right away and as we were undocking you could hear John on the other air to ground working very hard to fix one of the other payloads that we transferred that had a problem, the bioreactor and he got it fixed, squared away. I'm here in the F portion of the double space have with a new friend, the Orlan space suit. The Orlan space suit is the EVA suit that the Russians use and up until this time the Russians had never been able to bring one of these suits back to Earth to analyze and to see how they did after several uses in space and so we're the first ones to be able to bring an Orlan suit back and this suit will first go to Russia and be refurbished and examined by the engineers at the Zvezda company there in Russia and then will be upgraded and returned to Johnson Space Center for testing with the Space Station airlock test assembly and it will prove it out for use in the International Space Station. Now, we tried to use every possible nook and cranny for transfer and in fact on our Eris rack which is a microgravity test rack that we flew for Space Station, we filled that with Russian food containers and near the end of our mission we removed those food containers from that rack and transferred them to Mir and then we took empty food containers which you see in this picture and Shannon and Sasha, they are taping them together to be inserted back into the Eris so we had enough room to bring them home. We have a picture here in the central node and that's the Mir commander Valeriy Korzun in the node and that is where all the modules come together in Mir and we would come up through the Kristall module into this node and then you just sort of look around and try to figure out which module you wanted to go in and you'd have to look up and down and left and right and it was probably the most disoriented I've ever been in space. You'd look into the base block and you would see people in the normal attitude and then you'd pan your body 90 degrees and you would see somebody standing on what appeared to be the ceiling although what really was the module was clocked 180 degrees and so those kind of visual things happened all the time on Mir and it was very exciting, very interesting. One of the things that consumed a lot of our time during our dock phase was filming IMAX. Tom Akers and I and our commander Bill Reedy spent a lot of time setting up IMAX scenes both in Mir and on the shuttle and we've had a chance to look at those and they look really good and we're looking for the incorporation of these scenes into the new IMAX film about our phase one program to Mir and that's supposed to be released in March of 97 to a theater near you so stay tuned. This is a picture of Shannon and this is in the tunnel adapter of the space shuttle she made sure she was on the right side of the hatch when we got ready to undock. Fortunately with all the science and transfer activities going on we still managed to find time to look out the window and take pictures of our planet and we'll show you some of those pictures at the end of the slides and something else we were taking pictures of was the Mir. Next slide please. We had a detailed test numbered 1118 and it was the photo survey of the Mir so we tried to take pictures of literally every square inch of the Mir that was visible to us, the solar panels, the modules, everything that we could and the engineers here at JSC will study those pictures and we'll determine how well the materials that Mir is made out of have withstood ten years or less in space and they can use those to see where what materials have degraded, what materials have oxidized and you can use the location of some of the off-gast materials for instance that have stained another part of the Mir to determine exactly where it's coming from, what it is and we hope our space station people will avoid those types of materials on the space station. By the way, it's in the southern Indian Ocean and it's one of several that we saw while we were in space. Next slide. Well, we got ready to say goodbye and one of the things we want to do is take a picture, the first crew picture of the new Mir crew and you can see the three of them there and John and his cosmonaut suit. Next slide. Shannon says she has mixed feelings about leaving and I'm certain that she did. She treated us and heard very, very well that it was a real team up there and anyway it was time for her to say goodbye and come aboard shuttle for the trip home. Next slide. After we closed the hatches, we spent the night attached to the Mir still and then the next morning we got up and undocked and I was fortunate enough to get to do the fly around of the Mir and this is a shot from that. You can see the docking module clearly at the top of the screen. This is a picture of the Mir at the terminator and you can see the blackness on the dark side of the earth at the top and of course we're leaving the light at the bottom. People have asked me if the Mir was easy to see on the dark side and it was very easy to see. They have aviation lights, red and green and even flashing lights located on the Mir. It was very easy to see the thing during the fly around. Next slide. Our joint program with the Russians didn't stop when we undocked. One of our objectives is to do a program of earth observations of particular sites of interest to scientists both in Russia and right here at the Johnson Space Center where a fantastic group of people studies the earth from space and disseminates all that information to scientists all around the world on a continuous basis. We carried plenty of film and plenty of Hasselblad cameras to bring you back a few shots and we're just going to show you a couple here but we have several thousand more that will be showing you over the next couple of years as they trickle out of building 8. Next slide please. This is the view out the aft windows of an area that's been in the news quite a bit. This is the Middle East. The tail is pointing to the city of Jerusalem in Israel and the Jordan River connects the Dead Sea at the bottom or center of the picture to the sea of Galilee up near the top and just a fabulous area of the world to fly around. Of course it's a desert so you can see it. There's not a lot of clouds and we enjoyed very much flying over it pretty much every day. Next slide. This is an area that I saw for the first time but because it had not been cloudy. When they talk about deforestation in the rainforest this is it. This is an area the size of about half of Pennsylvania in the Brazilian state of Rondonia along Brazilian Road 364 and we've watched in pictures from the shuttle that are analyzed here at the Johnson Space Center this area just getting less and less of the dark forest and more and more of the light green farmland. Unfortunately the farmland is not usable for very long. After as little as three to four seasons the soil becomes unusable. It's just not suitable for farming and they abandon it and take the chainsaws a little further into the rainforest. Next slide please. This is an awesome example of the power of nature as well as the power of man to transform the planet. This is Typhoon Violet just northeast of the Philippines and you can almost feel the atmosphere getting sucked down into that giant low pressure area where the hole is at the eye of the storm there in the center hundreds of miles away from us. Next one. We'll end our Earth observations with a beautiful scene of the aurora in the tail of the orbiter lit up by moonlight while the stars flicker in the background there and you can see some of the stars that appear to be closer to us than the planet there. That's because there's a little air that you can actually see through and there's that yellow layer right at the top of the atmosphere that's up about 60 miles that you can see through. That is our fragile planet down here and protected by this very thin layer of Earth and we as a crew were very happy to be able to fly the spaceship that you all built and operated for us to get up there and see these beautiful sights. This is just a portrait of our crew taken in the base block of the mirror station. And the $64,000 question is who took the picture? Well that concludes the slides. This is a short movie that we'd like to show you of footage that we assembled from our mission. Our sponsor, the crew patch. This is a shooting up before we're getting ready to go. Terry Wilcott, the pilot. Jay Apt, MS-1. MS-2, Tom Akers. MS-3, Carl Walz. And John, NASA mirror number three. On our way out to the Astrovan. Still awfully, awfully dark at that hour of the morning. Let me tell you. About to light up though, big time. Six seconds there prior to liftoff. The main engines come up to thrust. And we're on our way. First master alarm. The other thing was shaking so much that Terry and I had a real time trying to read the scratch padline of what was going on. Fortunately, we had Tom there to mid-value select between the pilot and the commander. He properly informed us what was going on with our vehicle. I think the folks that were there at the Cape had a real spectacular view not only of the SRB separation here, a little after two minutes. But all the way up the east coast. We're going to get a little bit closer view here and a special camera in the umbilical wells that was able to capture that. Unfortunately, the external tank came off in darkness so there wasn't any residual light from the main engines or anything to capture that. Once we got on orbit, we opened the payload bay doors to reject some of the heat, of course, produced by the fuel cells and got a first real good look at the space have in the back end of the payload bay and the orbiter docking system and the trajectory control sensors, those boxes right on the beam in the front of the cargo bay. Very happy to see everything was in good shape. We got on to the space have a couple hours after launch, after verification that all of the atmosphere back there was good. It's the first flight of a new habitable volume. It went just great. What a wonderful place to work and have all the logistics and live and sleep. It was just huge. I mean, it was like a big building inside. Those of you who have offices around JSC know what I mean when I say this is a lot bigger than any office I've ever had. Terry's getting ready here to transfer some of the water, specifically squeezing out a sample into a sample bag for analysis on the ground and boy, it's a good thing he was in the best shape of anybody on the crew, except maybe Shannon, go do that. It was pretty hard. Here we are checking out one of the JSC experiments on board, a bioreactor, so-called it is designed to supply nutrients to all sides of a cell in three dimensions, like a two-dimensional petri dish. Cells can grow just like they do in the living body. We took sterile samples of that as John will do every week that he's up on orbit to ensure for the principal investigator or doctor up at Massachusetts Institute of Technology that everything is working well. If all goes well, we'll learn how well cartilage, like in your knees or your nose, grows up there on orbit. Here we are on the second day of the flight, preparing the active rack isolation system, a risk mitigation experiment for space station for tests. We tilted the rack out, just as people will do hundreds of times on the International Space Station in this thing about the size of a big vending machine here and about the same weight, too. We were real careful with and took all three of us to get that out there and make sure it was all in good shape. Then Carl and I went to work for what turned out to be many days of tests on board. The idea of that system was to isolate the small vibrations that you have in space for the benefit of experiments such as this one. This is a furnace that was to melt metals, centered metals are used in everything from machine tools to exotic space structures. Here we are inserting a sample into that furnace for melding and later analysis on the ground. Back in the back, Carl was examining all of his transfer items and getting everything ready for transfer and here he's getting a computer out that John will need on mirror and putting it into a bag where it can be efficiently transferred as soon as we get docked. He did a fabulous job getting everything ready so that when we docked, bang, it was ready and everything got over. It was just super. The bright star that you see in the center of the optical sight there in the middle of the way and we're going to show you just a couple times slices here. Now we're about a mile away. Now we're getting to about 600 feet and this is how we had the cockpit laid out. Terry was in the front and he was doing the mid-course burns. Jay had the master checklist and then Tom was doing the handheld laser and Carl was working the cameras while John was our communicator and that left me free to do a little bit of flying and what you can see here are the forward reaction control jets firing as we're approaching the mirror station. This is approximately 170 feet as we're continuing to close and you can see the whole mirror station at that point. Shannon's eye view of us on our approach. Here we're about 10 feet and you can see the docking module very well coming into the payload bay. This is a view out of our trust camera that was located adjacent to our docking system and you can see that the closure is just ever ever so slow. It's about a yard in 30 seconds so you almost can't walk that slowly. About this time Tom was calling pedal overlap and then when we get to 2 inches we fire close contact thrusters to just nudge the two vehicles together so that we get hard docking. And there was great rejoicing. On the other side of the hatch too. And this is Shannon in the docking module waiting expectantly for our hatch to open here and Bill is doing that right now and of course the MIR-22 crew Valeri and Sasha and Shannon are there on the other side waiting for us. So Bill goes to shake Valeri's hand and gets brought into the docking module here. And this is a view from their camera on board MIR. And of course it was a great tremendous celebration meeting together in space and of course here's Shannon and Shannon glad to be together again after about a 6 month separation since they were training together in Star City. And Shannon had the traditional greeting of bread and salt. It's a traditional Russian greeting and we celebrated together. Well with MIR hard docked to the Shuttle and the welcoming ceremonies complete it was time to go to work and we got quite a bit of the transfer operations done that first day. This is Terry and I back in the space have you can see one of the large Russian pieces of hardware we were bringing home already there occurs unit. We also did for the first time powered transfers where we had scientific experiments under power on Shuttle that we powered down and moved over to MIR. This is Jay one of two incubators that keep a controlled temperature environment for several different varieties of samples in those. Took it over to the new module on MIR of Perota and inserted it in a locker and powered it up. The transfer operations and other activities Shannon every day we were there exercised for two hours each day here on the treadmill in the base block and one of the final transfer items which Carl mentioned was the 350 pounds of Russian food we had in the Aris experiment and this is just checking to make sure we hadn't left any in before we stowed the empty containers. Now we'll take a quick look a quick tour of MIR this was my home for six months. Now as you see we're going through here we're going through the docking module and now this is in Kristall you can see that there's lots of ventilation tubes, there's lots of wires there's lots of equipment that's stored there and there's a bungee cord that sort of helps you navigate back and forth actually well first we're going to stop off here at the green house due to the slip I was fortunate and was able to get this started and it was really sort of neat to see the wheat start to grow it reminded me of Oklahoma where I used to live and for the first time just before I left the wheat was actually going to seed and so for the first time in space we had started with the seed and it had gone two seed and so I think that's just pretty neat going on this is Perota there's a module that came while I was there and it's full of various scientific equipment as you can see there's a glove box and it just worked outstanding actually everything that all the United States equipment that was there in Perota worked really really well this chair there in the middle is one of the French experiments that came up on progress and it's left there there's just lots of equipment in Mir, there's German equipment French equipment, there's the United States equipment and it's all there it's very difficult to find places to store store stuff in the back of Perota you can see the BTS and the rest of the United States experiments now this is the node and everything joins up here and when after Perota came and then after progress came Yuri pointed out to me that for the first time in the history of the station of Mir all the nodes were occupied and that was a new record that's what it was designed for and that's how it was designed oh and this is inside Soyuz which was there and there's our responders in case there was an emergency we could have gotten in Soyuz and come home and the Soyuz is still there and it's the return vehicle for Valerian Sasha this is in the base block and you can see the table back there, Valerian is back there the table was sort of the central place in Mir and somewhere else she sort of congregated there to talk talk to the ground, eat and do all the various activities that you have and then you could look the cosmonauts each had a small cabin on each side which is very nice they could keep their personal things there and then they had a little window that they could look out and this happens to be Sasha's little cabin and the pictures of his family three month old son so he had his pictures hanging up there and then all their personal equipment their toothpaste and everything to be kept in one place and then the sleeping bag was hung up on the wall and as you looked out the window when the shuttle was there then you could see the shuttle dock there also in the base block was a ham radio and we used it to talk many times we were coming up with Houston you could talk to your family and Sasha also liked to use the ham radio a lot this is another view in the base block going toward the central on the post and Valeri was headed in that direction and you could see the bungee cords that were stretched out there to help you navigate back and forth this is inspector John has just moved in it was all nice and clean and all picked up got in there and you can see I like to read I had lots of books I put them in bookcase up there and Yuri came in he looked and he said what are you doing? I said I like to have my books out I like to look at it makes me feel good and he said well what's John going to think about that and I said well he's not here and this is the back-end inspector and you can see those are the big great things there are two cameras but then those white bags are all the science equipment that we transferred over for John and they're all stacked up there and bags of science equipment stacked up to take over to the shuttle this is another one of the large storms we saw where we were up there at Typhoon Yates fortunately none of them were around KSC on the 26th they were just simply spectacular if you could see those at night you saw all kinds of lightning we had the mirror crew over to the shuttle for a dinner that we hosted we treated them to some freeze-dried local Cajun barbecue they enjoyed that very much and it was time to go unfortunately we had our formal farewell ceremony said goodbye to really two very close friends of ours Valery and Sasha and then we said goodbye to the new mirror crew member and it was a very emotional flight I'd have to say it was emotional picking Shannon up and it was emotional saying goodbye to John if you look at the hats that they're closing and if you look carefully at a still picture you can see the repair we made to it while we were up there this is the undocking early in the morning there's springs in the docking mechanism that push the two space vehicles apart and then once you get two feet away we activate the jets and then Bill gave some pulses to separate us at a more rapid rate this is a view out one of the trust camera we call it is an alternating alternate docking camera again there goes the docking module away from us we drifted out to about 150 feet and then Bill and I traded places so that I could do the fly around and my hats off to all the ground people that arranged the timing so we got pictures like this this is the southern island of New Zealand the southern Alps are on there our geologists are particularly interested in this area because it has a lot of volcanoes and some geologic faults and the mirror and another attitude during the fly around it seems to change colors depending on how close we were to the terminator it was really really beautiful this is off the coast of Australia and that's the island that the mirror is approaching right now is Fraser Island and the town of Bisbane is just up the coast from that here's the northeast part of Australia again it's one of the capes up there and what you've got on the left side and on the right side of Australia there is the Gulf of Carpeteria again we did the fly around to set up shots for the IMAX and again for a mirror photo survey then it really was time to go home we finished up the science and the packing in the back and closed the doors I couldn't figure out why Shannon wanted to watch this but then we turned our space shuttle into the re-entry vehicle that it was designed to be is the fire on the plasma that surrounds the orbiter during re-entry that stuff seems to reach a critical mass up around the tail and you get the explosions like that that give the orbiter a thump every time you see an explosion that's sunrise over my right shoulder while we're in a row there Bill we had almost a 360 degree turn to get aligned with runway 15 at the Cape and it was a right hand turn all the way around so I looked at nothing and Terry had a real nice view of the Cape got rolled out on final and it was just the most perfect day you can imagine to come back to Florida just a light breeze about 80 degrees and bright sunshine Terry put the gear down there at 300 feet doing the final flare here at about 50 feet we never did see the birds by the way coming on in and I'll tell you the orbiter just handles like a dream you could see a little bit of oscillation as the drag chute comes out nose was cushioned onto the runway by the drag chute then the dog on drag chute works so good that you just don't even need any brakes hardly at all and about 90 knots just kind of tested them just to make sure they were working and we stopped with about 3,000 feet to go there at the Kennedy Space Center we had a surprise mystery guest welcome us home I'll tell you we were just terrifically honored and proud to be there to be with Shannon and welcome her home to be the first to welcome her home I guess from Space President Clinton and Mr. Golden we got a chance to give him one of one of our crew symbols and crew hat and of course a welcome home Shannon t-shirt