 good morning or good evening Houston time. We have you handed down through O'Khanger and just in case we can't talk to you a little bit later you do have a go from Houston and Moscow for the maneuver the Geo 5.3 maneuver at 1835. Okay very good Bill. Gracious good evening to all of you there in Houston and thanks for the wake-up music is real appropriate because we had the Russians in our wardrobes last night the Saturday night and a little barbecue and a little Max Q. Okay you should see Shannon leading us into MIR up through the docking module that you folks put on and all the walls of this compartment are made of power velcro which makes it very convenient so one place in MIR was hard to lose things when you lose stuff in MIR it's real difficult to find that these ventilator tubes that you see all around Shannon all have fans in them and you can find some things on the intakes for them that's real helpful. Shannon is gonna stop here in just a minute after passing the narrowest part of MIR here in Cristal to show us a plant growth experiment called FET which means flowers that has wheat plants and it's just in the last week had some new growth on the beautiful plants and it's just fantastic to see them growing into the sunlight up here it's a real nice refreshing green color to have aboard the outpost up here and then we'll continue on through Cristal growing towards the node the central node which is what makes all of this possible a fantastic piece of gear that allows modules to be docked to the various ports on it and that's what's made the construction of MIR station possible here we are getting into the node you can see all of the hatches and docking adapters and so forth right in the node itself it's a kind of a busy place we can look all around the node Shannon's going to take off there and get prepared for her exercise period looking into the pre-rhodomodule coming here to the greenhouse experiment which John will be spending a great deal of time on you can see an accelerometer about it on the bottom of the greenhouse experiment here as we rotate what the designers thought would be the proper attitude here's a French vestibular experiment the blue equipment you see that we've just flown over now we're going back to where we did for the five power transfers in the last couple of days the technology system BTS unit is here on one set of lockers we transfer that with no difficulty as the first power transfer here's a French laser spectrometer called Alice and here are the CGPA crystal growth units up in the next set of lockers and we transfer those we've only got one more of the power transfers to go coming out of pre-rhodomodule we go back to the node through the hatch that was used just a few months ago when pre-rhodomodule came on up take a look around the node just to show you how as you know Bella a confusing place it can be up there there's no upper down and you got to follow your nose to get to the right place and here's the orbit module of the Soyuz that has the scoffander or launch and entry suits that include now John's the folks will be using that to come on back down here when Valerian Sasha land here in a few months Shannon preparing for exercise here with the help of Sasha the flight engineer commanders I view of the control post there that's where they conduct most of their air-to-ground sessions also got a viewport there in the center and displays similar to what we have on board the shuttle in order to do control of the vehicle big white tubes on either side as you can see to carry the air back and forth and around the mirror which is a huge complex 120 tons now and once you get to that that docking node boy it's real easy to get kind of confused which way is up which way is down which way is quant which way is crystal but here we've wound up going into specter we're gonna take a peek at John here there we go there's John this is where Shannon did most of her work the specter arrived while Norm was there and he was the one that had a chance to unpack it all and Shannon kind of set up her laboratory in there until pre-wrote arrived and see her balloon and her books there John getting prepared to work here with his laptop and going through an awful lot of his inventory and getting set to go to work with some of the file management that comes up and down on their air-to-ground the pretty pretty pink tag there is intended to be read that that's kind of our signal on board that the Tom Akers devised as the red goes over to the mirror and the blue all comes back to us floating back towards the towards the node here Sasha and I spend a lot of our mornings in quantum we both love photograph in here as I'm looking out the windows and you'll see why here in a second as we get through some of the gyrodynes that help stabilize the mere station and into the at the far end of quantum that's their airlock that's used for their EVA is here are their space suits and there are three windows in any given time generally there's one of them face in the ground it's a wonderful place to be even though it's kept cold for a number of reasons not least of which to keep the space suits in good shape there's our beautiful older solar rays sticking down towards it and our radiators from one of the windows of quantum you just see the solar ray that came down right in front of the commander's chair where our planetary rocket was sitting during the rendezvous and was an entertaining site during the rendezvous now we had a really beautiful pass over the New Zealand Alps not too long ago another picture this one taken from the flight engineers cabin on board the mere station CJ is zooming in a little bit to get a picture of the overhead windows that's kind of what they were looking at while we were looking back at them during the rendezvous and docking a little bit wider view that's a spectacular and here we are in the base block where Shannon has started her exercise and software the flight engineer flight engineer one down while helping flight engineer two is getting ready to talk to folks on the amateur radio that they use there providing the docking module to us there we appreciate that bill we're gonna make a turn here into the space have kind of flying into the into the have here you can see the oil on suit stowed down there at the bottom handing up all our return bags with the blue labels I'd like to know what's been the biggest surprise for you since you have become a mere cosmonaut which happened a couple of days back I guess the right answer to that is I'm amazed at how quickly I have adapted to the mirror I've never been on the real mirror before it looks very different than the simulators I trained in and so at first I was a little concerned about that but the lawyer here and Sasha my two Russian crewmates as well as Shannon who spent six months there have really helped me out the last three days and I feel like I'm very comfortable there right now I had a great night's sleep and I feel very good on the mirror right now tell me about the emotions that you were feeling during docking the hatch opening itself and now that you're back with astronauts again just to launch it's sort of like Christmas Eve when you're a kid you know what I mean you just you have a hard time getting to sleep and you're just wondering just what's gonna happen the next day and then you know just took it one step at a time first of all they had to dock and that went just real fine then they had to have the hatch open because the docking wasn't any good and the hatch didn't get open and everything just went along just great and then finally we met each other then you could sort of start thinking about going home one of the first things you're gonna be asked to do when you get home is make recommendations for improvements to mirror to make it more habitable for future crew members what would you fix about mirror if you could basically the only suggestion that I would really have is just to have more experiments to do because that's the fun thing to do and more is better as far as I'm concerned here when you when you go on it for the first time John and if the atmosphere is clammy or anything what's the what is it like in there to tell you the truth I've heard those comments before but I thought the atmosphere there was very similar to the shuttle I find it very comfortable and what I was really surprised that is what I'm gonna call the tremendous volume inside to move around then having been with the shuttle for so many years when I come back to the shuttle now to me it looks smaller than I used to think it was so the volume in the mirror is quite large and that's the most thing that I was impressed with no I don't smell anything in there myself that's good I think I've got a couple more questions for Shannon that if people around here have come up with what are you gonna do for an encore obviously it's gonna take you a time sometimes to recover from the effects of weightlessness for six months when you get back and talk to your bosses at NASA what are you gonna say you'd like to do next well first of all someone had to ask me if I had a preference I would just like to have an interesting job I mean I just really enjoy working and I hope that I just have an interesting job but right now my vision of life I guess doesn't extend much further than landing and saying hello to my family well I can understand that Shannon were you able to see other satellites frequently as you uh orbited the earth and did you see space jump fly by at all when you had time to look out the window well once in a while you could see a few little flecks of oh I think it's like paint something like that coming off mirror and they would sort of sparkle in the sunlight you could see that and as far as satellites I saw you know the moon a lot and I saw a lot of the satellites the Jupiter a lot but I didn't see any artificial satellites very often all right quick final question for for Larry it's a question about Russian President Boris Yeltsin his health is deteriorated there's some debate about open heart surgery on him a Valery have you heard about this and be or you're concerned about the health of President Yeltsin well of course we are concerned about the health of the president and about any upcoming operations but this is a strategic question and we are primarily concerned up here with the health of the crew at this time and the performance of the crew's mission thank you very much thank all of you for joining us on CNN today