 That's exactly what we were going to say. How about them Indians? And we knew that would wake you up. The Indians are doing fantastic. We're so happy. Just like you all up there. This is Mission Control Houston, the wake-up music today for the crew of Discovery was Talkin' Tribe, a song about the Cleveland Indians who are about 15s that came ahead in their division at this point in the Major League Baseball season. Four of the members of the Discovery crew are from Ohio and taking a lot of pride in the Indians' performance this year. Discovery, if you're not on the flight deck, you've got a fantastic view of the Nile Delta, the Pyramids, Cairo, Suez Canal coming up. You're right. The parade is beautiful. Discovery, Houston for Mary Ellen. No action on the BDS message. And we're ready to do the event early if you are Discovery. We're ready, Mark. Discovery, this is Houston. Are you ready for the event? Houston, Discovery, we are ready. CNN, this is Houston. Please call Discovery for a voice check. Discovery, this is CNN. How do you hear me? CNN, this is Discovery. We have you on, Claire. You guys look good this morning. We'll get started. I'm going to do a little 10-second hello and who you are and then we'll just plunge in. My order of battle here is to go Mary Ellen first and then Nancy and then Don. And if that makes, I'm going to try to do it as three separate things so you guys don't have to play past the microphone in this delay, you know, during the interview. Where are you? We're on the mid-deck of Discovery. Okay, great. I couldn't tell. It doesn't look like the mid-deck I know and love. It looks like something else behind you there. Great. Okay, here we go. This is actually the wall where we usually have sleeping bags and that's what's keeping us stable against the wall right now. I envy you. You talked about envy in the mirror gang. Geez, I envy the Discovery gang. Yeah. Okay, we're going to start with me, Joe. Here we go. We're joined by three mission specialists aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery orbiting more than 150 miles above the Earth right now. The team of scientists includes Mary Ellen Webber, Nancy Curring and Don Thomas. We're talking to them from the mid-deck of the Space Shuttle this morning. Mary Ellen, let me start with you. I'd like you to think back to launch day last week. I know this was your first trip into space. I want to know what was going through your mind as you left the Earth for the first time and what it was like to experience weightlessness for the first time. Well, it was really awesome. The thing that kept going through my mind was, we're really going. We're really going. It's really happening. And it was just incredible shaking, awesome sense of power. And that's what I was thinking about. And I was thinking ahead to what I needed to do once we got to MECO, our main engine cutoff. And at main engine cutoff, you instantly feel weightlessness. And it's pretty different. It's definitely interesting. I've done a little bit of training on a parabolic aircraft back in Houston experiencing microgravity, but experiencing it nonstop was awesome. Yeah. Did you or any of your pals get sick? One or two of us did get sick. That's correct. How bad is that and how long does it last generally? And what do you do about it? Not too bad. It comes in varying degrees with varying crew members. And we do have some medication that we can take that still lets us adapt to it while we're on the medication. But unfortunately, one of the side effects is that you get very drowsy. So typically, you only take that before you go to bed that night. But it usually takes a day or two to adapt. And right now, all five of us are up to speed. As I was preparing to talk to you this morning, I was sitting at my computer typing out questions and I discovered the A key on my computer doesn't work. Do you have problems like that when you're up there? I know I can take my computer to the computer guy here and he can fix it. Do you have somebody who can do minor repairs like that? And have you had many problems like that? Well, certainly with a vehicle that has millions and millions of parts on it. I mean, some of them are going to fail. And we do have two crew members. In this case, Nancy Sherlock, who's to the left of me and Kevin Kriegel, the pilot are trained for IFM or in-flight maintenance. And so we have a set of tools and various implements that help us fix things when they do break. And usually we can fix them. Yeah, I've been looking while we were preparing for the interview down here on Earth at a bunch of things that look like pictures through a microscope. I'm not totally sure what you're doing and how it's going to help people down here on Earth. What's your take on that? Well, that particular experiment is looking at fish embryos and it's looking at the way gravity affects embryos. In this case, fish, but it could apply to people and other animals. And even as an embryo, you're developing your sensors which will give you the indications of which way is up and which way is down. And what they're doing is they're looking at what happens to the fish that develops without gravity in that development stage. Yeah. All right, would you pass the microphone over to Nancy for a minute? Nancy, I've been a private pilot for about three months now. I've been training to do this for a long, long time. I know you've got 3,300 hours minimum, particularly in helicopters. How is it different to be on the space shuttle compared to being in a helicopter or being in a fixed wing plane on Earth? I think for the standpoint of being a pilot, I've probably seen it all before at treetop levels with night vision goggles in the Army, off-the-floor and total prop airplanes in the Army, G-38s with NASA at 41,000 feet and now the space shuttle at 260 miles and now on this mission at 160 miles. So I think in terms of aviation, I've covered basically all the ground you can cover. Is it a lot different in reality for the launch and in the practice that you've done for the landing? Is it a lot different as a pilot to bring this thing down than it would be to bring down a helicopter or an airplane? I was tremendously different, but Tom and Kevin had both been training for years to accomplish this approach of landing. I used to work as a flight simulation engineer on the airplane that we use, the shuttle training aircraft, which is an excellent simulator of the flight dynamics of the orbiter during the approach of landing phase. So they're more than ready to go. They have a minimum of 500 approaches in that airplane before they ever land the orbiter. Yeah, as the shuttle was going up, one of the things that NASA was trying to find out was how does this new improved main engine work? I'm sure you couldn't tell it ever since how it felt, but could you see any difference on the meters that you were monitoring in its performance compared to the other two? The performance of all three engines was as stable as ever. The ride up hill was a smooth. I've only had two launches, but as smooth as I've ever felt. You know, I'd use a description in second stage once the solids were off. It was more or less an electric ride. It was just as smooth as can be. The parameters of the engines all looked nominal, and all three engines operated just excellently. Yeah, well, it goes through your mind when you take off. And as you say, you've done it a few times now. What do you think about? Well, down in our classmates, we were both selected in 1990. We celebrated our fifth anniversary of being selected as astronauts yesterday. And when we came out of the hold, we gave each other a thumbs up and kind of a high five because we knew what was about to happen. And we also both had mirrors out so that we could look at the overhead windows and not only watch as the main engine flipped, but watch as we rolled heads down. So I think the second time around, you're a little calmer, perhaps. You know what to expect. You know when to put the mirror down and immediately put your focus back on the instruments that we have inside the cockpit to monitor all the parameters during the effort. Yeah, there are dozens of experiments on board. Tell me what is most interesting in those experiments to you, which if there's one or if there are a couple that are more interesting to you than the others. Well, we have a couple that I think complement each other very nicely. We have one that say protein crystal growth experiment and we're going out to interfere on crystals. We went ahead and activated that right after the deployment of the TDR satellite on the very first flight day. So those crystals have been forming. We'll continue to do so until landing time. And I'll say interfering is an antibiotic on anti-cancer drug and it's development here in space. We can develop crystals in a much more pure form. We also have another experiment called a micro-encapsulation in space which by micro-encapsulating drugs you can induce long term effects for example for vaccines. So I think in terms of pharmaceuticals we're doing quite a bit of work up here during our eight day mission. How do you think and how long do you think it will take for things that you are working on today to actually come into use particularly these medical things down here on earth? When can I go to the hospital and get a micro-encapsulated drug to give me some medicine that I need? Well particularly when you're talking about pharmaceutical testing you have a problem with the testing required for the drug and the length of time required for that due to FDA standards. So I think probably within seven years, ten years at the latest before you actually see some relative feedback into the community in general. Yeah, how's your vision? And are there any other physical changes that you are poking you and your colleagues and plotting to try to find out how your bodies are different on this trip? Well I always enjoy space because you tend to grow about one percent and being five foot it gives me a chance to be actually five foot one or five foot two for a short time. The other interesting thing that I noticed this mission much more so than my first one is that near vision, particularly adaptation from looking at far vision and backing close to perhaps a checklist or to read procedures takes much more longer period of time for your eyes to adapt to that close end field. Yeah, all right, pass the mic over to Don Thomas if you will. Obviously you've been smiling through this whole thing and I hope you'll keep smiling as we talk here. I want to find out... I'll try, Josh. ...about the experiments you're running. You're known here on Earth as the zookeeper in space. How's it going with the live animals and the eggs and the embryos? Well, as you know, we have ten pregnant rats on board. This is an experiment with the National Institute of Health that we're working in cooperation with them and the Ames Research Center. And the investigation is focusing on looking at the muscular development and also the bone loss mechanisms in rodents. And hopefully we'll be able to translate this over to humans on the Earth. It's particularly important for elderly people where you have osteoporosis, a weakening of the bones. If we can understand bone loss mechanisms in space, maybe we can understand why elderly people lose calcium and have weakening of the bones and be able to apply this to help many people back on Earth. Yeah, you're excited about this, aren't you? I'm pretty excited about it. I love the research we're doing up here and you can't get a better laboratory to work in or a greater group of people to work with than those associated with NASA here. Yeah, Space Program is getting a lot of publicity right now. Last, this month's docking mission with the MIR was pretty exciting. What you were doing, I imagine, is just as exciting to you. There's this Apollo 13 movie right now. Do you see the support for what you are doing in space growing back here on Earth? We sure do. We have an amateur radio on board here and we've been going around the Earth talking to many schools during the last five days. And the kids who are as enthusiastic today as I was when John Glenn first went up in 1962. So I really see kids being enthusiastic and these kids today are going to grow up to be enthusiastic scientists, engineers and carry our space program into the next century. Yeah, one of the most unusual things about this mission to me and I think to other people here on Earth is that it came so soon after Atlantis landed. Just a few days later. Did you have any apprehension about the fact that you were going to go up so soon after another shuttle had been in orbit? I had no apprehension whatsoever. The same people that launched Apollo 11 26 years ago yesterday are down at the cave the same caliber and we have the greatest group of people working at the Kennedy Space Center to get vehicles ready. They got Atlantis on the ground after the 71 mission and within a few days we have another team getting us ready for launch. So I think it's a tribute to the Kennedy Space Center and the great group of people down there and their can-do attitude that we were able to launch successfully right on time. Yeah, I've talked to a lot of young people in the past couple of weeks about the fact that I would be talking to you today and they said to me, well, we want to know about some of the weird things that you can do in space that you can't do on Earth or that you can't do in space that you can do on Earth. Is it true that you can't whistle? I never really whistled that well, but you can still do it up in space. What about smell and taste? One of our assignment editors said, how bad is the food up there? The food is typical like camping food. I've had better food in restaurants and I've had worse food than up here and it's good enough to get us through the mission. Some of the selections that we get to make, I really enjoy other ones. I'm not too wild about. It's really an individual thing here. As far as taste and smell goes, some astronauts experience a blandness in space where they need spicier food, but for myself, the same foods that I enjoy on Earth I enjoy up here are such as stadium mustard from Cleveland, Ohio. Now, while you guys have been up there in relative comfort, there has been a monstrous heat wave down here on the Earth. It's been above 100 degrees in the Midwest for a few days. It's been near 100 and over in the Northeastern United States. Now, you've been in space several times. I know that if you get spare time, you like to look out the window at the planet below. Does it look any different down here right now, particularly in the U.S., Midwest and Southeast? Then it has on your previous trips with all this monstrous heat. Well, I flew in space exactly a year ago. I was on orbit aboard STS-65. That was a 15-day mission. Got to look out the window a lot. And the cloud patterns have changed and some of the ocean currents are different. But basically the planet looks very similar to what it did a year ago. So there's nothing we can see up here that gives us an indication of why it's so hot. But we're welcome to share our Houston weather with the rest of the country. Last question for any of you who want to take it. What's the most amazing, surprising thing that's happened to you on your trip? The view out the window. It is just incredible and amazing. Last night before going to bed, the last thing we saw was a sunset and it was just spectacular. Words can't describe it. All right. Thank you all three for joining us on CNN today. Thank you. Good bye. Houston, CNN. That concludes the event. Discovery Houston. We're about a minute to the ZOE. We'll pick you up again at 2214. 2214, Mark. Great interview. Now coming into view from Discovery is the Baja Peninsula, the southern extreme of that peninsula, and the Gulf of California. The view in the center of the screen is Miami. So it zooms in. And now coming into view of the Bahamas, the island of Andros. This is Mission Control Houston. This view from Discovery showing a tropical depression forming in the Pacific south of the tip of the Baja Peninsula. This is an as yet unnamed storm, just a tropical depression in its early stages. Again off the Mexican coast in the Pacific. Discovery Houston, we had about 10 seconds of that pinched cable. Now we have the picture again. Okay. Again, we're a pointer right there. That's where we found pinched in the door in M57 Alpha. And the vacuum cleaner stopped. And that's where we found the pinched wire. And actually it was when we started up the vacuum cleaner going from the pantry food and WCS is when we found out that it didn't work anymore. To inspect the wire further, we had two other places. Those are two other places we discovered on the wire that also had some damage. So we cut the wire and the wire status right now is. And do you need anything further there, Houston? Kevin, if you just tell us where that spliced section is in relation to the connector cable, and otherwise we've got a good video of it. Only one break in the wire, correct? When you see the full wire coming out, that attaches to the vacuum cleaner. And we have about three feet of wire to the vacuum cleaner. And then the rest of the wire goes to the connector. Discovery, if you just hold this view, understand this is a taped downlink. We'd like to get a rotation of that spliced section so we could see all sides of it. Discovery, we have all the video we need there. Thank you. Great work.