 official mission and earlier today he chose the name. Good morning, Houston. Good morning, Paul. Dr. Thomas, you will be the seventh and final U.S. astronaut to live on the Russian space station. In view of the well-publicized mishaps with the aging space station last year, are you in any way apprehensive about the next four and a half months? Not really. I don't think that there's safety issues that I need to be concerned about. I think the Russians have done a very good job of stabilizing the situation on mere following some very serious situations last year. My concern more is just learning to live and function for a long time on a day-to-day basis in conditions which at times it might be difficult. There might be difficult temperatures and hard work and so on. And I think those are the more realistic concerns that I have. Dr. Thomas, we should point out there's an Australian native who has undergone training at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia. How is your Russian? Well, it's better than I ever thought it would be. Then again, I thought I would never need to learn Russian. I enjoy learning it. I wish it was a little better. I don't have the spontaneity of language that I have, obviously, with English, but I think I can communicate and I can understand what's being said, and that's the important thing. You have also worked in your career at the Gen Propulsion Laboratory. Do you have any messages you want to say hello to, whether you're friends in Pasadena? I still have a lot of friends there. It's a number of years since I worked there, but I enjoy the time I had there very much. It was a fascinating place to work and a wonderful place to live, and I hope the people there are watching this flight unfold. Very well, sir. Commanding the mission is Marine Lieutenant Colonel Terrence Wilcott. Colonel, this is your third shuttle mission. You've already logged more than 500 hours in space. It's a little different than flying combat aircraft, isn't it? Yes, quite a bit. As a matter of fact, we don't have anything on here to do any combat with. And we'll hope that it continues that way. Is it still as thrilling as it must have been the first time you lifted off? And I think Story Musgrave put it right when he said that he hated acid, but he loved being in space. It's definitely a thrill, and I think we all view acid as something we have to go through to get into space where we do our work. This is Air Force Major Michael Anderson's first shuttle mission. Major described the lift off for us and tell us how it was to lift off and then have to go to sleep so quickly. So I was pretty surprised by the launch. It was a lot smoother than I had expected. There was a little bit of noise, a little bit of vibration, but not nearly as much as I had expected from watching launches from outside the space shuttle. Overall, it went by pretty quickly and it was a real nice ride. Getting up on space, we had about five hours before we had to prepare to go to bed. It was a real busy five hours, and as you can imagine when it was time to go to bed, it was very difficult to do. But I grabbed myself a bite to eat and sat in the command of chair and looked out the window and watched the world go by, and essentially managed to catch a few hours of sleep. Also on board is Cosmonaut Salazon Sharapov. Cosmonaut, is this your first trip into space, and then what are your impressions? My impression is very good because it's very interesting work with my American colleagues. In every step, every day, every hour, I see that American astronauts can work hard and they always show me that Americans are better than Russians, but I want to say that Russians are the same, good guys, and angels can say it, so we have some. Do you speak better English than Dr. Thomas speaks Russian? I believe so. We'd like to go back to Colonel Wilkut now. Colonel, you're 48 years old, older than the others on the flight, I believe, but you were just a kid when John Glenn made his first spaceflight. How do you feel about having him back in the program? I think it's great that I would love to fly with him. He was at the launch last night. Did you get to meet him? I met Senator Glenn before when he came to Houston and received a lot of briefs on the science that we do on the shuttle, and he took that information back to Washington to share with the other senators. So I met him. He's a very fine and distinguished gentleman. Although it's been said that sending John Glenn back into space is not an effort to give the U.S. space program a boost, has it had that effect though? I think so. Literally 100% of the people I've talked to think it's a good idea, so I think that. But you know, NASA, we're on sort of a roll anyway. We've had with the Mars exploration, the shuttle science, the mirror program, the International Space Station getting ready to crank up. So I don't think that we really needed the boost, but it's why Senator Glenn, if that gave us one, then I'm glad to get that one too. Briefly, can you give us an idea of what some of the supplies are that you have on board that you'll be taking to the mirror? I'm one of them actually. I'm one of the main things that they're going to transfer to the mirror, and I'll be on the mirror for four months. So to support me in that period, they're taking obviously a lot of food, a lot of water, clothing, some equipment that I would need on mirror to operate with the Russian systems, but also a suite of experiments that I'll be operating during my time on mirror since that's one of the main functions that I'll have while I'm up there. The site of Earth from space, we've seen pictures and we know something of what it looks like, but still nothing of what it feels. What did it feel like for you? Well, it's breathtaking. Pictures don't do justice to the way the Earth looks with your own eyes from this vantage point. It's just a beautiful place. It's just a wonderful creation. When I first got my glimpse of Earth from up here, it's just impossible to describe. It's a fantastic view. I imagine not many African American youngsters when you were a child actually aspired to space travel or space work. How did you come upon this desire of his aspiration? Well, I think for me it was a combination of a number of things. My father was in the Air Force, so my exposure was to a lot of high-tech things, a lot of airplanes and a lot of the gadgetry that the Air Force had at the time. And also just an interest in science fiction. I was a big science fiction fan as a kid. I watched all kinds of television shows like Lost in Space and Star Trek. And I think just from watching those shows and seeing what those people were doing and from going to work with my dad and seeing what he did, just kind of developed a natural interest in me. You don't want to do something like that. Wonderful. Commander Wilkut, this is, of course, the third space mission for you. Does it get repetitive for you or does the excitement recur each and every time? We only get to do this about every year and a half if you're lucky enough to do that. So it certainly never gets repetitive. It's exciting every single time. And how did you come to the space program? Well, sort of the same way I also, I guess, was always interested in space just from the science fiction, the movies, whatever. But so I was nearing the end of my tour as a test pilot and I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. A good friend of mine that was already in the astronaut program asked me if I would be interested in that. And it seemed like a way to continue really the work that you do as a test pilot. And you get to work with a lot of very, very bright young engineers and scientists. And so it seemed like something I'd be interested in. Dr. Andy Thomas, you're, as I understand it, the last person the shuttle will deliver to the space station mere before the construction begins on the new international space station. What exactly will you do or will be doing between now and then to prepare for the construction of the new space center? You're correct. I will be the last US representative on the mere space station following six predecessors who have all done very good jobs under sometimes very trying circumstances. I'll be spending my time on the mere space station running a suite of experiments that are from US sponsorship looking at the effect mostly of long duration space flight on the behavior of the human body. And I'll also be supporting the cosmonauts in operating and maintaining the space station and keeping it flying. So I expected to be pretty busy during my time there. And that kind of experience obviously is going to feed directly into the international space station because it's going to give us guidance on how you should operate one of these large opening vehicles. Major Anderson, back to you again. If there is one space mission either conceived or yet not conceived that you'd like to be on and you'd like to be a part of what would it be? I think that's an easy question for me. I always thought it'd be nice to go to Mars and that's something that I think the space program is going to be looking at rather closely at very soon here and that's something that I think every astronaut in the program would really like to be a part of. You know a trip to another planet to explore that planet and see what's out there is something that would be very exciting for anyone.