 Currently looking at the mobile launcher platform and one of the solid rocket boosters. Ice team is on the zero level of the platform making inspections, scanning the orbiter vehicle, recording temperatures and making note of anything that looks unusual. One of the activities the team performs at this level is pulling down of some sensors that are located in between the space shuttle orbiter and the external tank. You can see the lines to those sensors are to the left hand side of the booster in between the two boosters. Once the ice team finishes their inspection they'll be coming back here to the launch control center and they'll make a report to launch controllers on their findings at the launch pad. The STS-65 crew has been preparing for about a year for this flight today. Today will be the beginning of their 14 days on orbit. And we have a picture of Bob Cabana now, commander of this flight. Just completed a weather briefing and very optimistic about today's launch. Cabana is a member of the red team for mission STS-65. Jim Halsell, also a member of the red team, flying for the first time today on the space shuttle. Mission specialist and payload commander for this flight, Rick Hebe. He's flying for the third time today on the space shuttle. He's a member of the red team. He'll be working inside the IML space lab as part of the science crew with some primary responsibility for activities going on in flight. And across the room, we've got mission specialist Carl Walls. Ready to go today? Walls is a member of the blue team. Mission specialist Leroy Chow. He's part of the space lab science crew. He's flying for the first time today. Mission specialist Don Thomas. Thomas is born in Cleveland, Ohio. He's a member of the blue team, flying for the first time today. And we have Japanese payload specialist Chiaki Mukai. He's making history in Japan as the first woman to fly into space from Japan. Mukai is a member of the red team and also part of the space lab science crew. She'll be involved in the science activities going on in the international microgravity laboratory for the flight. Commander Bob Cabana. Got pilot Jim Halsell. Flight crew will be making communications checks with the test conductors here at KSC and also at mission control. They'll be talking to the flight controllers there. Team mine is eight minutes and counting. PLT, RPG. PLT, that is complete. Okay, I copy. NTD Houston flight. I'll go flight. Yes. At this time, I'd like to give a go for the RTS weather, both the observed and forecast conditions and where go for launch. I copy. Thank you. Launch director. Director NTD 212. Go ahead. If the flight has cleared his weather constraint, there we go. And that puts us fully ready to proceed. Okay. Stand by and MMP chairman. Roger. Our weather constraint is cleared. Clear to launch. Okay. Copy. Well, with that NTD, you can take out the whole tenting at five minutes and see if we can keep the clock going for another seven. PLS copies. I'll do that. Thank you. PLS is go for orbiter access arm retract. T-minus seven minutes and counting. We've gotten a clearance to launch today. RTLS weather is going to hold out for us for a 12.43 p.m. eastern time launch. Also, the weather at our TAL site is also clear for launch today. The orbiter's access arm is being retracted away from the vehicle at this time. The assasin is still on. Copy. CDRTC. The gaseous oxygen vent hood is now being retracted away from the shuttle. Caution warning is clear, but no unexpected errors. Copy PLT. And with that Columbia, OTC, I'd like to wish you all a very successful two weeks on orbit. And with that, close and lock your visors and initiate O2 flow. And initiate an O2 flow. Let's just go for ET-LH2 pluses, ASIN. T-minus 20 seconds. T-minus 10, 9, 8. We have a go for engine start. Six, five, four, three, two, one. Booster ignition and lift off. Lift off of Columbia on a multi-nation research flight. See Columbia roll program. Roger roll, Columbia. Houston now controlling Columbia underway on its 17th trip to space. Columbia already traveling 250 miles an hour. Three engines on board Columbia now throttling back to two-thirds throttle. To prepare the spacecraft to pass through the area of maximum air pressure. And go supersonic. Columbia, go with throttle up. Columbia's three engines now back at full throttle. Whose dropster confirms a good separation of the solid rockets. Altitude now 172,000 feet. Columbia 33 miles east of the Kennedy Space Center. Now traveling 3,500 miles an hour. But he doesn't get excited until the solids lit. And then when the solids lit we took off. It was great. I wish we could show you what you were seeing out the windows. Unfortunately where the cameras placed all we could get is the shaking inside. As you can see vibrate pretty good on the solids. And we're being pushed back in our seats at their amount. But nothing compared to the last two minutes of the flight when the main engines are really accelerating us out to our orbital velocity. I'll tell you Bob from our perspective this is great footage. We just never seen anything quite like it. Pay attention we're coming up to SRB SEP pretty soon here. You can see the flash out the front windows. Jim and I have cue cards over the HUD to block the sunlight coming in so we can see all the displays. But you'll still see the flash from the SEP motors around the sides of them. All vents open. Lift off confirmed. Roger roll Columbia. SEPO sees the roll. Thank you. Your Delta state buses are looking good. Looks good. Thank you. Booster how the three engines look. Negative return. Columbia Houston negative return. Booster flight. Three engines look real good flying. Thank you. Prop you go for the photo DTO. Go. How are we doing at Miko? Nominal velocity flight. No one's required. OK. CAPCOM. ETS out. OK. Nominal. Columbia Houston nominal Miko no one's required. Go for the ETO photo DTO. Go for the ETO photo DTO. Nominal Miko. Full sex in work. 30 seconds handover. Power assist. This is Jim trying to float for the first time in his life. Go for it man. This feels really weird. I'm going to call the ground here. Jim is floating. He's in Columbia. Can't you man attend at the ploy? Nominal. What can you get into the father and the power person? Oh we got a CPL. He did it. It smells like a lab. OK. What's the next step? Open hatch for CPL. Fill the light on. All right. We're glad to see you folks come floating out of the tunnel. And now we're assured that this just in a mock-up somewhere on the ground. Actrophoresis unit is used to separate proteins. And what we're doing today is we're trying to separate a mixture of proteins by applying electric field against the current flow of the buffer solution with the sample stream of the protein. OK. I'll just kind of go from top to bottom here. OK. This is the Ramsey's facility here. And on the top is the power supply called by the control and display keyboard. Here. Where you control all the pumps and you know they put all the different things. This is the storage. One of the storage compartments. We have the different sample trays for the different experiments we're going to run. We have in here drawers and slide-out. These are the sample bags here. This is the sample of the stuff that we're going to separate. We also have some more of these sample things in the prim. And after we're done collecting, we freeze the samples of the prim. Coming down, this is the main cell here. This is where the electrophoresis happens. And here's the cell buffer pump. It's a peristaltic pump with a bunch of different tubes. That's the medium that we separate stuff in. This is the sample compartment. The sample just slides right in here. Another peristaltic pump pumps the sample up through the chamber. Where it then kind of separates like that. It's just some of the plumbing of the different fluid loops. A couple of valves. Things like that. And that in the nutshell is Randy's facility. There's different science going on in most of them. It's got centrifuges for 1G controls. You can see those in the background. It's got incubators that run at two different temperatures. And there's experiments from all over the world in Biorac. So it's a lot of fun to work because there's a lot of different things. It's got its own cooler. And down below it's got a glove box so that we can work with toxic things that we wouldn't otherwise be able to work with in space because we keep them contained inside the glove box. And here's a shot from right in front just as I'm loading some things into the centrifuge. We stopped the centrifuge, put some things in the exact same environment except that some are being spun at 1G and some are being kept at 0G. And today, just for example, besides the fruit flies, I've irrigated some rental seeds which are going to be growing in space and then we'll fix them later and sort of capture their development. Here I'm getting into storage for a nizami which lives right next to Biorac. It has a lot of similarity or a lot of relationship with Biorac. It's different in that it's got a variable speed centrifuge. Meanwhile, Chiaki is over at the workbench rack working on some experiments that will go into FFPU. Here she's borrowing the Biorac glove box to inject some fluids from one syringe into another. She's going to use these to run in the FFPU electrophoresis unit which we were able to rescue by sort of repeated IFMs earlier in the week. So we've been very happy to get to do some FFPU work because it's one of the facilities on board. And in fact, it was the last facility to repair. We've now had all the facilities working. In fact, we kind of added up over the course of the flight. We've been able to rescue significant parts of five of the 20 or so facilities on board with IFMs between the newt, removing the newt, which was required to keep the fish package alive and repairing the Eris echo machine which was required for both EDOMP and the Canadian spinal changes and microgravity. And then of course the FFPU that I already talked about and the sort of lucky touch with the fingers to get the HRM data from the RRMD. Jack is using a microscope here just as you would on the ground to look at the condition of the cells that are in these little cassettes. Here's a look at the Madaka, the fish that are in one of those little packages. Two males, two females in the lower right corner. You might be able to pick out some eggs. It's a little bit hard to tell that. And as the team traced back the last usage of that CCK mic and it was during the new injection. So it may have been left in the space lab. We're guessing right now looking by some of the gills starting to form with some of the eggs there. So they all look pretty healthy here. I can see maybe one or two possibly eggs that aren't doing so well but the other ones are all looking good. Okay Don, that's very good news. Okay, so IFMW-48, for step three, wait till the nozzle temps are greater than 200 and I'll check back when complete. We'll put it in work right away. I'm being advised you have 11 hours of already accomplished in the dump. I just wanted to ask you now that we've got a lockdown right now for the ballerite club box. Yeah, welcome inside. Thank you, Jack. You're in a real difficult timeline. Here's a reenactment. I just want to squeeze out a bottle of water on the end of the touching the syringe. The bottle of water is just floating freely and Rick is pulling back on the end of the syringe sucking the water into it with no air. It really works flat. This morning I'll give you a brief explanation about one of the major facilities we have here on IML2. This is the AAU, which is short for Aquatic Animal Experiment Unit. Essentially this is an aquarium and it's up into two halves. Over here we have the aquatic package and on the other side we have the fish package. In the aquatic package we have four water tanks. I'll pull one out here. I'll hold this up so you can see it. It's in two of the containers and in one of the tanks we have two nudes in there. In all the tanks we have an egg chamber also with many different nude eggs. I'm up to 70 or 80 eggs per water tank here. What we're doing with this experiment is having the nudes lay eggs in space and we're interested in how these eggs multiply and develop under zero gravity conditions. We'll compare these eggs to those grown on the ground and ones that have developed under 1G conditions. This is one of our red-bully nudes. One of them that I looked at just a few days ago if you were watching has laid 36 eggs already so we know we have a number of great eggs for the scientists to look at. The nudes here are a tank with fish in it called medaka. These are small killfish about the size of guppies and we have four in there, two males and two females and in this experiment we're interested in the mating behavior of the guppies, of the medaka fish here. We have goldfish. You might have seen some of the downlinks from this and I'll sign the light on there and hopefully you can get a view of some of the fish swimming by. We have six different goldfish in here and as you can see they're looping around. They don't quite know which way is up since we don't have a gravity vector here for them and we've been watching and monitoring their swimming behavior for the last couple of days. We have a door up here that we open and close to give them the day-night cycles just like they would have on the ground. OK, Dan, we have some very good video of the goldfish now. I changed it all. I tried to get it to the center right on their eyes. OK, PI's focus is very good. It's a good copy and these containers are from 107, bone 3, from 108, bone 4. Space at console 4, Leroy. We are getting downlink right now and we're about to go LOS. Go ahead, Leroy. Kimberly, before I begin T.E.I. I'd like to reposition the slime mold here. If the PI's agree, I'm going to recenter the target. That's affirmative, Leroy. The PI on the ground was just saying the same thing. We're going to have you do it after T.E.I. I bet you can go ahead. I'm really busy this morning back there. Space at console 4, Judy. Go, Chiaki. Judy, thanks for waiting and I'm ready to copy. P.O.4, right? We're going to power cycle it. That's affirmative. They were resetting some of their internal software and they need you to do a restart. Home before he goes to bed, skate through the modem back and forth with the folks back home and even you, Mario. I just have to say it's been probably a little longer than I should. I'm just recording the M.E.T. and stuff here before I get started on the readings between the commanders and pilot's seat on the flight deck. I just thought it was really neat to be able to work with equipment like this. You really adapt to microgravity very quickly and it seems totally natural. Just using a piece of equipment, setting it off to the side, letting it float and then writing something down or going off to something else. It just seems like you've been doing it all your life once you've been up here for a while. My final scene for this morning, Chiaki was able to talk to the children at Tanabashi School in her hometown, the SRX. Directly the SRX but through a bridge in Hawaii and she really enjoyed that. The children enjoyed it immensely and it really has been nice to be able to talk to school children around the world. We've covered the southern U.S. on this flight and it always is an encouragement to them and to us to hear how excited they are about space exploration and answer their questions. Looking at a new lens, well, not a new lens, a different lens on the Hasselblad camera. Same lens we always fly, but instead of the infinity stop set on the ground, we're focusing it in flight and looking at a different, a couple of different focusing screens to see how we might get more accurate pictures. We do an excellent job, as you know, documenting the changes in the Earth on our shuttle missions and the Earth is constantly changing and we want to ensure that we have the best pictures possible when we get home. It's very quiet here in Mission Control. All of Columbia's systems continuing to perform in excellent fashion. There are no issues at all in the room. Sonic Boom's announcing Columbia's arrival in the landing area. The landing gear is now down. Main gear touched down and nose gear touched down. Columbia completing its 17th voyage in space, completing 236 orbits of the Earth, rolling out on runway 33 at the Kennedy Space Center, completing 6,143,000 miles. Repositioning is completed and the probes are in transit. Thank you. On glide slope on centerline. Hey, on and on. Columbia Houston, on glide slope on centerline, surface winds 150 at four. Roger, we'll stop. Welcome home, Columbia. Excellent, excellent job. Your record of 15 days on orbit for the shuttle has brought us closer to the next giant leap for humankind when we live permanently in space aboard the International Space Station.