 Well good morning and welcome to the post-flight press conference for the STS-60 mission. The crew of the mission is joining us today. The commander will introduce the rest of the crew, Charlie Bolden. And again, this was the 60th shuttle mission, the 18th flight for Discovery. And with that, I'll turn it over to the crew commander, Charlie Bolden. Thanks very much, Kyle, and welcome to everybody, wherever you are. Please quickly let me reintroduce the crew, since we've been through this before. All the way down on my far right, Ron Sega, who was our mission specialist number two. To his left, Jan Davis, who was mission specialist number one. To my immediate right, my pilot, Ken Reitler. To my immediate left, Sergei Krickloff, who was mission specialist number four. And to Sergei's left, our payload commander and mission specialist number three, Franklin Chang Diaz. So what we're going to do from here on out, we're going to show you about a 16-minute video that will give us an opportunity to explain what we thought we did. And then you can ask us questions in case we did something that you didn't think we did or we didn't do something that you thought we did. And then we'll show you some slides that are primarily geared toward Earth observations. And after that, we'll take questions and answers. So with that, why don't we go ahead and roll the video and we'll make an attempt to describe it to you as best we can. The first thing you're going to see is an advertisement from the sponsor. This is the NASA logo, the meatball that we've all come to know and love. And these are the two patches that we have come to know and love. They're both the English and Cyrillic versions of our crew patch. As is normal, we wake up, get breakfast, and then we go in and get suited up. And you'll see each of us in succession here as we go through the suit up and check out in the launch and entry suits. Everybody trying to act like we're very relaxed and it's just another day at the office, but I think all of you know better by now. We were very excited about this flight. Everything had gone very, very well in the flow so far in the countdown. And everybody but me was very confident that we were going to get off on day one. I still had it to be proved to me since I had never done it before. So it was a new and exciting experience. Everything was just about like the simulator until somebody said three, two, one, and everything started rumbling around and the engines lit off. And we knew that it wasn't a simulator anymore. This is the real thing. On time launch, beautiful morning at KSC. The feeling of those main engines and the solid rocket boosters is just incredible. Feeling of being pressed back in your seat and accelerating upwards, followed immediately by that big roll to get us aligned with our high inclination right up the east coast of the US. Not a whole lot to see out the windows because of the attitude of the vehicle. But really trying to pay attention to what you're doing inside at this point. The first stage is pretty rough. It's like riding down a country road. But once the solid rocket boosters are finished up about two minutes, they come off in a nice clean burst of energy. And then the main engines take you the rest of the way. One of the first things we do once we get on orbit is open up the payload bay doors. And this view of the payload bay, you can see the space have module and the foreground and the wake shield there. And also after the wake shield, we had a gas bridge, which included a capple bridge and the bremsat deployable and the odorax deployable. And then we get right away to space have activation. Basically, this is the first order of business for us on orbit. And Jen and I got to do that. And we found a few traces of debris common in a new type of spacecraft. But we took care of that and got down to the business of getting all the systems activated in the lab, something fairly, fairly simple to get down to work. The space have module worked very well. All of the systems worked very well. And it turned out to be a really nice environment to work in. And here we are checking out the initial systems and doing the setup of the module before we start doing the experiments in the space have. Even on the end of flight day one, we were busy doing DSO 201, which is sensory motor investigations. You see Jan in the foreground as the subject here with electrodes placed on her head. And there's Sergei as well with a small laser, which is the white thing in the accelerometer on top. He's undergoing sinusoidal head oscillations. We performed these exercises on day one, two, five, six, seven, and eight with Jan, Sergei, myself, and Ken. This was another one of the Joint Science Detail Supplemental Objectives, DSO 202, which was metabolic studies. And believe it or not, I've just inserted a catheter in Franklin's arm and if you look very closely right down there by my left hand, you saw the blood just start flowing into the tube. I was pretty excited about that. Once Charlie and Franklin were finished drawing blood from each other, then they handed it to me and I was going to work up the blood in this centrifuge. You can see that we ran that centrifuge pretty much free floating. Worked just like a gyroscope. Once the samples were taken, both urine and blood samples, we then had to freeze them to make sure that they stayed preserved until we could get back and harvest the science. We used two freezers, GN2 freezers like this, to put the samples in. This was always a pretty interesting time when you go down in the mid-deck and you see this fog and haze down there. And you wondered what these guys were doing with a GN2 freezer there. Another part of the metabolic experiment, I'm not drawing blood here, it may look like I am, but I'm actually measuring the venous pressure of the blood that we have already obtained the catheter for. It's called peripheral venous pressure, a non-invasive way to get the pressure of the veins. We also did hermetic tests on the blood as well with another little centrifuge. And that's what I'm doing here, filling up capillary tubes from the blood and then inserting them into a small hermetic centrifuge. And I'd run those for a couple minutes and then record the readings. This is the rack there in the back is called eclipse. It's one of our material processing experiments in the space ab, having to do with liquid phase sintering. It's from the University of Alabama at Huntsville. We had another rack, kind of like this one that you see here. And it was on the other side of the space ab and it was called the SEF, Space Experiment Facility. And it was probably the most interactive experiment we flew on the space ab. You see a crystal there at the bottom of the picture. The beginnings of a crystal that we grew for several couple days actually. Highly interactive with keyboard entries through a small computer. And the picture that you see there is the end when the crystal was completely formed and we get the feeling that it's a pretty good one. This was another experiment in Space Ab called OrSEP or the Organic Separation Experiment. It was actually two parts. One was a phase partitioning experiment and the other actually a live cell growth, both canisters inside. And what I was doing here was actually conducting one of the many status checks that we did. This is in what we call a CRIM. It's a commercial refrigeration incubation module. And it actually was able to keep the samples at desired temperature. This is an experiment. We expose several materials in space and grow some bio crystals. And this kind of experiment could be very important in future to understand how we could use weightlessness. And to understand what kind of weightlessness we have in space. We had several other experiments and this experiment named SEMS, record data from Space Hub, all vibration, acceleration. And we return this data back to Earth for development in future. Another experiment we had was protein crystal growth. And this is a graph on a power book that we had that shows when nucleation occurred. You can see the peak at the end. We had a laser scattering detector which detected when a crystal was actually growing and we were real excited when we saw these two peaks and the two different CRIMs that we had indicating that we had a really good crystal and hopefully we have some good results from this protein crystal growth experiment from University of Alabama, Birmingham. This is another biological experiment, life science experiment actually. We flew two cages with rats and we took care of them. This part of the experiment we show as we feed water in these cages. We had over 50 of these canisters that had different tubes in them filled with different biological experiments. We had crystal growth, we had seeds, actually seeds that were flown from LDF. We had actually miniature wasps and all kinds of different biological experiments. And we activated them by mixing two fluids together. And in some cases we used these incubators where we would take out the individual tubes and place them in the front of the incubator and monitor the temperatures and other data from those experiments. A very late addition to our experiment list was this Sterling Orbiter Refrigerator Freezer which we filled up with drink containers to check out how it worked. We also had some ice cream on board. The first time the history of space program that astronauts enjoyed truly real ice cream and we really had a good time with that. We get an opportunity to see us in our inaction here on the mid-deck as we all. The ice cream was packed in small containers like the old food containers that I think most of you became accustomed to before we started using the much more flexible ones. It was quite delicious. We had an opportunity to perform a couple of in-flight maintenance activities. This one got I think a little bit more visibility than the others. It was this collapsed rubber duct that provided a means of transporting air from the orbiter into the spacehab module. Eventually what we ended up doing was just taking the cover from our atlas, plastic cover and inserting it kind of as a stiffener on the inside of this rubber duct here and then reinstalling it and it worked very well. This is another experiment to understand what kind of environment we have on board. It's very simple but it's allowed to visually see what kind of acceleration we have on board the space shuttle. These are some of the scenes of preparing food in the mid-deck, which you probably have seen in the past. But it's a matter of just simply rehydrating containers, plastic containers with dried-out food. On Flight 8, this was a special night. We call it international night. We not only had chopsticks and Japanese food, curry chicken and so forth. We had the small Russian bread loaves as well as cheese dip that Sergei arranged to have on the flight. So we ate everything from American jerky to Japanese and Russian food on Flight Day 8. This is a more challenging way to have dessert here as Sergei I think has a cashew bounced off the flight deck lockers. So each one was more challenging than you'd expect. And here's Charlie on your agometer. Each of us had an opportunity to exercise on this basically a fixed bicycle, and we thought that was very important. We were so busy in flight, we probably would have liked to exercise a bit more than we got a chance to. Let me try to look nice. And here's a scene of just brushing teeth and basically how to maintain yourself in the environment of the space shuttle. In my case, I slept in the space hab. So not only did I transport myself down, back and forth, during the normal days, but also in the evening. We had the opportunity to send a couple of messages to the Russian people. In this case, we were singing a lullaby, spyatustali i grushki, which means tired toys are sleeping. It's a traditional lullaby right before the evening news to put all the children in the right frame of mind to go to sleep. This is during some of our RMS activities. I think actually Ron was operating the arm in that case, and I was backing him up. This is during one of the unbirthing of the wake shield. We had really good luck with the arm. It was very smooth. And our training prepared us well for these activities. We had four unbirths, actually three unbirths, I guess. And this is one of the times when we rotated the arm so that the wake shield hardware could look at different atmospheres. The horizon sensor was looking at different things and checking out the hardware on the wake shield. We noticed on flight day four that the attitude control system had a problem. And one of the attempts of diagnosis was to bring the wake shield over the overhead windows of the orbiter and look at it with a camcorder and looked at the mechanical motion. We did a growth on the port side arm in a very successful respect to vacuuming films. And we also could control it from laptop computers there, as you see on board. Very interesting experiment, plasma physics, used the wake shield as a source of voltage. And we would observe the actual changes in the luminescence of the wake shield at night with image-intensifier optical train on board. This was the deploy of Otarex. And as you can see, the balls start coming out. There were a grand total of six spheres, metallic spheres. And they were used for subsequent tracking by radar sites on the ground. Our primary site was Eglin, the Air Force Base. And there's also a backup site in Kwajalein. But this was pretty interesting to watch. And you see these balls go trailing out. And then kind of coming together again out there. And they'll probably be there for a couple of years, orbiting until they finally burn up in reentry. The next deploy that we had, and both of these occurred on Flight Day 7, was the deploy of the Bremsat satellite from the University of Bremen in Germany. Very small, lightweight satellite. And its primary objective is to do some observations of Earth's atmosphere while on orbit. And then during its subsequent reentry, which will come in a few months, to actually collect data about the makeup of the atmosphere as it comes back through. We had a very busy flight. And on Flight Day 8, we actually closed up the hab, closed the hatch out, as you can see here, and deactivated the space hab. We were really busy the night before trying to stow things. And the morning of entry, we also were very busy trying to clean up everything on the mid-deck and stow away all of our equipment and get ready to come back home after busy. And we felt a very successful flight. This was hilarious, because remember the bicycle or gometer that we were on? This is it, or pieces of it. And I remember hearing Ron and the guys down on the mid-deck going, wow! Pieces were just going everywhere as they're trying to gather them all in and put them back in their place. Time to get back into the launch and entry suits and get ready to come back. This reentry came in right across Alaska and Canada and down across the heartland of America and right in across Atlanta. It was mostly daytime, and so we didn't see a lot of the real spectacular fire that you see sometimes. But it was a very, very clean entry. We did have to go around one time because of some concern with weather. That was not a problem at all. Very comfortable just sitting there in your suits. All the work was done. There's just a matter of letting time pass and letting the weather work itself out. Weather was great. Charlie made a real nice approach over the Cape and brought discovery in for just an absolutely perfect landing. It was a great ending to a really fantastic flight as far as I'm concerned. Everybody had a lot of concerns about the weather. I think on board, we just kind of roll with the punches and roll with the flow. We were very confident when they finally told us that we had to go for deorbit. And we had had an opportunity to see the weather on our previous pass. And knowing the folk that worked the weather and knowing that Hoot was in the shuttle training aircraft making the evaluations, I was very comfortable. And like Ken said, it was a gorgeous low level. It's what it seemed like coming down across Alaska and Canada right through the heart of the US. We did deploy the drag shoot. We did a little bit different procedure than has been done before. This was the first time that we actually deployed the drag shoot prior to initiating the derotation. It was unbelievably smooth, very, very stable when the nose came down. All of your speeds end up being a lot slower than you're generally accustomed to, but it makes the orbiter very, very nice to handle. And I was very pleased with the handling characteristics of the orbiter there. This is, again, one last word from the sponsor. And that finishes our video.