 It's indeed a pleasure and a privilege for the crew to be back here to share with all of you our experience in space for 15 days I'm L2 was a record breaking flight. We stayed up longer than any other shuttle And I think we did a lot of good science while we were up there I tried to stress while we were in space the importance of international microgravity lab to that This was setting the groundwork for future operations aboard International Space Station and These guys just did an absolutely super job. I I'll share with you a little bit of the the emotion after landing when we got to wheel stop. I Mission had finally come to an end and I was just so proud and so pleased with these guys You just couldn't believe the joy that I felt at wheel stop after such a successful mission And I hated to give up the orbiter when it came time for Scotty Horowitz one of the Astronauts support personnel to come inside and he said it's okay, Bob You got it all and safe now you can leave after 15 days. I was kind of attached to Columbia It was just a super spaceship But I've said all along in a lot of briefings that people just see the astronaut office You know when we fly in space. We're a small part of it Unfortunately, we're a very visible part, but it is a team effort and this was your space flight You guys just did an absolutely super job preparing us Preparing the payloads training us making sure that everything operated correctly while we were on orbit providing the support We needed to have such a successful mission So all these metals that we got today they're special for us But you should also take pride in they're being awarded to us because it was through your efforts that we were able to receive them So we'd like to thank all of you very much for your hard work And we're just really happy to be here with you and share some of these pictures. I guess we're on NASA select now So before we get going I'd like to just reintroduce the the crew here for everybody and talk a little bit about them I I can take a chance to do that. I'm my right My right hand man here my pilot Jim Halsell. This was Jim's first flight Jim had flown SR 71's in the Air Force before he came to NASA as an astronaut So he was used to go and mock three three and a half But we got him going a little faster and he thought it was pretty special No stranger to y'all is Ricky Of course Rick worked here at JSC before he was selected to be an astronaut with myself in 1985 And we were pretty proud and pleased to have two of the 85 class as the commander and payload commander on this flight Rick just I can't say enough good things about the job. He did his payload commander He the payload crew was assigned to this flight two years ahead of time And the travel and the work that these guys put in Preparing these better than 80 experiments from 15 countries around the world and six different space agencies Was phenomenal and when the orbiter crew got assigned All we had to do was get up to speed a little bit on what was going to be done on the job and show them that we Knew how to fly the orbiter but these guys were ready to go and it was an awful lot of hard work And they did a super job Carl waltz next to Rick was MS2. This was Carl's second flight You probably remember he flew on STS-51 got to do a spacewalk and took those Fantastic IMAX pictures that are part of destiny in space this time We didn't let him do anything so exotic we locked him up in a space lab for 15 days But he did get to be the commander on the blue shift for the few hours that I didn't sleep each night And he just did a super job keeping the orbiter running so these guys could do great science Dr. Leroy chow on the blue team back in the lab and I'm gonna talk about Leroy and Don together because in my mind I just can't separate them Dr. Don Thomas these guys just Unbelievable the amount of work they were doing they were bouncing from one experiment to another back there the folks at Huntsville just couldn't wear them down and I'm really proud of the work that they put forth getting the science done back in the lab They just did a super job getting everything that was asked of them completed and I Think the folks at Huntsville were surprised they could get so much out of a crew And finally last but certainly not least dr. Chiaki Mukai Chiaki our payload specialist from NASA was an alternate payload specialist on space lab J and She was well familiar with most of the experiments we were flying and was prepared to fly in space and The only problem we had with Chiaki was trying to slow her down. She has got one speed and It just goes all the time and we tried to tell her that in microgravity You don't need to go that fast. You can slow down a little bit and get things done I think we're making a little bit of an impact toward the end of the flight, but not much. She just Extremely enthusiastic hard worker and did a super job One person we don't have with us today is our alternate payload specialist Jean-Jacques Favier and Jean-Jacques was an extreme help preparing for the flight and Helping ensure that we got all the science done working at the payload operations center in Marshall So we're extremely pleased to be here and without any more words. I'd like to share some of the pictures We're gonna start out with some 70 millimeter slides if we can have the the slides first and the lights down We tried to pick slides. I'm gonna give you a little tour of the earth We're gonna start out down at the Galveston Island and work our way around The slides that we picked show changes in the earth That are significant from previous shuttle missions or else pictures that maybe hadn't been documented before on shuttle photography Of course, no slide briefing is complete without a picture of our launch and First time flyers time in was it worth all the work? I'd say it was well worth it. Yes. Well worth it. It was a right now My heart at this point the pictures this picture was taken. I think my heart is somewhere in my throat I couldn't believe the tremendous acceleration Once we got on orbit, we opened up the payload bay doors in this is a view that the guys in the blue team and Well, the red team back in the lab also didn't get to see a whole lot. It was a space lab from the outside they saw the inside of it and It's a fantastic laboratory It's set up just like a lab on earth only it's got an environment that you just can't get anywhere else We were in a microgravity environment a very fine microgravity environment for 15 days 14 days worth of science and the only thing that we need to do is do it for longer and build space station international space station so that We can have this environment and continue on the work that we've started here I will point out that I had four hairballs on board for those that don't know what a hairball is that's an astronaut that was selected in 1990 and I think this is the most that they ever had congregated at one time in microgravity and in spite of having four hairballs The orbiter was pretty clean. There wasn't a whole lot of lint in the filters That was the most most that they had allowed ever We were also extremely privileged to be airborne during the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing and We couldn't help but Draw on the similarities between the missions in some ways or well first off we were extremely proud to be aboard Columbia not only the the Maiden space shuttle, but also the namesake of the command module that carried Those guys to the moon 25 years ago We also launched from the same launch pad aboard the same mobile launch platform as Apollo 11 so that was kind of special and We were trading stories down on the middeck one night and we thought it was pretty neat that we had a an Apollo Capcom Dr. Story Musgrave down on console talking to us. Everybody asked us. Well, where were you? When Apollo 11 launched or when those guys landed on the moon and we all had our stories and we said well story Where were you and the story was in the at the at the launch Kennedy when they launched in in the moaker when they landed so he had some good stories for us, too but it it certainly was neat to to look at the moon up there and think about where we've been and know that we're going to build international space station and Lay the groundwork for future exploration beyond our planet If you look real closer right in the center of that dark area on the moon, that's to see a tranquility where Apollo 11 landed Jim you want to talk about? Making sure we had good pictures One of the unavoidable duties of the pilot is to be the janitor I think myself and Carl agree that we were we got good at taking care of all the Ship-shaped kind of duties that you need to do to stay in space for 14 days comfortably and here You see a picture of me cleaning the windows and I do do windows And it actually is more important than just from a cleanliness point of view We try to take a lot of 70 millimeter photography both color and color IR and to get the best possible photo It's important to clean the clean the windows two or even three times a day because as you can imagine as the lab guys Get a little bit of free time. They're all up at the window plastering their noses right up to the window So occasionally I'd like a good housewife or house person I would admonish them to try to keep their noses off the window And it really is important There's nothing more frustrating when you get back and you've taken all these beautiful pictures of the earth and you find out that They're a little soft They're not quite in focus and it's not because you did anything wrong with the camera It's because the windows weren't clean. So we wanted to make sure we had clean windows all the time It was a tremendous opportunity to view the earth on blue shift that we saw a lot of North Africa and we saw a lot of Australia we flew over India But I can't tell you whether I saw in or whether there was really India beneath us because of these this huge Mansoon cloud sort of hung over India for two weeks and they were just getting a tremendous amount of rain there If you look real close, you'll notice Galveston Island in Bolivar Peninsula Clear Lake areas underneath that one cloud in the picture But it really was a nice shot at Galveston Island when we went over this day if you When you look really close, it's kind of hard to see in the lighting here But you can actually see the the moody center in the in the beaches in this one area right off in there Coming down into South America. This was just a gorgeous shot looking down the Andes You can see the west coast of South America on the Right of the screen there the Andes with the dry lakes and then off that hazy area that you see on the far left of the screen there is over into the Amazon This is the real Grande River in Bolivia and what you see there is not smoke that is the wind coming down and actually picking up Dust from the river and blowing it away This is one of they've seen this before on shuttle flights. This is one of the better pictures of it this Airborne dust particulate when it gets airborne is actually a nutrient for the rainforest as it gets carried off into the rainforest Here we are over Central South America you can see some of the the biomass burning getting ready for a new planting season Again Cultivation in the rainforest area in Central South America It doesn't show up quite as clearly on this screen But this is just a gorgeous shot of Rio de Janeiro as we come to the east coast of South America You can see the runway on the island there. It was just exceptionally clear day a lot of the time South America was in the clouds, but toward the end of the mission the clouds cleared on we just had some gorgeous viewing much in the news lately Haiti on the island of Hispaniola and this is Port-au-Prince Here's another phenomenon that They had not documented with photography They knew it was happening the smoke what looks like smoke at the top of the picture there You can see the light coral area. That's actually the Bahamas were just east of Florida in the cloud That you see is actually dust it's particulate that has blown from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean and This again is a particulate matter that's in the air that gets blown into South America and is actually a nutrient that feeds the rainforest there This is in Saudi Arabia and you can see Centerpoint irrigation where they're actually bringing up deep water from an aqua fire and irrigating the land You'll notice some of the areas Bright green where it's being irrigated others where it's not in the desert is actually reclaiming some of these centerpoint irrigation systems This has been well documented in a lot of shuttle for time. Well, actually back to 1965 during Gemini. This is a lake Chad What you're seeing here in the center of the picture the the water area is approximately 15 to 20 percent The size of the lake that was there in 1965. It's something that NASA's been tracking for a long time this is Lake Turkana on the Kenya Ethiopian border where the river Omo is building a delta into the lake This lake the delta that you see in the north there You can see the mud the silt being dumped in there But the actual delta up at the top is about 400 percent larger than it was first documented back during the Gemini program Doesn't show up real well here, but in the water you see some Pinkish swirls This is the Red Sea and this is a plankton bloom in the Red Sea And it's something that they'd not seen before in the Red Sea Carl mentioned India being under water a lot or under cloud cover due to the monsoon season This is the Brahmaputra River just coming out of the Himalayas you can see the mountains the dark green area in the Upper right corner of the picture and what is normally a an extremely braided river You can see all the small little rivulets or however you want to say it, but You notice it's getting much wider as it fills with rain It just becomes a huge almost a moving lake as opposed to a river This is a Melville Island off the west coast of Australia we saw Australia quite a bit and you could see quite a bit of the agricultural burning there the fires This is in the Philippine Sea Jim took this picture and you want to talk about Sun Glenn Yeah, help me out if I can't remember I took so many pictures over the part of the fly But I Sun Glenn is a very interesting phenomenon where if you catch the angle just right reflecting back up towards you You can get some really interesting photos of what's happening not only at the surface of the water But also to a certain depth beneath it and what you see here is the surface of the ocean the start the the black splotches are Shout shadows from clouds so disregard that but the what's really interesting to the oceanographers And if I can figure out how to operate this Okay This area right in here and Bob if you help me out with a scientific name of that Well large internal waves. They're called the Suloys banga keys, but It's just the wave interaction that actually looks like a deep trough there But actually it you know if you were down on the surface of the ocean it would look level to you so from space we can see Formations in the water that can't be seen on the surface of the ocean and the oceanographers are trying to understand better how the Air masses and the water currents all interact together to develop the world's world's climates And this these could this kind of photography really helps them out This for a couple reasons we picked this slide up at the terminator Well first off we're crossing from nighttime into daylight and you can actually see the Terminator right across there, but right there. That's a huge typhoon that was up near The Philippines in Okinawa while we were flying the eye of it is actually right about in there I got a hurricane coming up that was even more well developed But very interesting to track the storms from up there, and I thought just a beautiful The earth limb with the the terminator there not often seen Jim took this shot, and if you could see this in better detail. This is just a phenomenal shot of Hawaii He was looking at the the Wake of the island as the ocean currents come by up here and It's cut off a little bit here on the size of the screen But if you look at the detail the field patterns and So you got to orient myself Pearl Harbor In the airfields. It's just it's really a fantastic shot We're gonna show you more. This is Hurricane Amelia and Jim's gonna talk about it in our video Extremely well-developed hurricane The eye here and the size of it wins Over 150 miles an hour Jim took just a tremendous shot here If I had to pick out one highlight of the whole mission from looking out the window This would be it I was minding my own business exercising on the ergometer and I see this come within the field of view so automatically I Stop exercising pick up the camera and start shooting and I got lucky in getting this picture And I think it accurately conveys the depth that we're dealing with here I'm just guessing but I guess the top of the hurricane must have been somewhere at 40 or 50,000 feet and The the side walls of the eye of the hurricane look perfectly Vertical and you could see straight down and the blue that you see in the center There is the Pacific Ocean in the eye of the hurricane It was such a powerful force of nature I actually felt that I could see the swirling in close to the eye the the wind speeds were so high It was a phenomenal sight With that we'd like to go to our crew movie and share a little bit of the motion with you here Here we are getting suited up ready to go fly Look all the way there Carl waving at everybody thumbs up. He's ready to go Leroy's ready to go This was really a gentlemanly flight for me I'm used to getting up at 2 in the morning and getting suited up The red team got to sleep in till 7 30 or something. We had virtually no sleep shift at all We were ready to go walking out in daylight instead of the middle of the night with lights shining Bringing up the end here the guys that like Cleveland an awful lot Certainly for any first-time pilot ascent is the highlight of an aviation career here We see the the three main engines igniting and from the inside you can see the vibration that we feel as the main engines light But before liftoff now we'll go back to the outside You'll see the solid rocket boosters ignite the explosive bolts fire and we are on our way There's no doubt at this point in time that we're going we're headed out of town I think the next shot will be from the inside of the vehicle and you'll get another shot of when the SRB's ignite and then once again Liftoff immediately after this the row program starts We can see the horizon out the side windows twisting beneath us and as we point the nose gently down toward the horizon Head out over the Atlantic Ocean to the east Certainly first stage is a tremendous acceleration tremendous vibration It's a exciting ride it about right now I was able to sneak a peek out my side window and already I was able to see the The sky darkened to a deep purple During a summer afternoon launch in Florida highs humidity So you can see the shock waves the condensation from the shock waves as we go supersonic Coming off the nose of the vehicle and off the external tank in a moment you're going to see an outstanding view of a Something we've never really seen before and that's a condensation shock right there Just shortly after that we have the solid rocket boosters complete their two minutes of thrusting And they separate from the vehicle you can see the large plume of smoke and this is what it looked like from the inside you can See the the separation motors fire across the windscreen and the orange plume come across the windows From that point in time for the remainder of the flight those windows were covered with a residue They kind of hampered our photography efforts from those front windows This is the thumbs up. There's Bob given a enthusiastic thumbs up shortly after solid rocket booster ignition And we are continuing on up to Mico that's 17,500 miles per hour and you saw Carl Recognize the fact that we went through 50 miles nautical miles in altitude here is Mico And you can see how we move forward in our seats as the three times our normal weight is relaxed off of us Here's a view looking out Toward the external tank as it is separated from the vehicle. There's another picture I believe taken by Don or Leroy and that's true speed. We're down at the we're coasting uphill from 70 miles Altitude at this point and you can see how fast the world is going by Once we got on orbit, we opened up the payload bay doors activated the lab and went to work for 14 days of exciting microgravity experiments here I am headed back through the tunnel to see how the guys are doing back there on a turnover between shifts Most of the time we had two people back in the lab But twice a day they traded notes to find out how the lab was operating and what was going on the the laboratory is just It's a fantastic piece of equipment and it sure certainly increases the amount of working volume that you have This was my first flight with a space lab and besides the fact that it's the world's finest microgravity laboratory It was a unique place to work because it's it's much bigger than just the inside of the flight deck in the middeck You can see all four of us are back here. That's because we're in the middle of a handover We're all handing over the notes from the previous shift to the next shift so we could keep up continuous ops We worked steady in there in their two shifts a day for the 14 days or so that we had the lab operating We had about 80 experiments Several which were life sciences two of the life sciences were looking at us as the subjects Chiakis in the lower body negative pressure device, which was managed by folks right here at JSC And I was the operator on this particular experiment Then later it'd be my turn to get into the lower body negative pressure device Who also flew a suite of experiments by a Canadian team from Vancouver? Spinal changes in microgravity, which was looking at what happens to your body and particularly what happens to your spinal column It's well known that we get a little bit taller in space and of course that means you're pulling on the spinal cord This was another experiment that was looking at changes in our ability to perform Cognitive and motor tasks. It was called pause the performance assessment workstation And it's a somewhat like a video game, but it wasn't fun This is the bio rack facility This has flown on previous missions and it's got a centrifuge there to spin some samples up to Create a 1g condition. We had other samples and there's 0g and we had many plant and small animal experiments in each of these small Containers that you see me inserting in there so we could we had a good 1g and 0g comparison between these two in space Here I'm doing the micro Looking at the microscope. We have a lot of bio technological experiment like cell culture and protein crystal growth and free-flow electrophoresis Well, the fruit flies that you see here I watched them every day over the course of the flight and the ones on the left are Microgravity as Don mentioned we had the ability to have some in 0g and some in 1g Tell you what the ones in 0g quickly learn not to try and fly here comes the German experiment using very special facility It's a slow rotating facility. It's a jellyfish to find out its gravitational sense So we have a lot of life science experiment We had more than 82 experiment and this is the goldfish and some of the goldfish doesn't have inner ear The organ so this experiment to find out how fish react to the microgravity and also how fish Orient themselves and here there is the other at a different kind of fish called medaka killfish and The researchers are pretty much excited to find out They are mating behavior and also the egg development and you can see small baby fishes These eggs are laid on earth and hatched on space and this is a young and they are developed very well And also this is a new experiment and we have such a very special Facility called aquatic animal holding facility and made by a Japanese space agency and this is a newt and and these are the baby noot and researchers are pretty much interested in the inner ear organ, which you are usually Necessary for the earth condition. So we have such a very lot of life science experiment on board The other half of our experiments focus on material science where we were looking at crystal growth and some fluid science I'm in front of one of the German facilities here called tempus, which was an electromagnetic levitating furnace We had small samples about the size of a marble that you see are heating up and beginning the glow As it's melting you can see it's oscillating a little bit and its surface is You can see the oscillation pattern there and it's a containerless facility where we can heat samples up and melt them And re-solidifying without ever touching the walls This is a another fluids experiment called the critical point facility and with this we're studying a phase transition between liquid and gas And this facility operated almost 24 hours a day non-stop for the entire 14-day mission of the science back in the lab Even let the commander back in the lab once in a while to help This is one of our fluids experiments called the bubble drop particle unit and here We have a heater near the center of this test cell where we're forming bubbles Just heating up the element there and forming bubbles like you would on your oven at home But we can do that in a controlled manner and look how they move under different temperature gradients and How they coalesce how the bubbles form together here? So you'll see a bunch of bubbles just forming and grouping together under microgravity conditions This is a French electrophoresis unit. It's one of two electrophoresis units We flew and we were trying to separate different proteins and you can see up there Where I'm pointing up to the control and display screen and if you look real close you can see two peaks This is the electrophoresis cell where the sample was actually injected and the electrophoretic separation performed Well as you know, we did a lot of repair in flight I'm spinning this bag around trying to get the air bubbles out the big problem with a couple of the units We worked on was that bubbles were in places. They shouldn't be so Jim and I worked together to try and purge the Japanese electrophoresis unit of the air so our first job was to get purge while it didn't have air bubbles in it So we're very carefully squeezing some out of one bag sucking it into a syringe This is the electrophoresis unit which wasn't really designed to be worked on in space But in fact we took it out a total of six times as we tried to purge all the air bubbles out of it This is one of the medical DSOs or experiments that we performed on the flight this particular one I'm doing has to do with seeing how the eye and the head track targets in the absence of using your inner ear I'm wearing a laser on my head You'll see a red dot on the middeck lockers there as I kind of move it between targets and try to acquire them and Sensitive electrodes will measure the electrical impulses to see how my eyes moved and an accelerometer also on the helmet unit There will measure the accelerations During our flight we exercised quite a bit and we were very interested in how the exercise Turb the microgravity environment and so we carried the microgravity measuring device Which was built right right here at Johnson Space Center, and we were able to look at the vibration modes of the cycle ergonometer Jim's heading on down from the flight deck down to the middeck We showed you the science on board now. We're going to show you a little bit about living in space for a long period of time Of course the middecks are our living quarters. It's where we sleep and eat you can see our sleep station here They really woke me up for this picture. Yeah, this wasn't staged. We got one of Jim That's a little stage, but we really woke Rick up this day. I Quickly caught on however Every morning like I do at home. I wanted to read the morning news So this is how we get our morning news in space that comes out of the tips machine Fantastic machine it really worked great, but you can see the kind of updates we got a little bit of that is news and the rest is Changes to what we were going to do each day Well, you enjoy your food up there. It's good food This was Carl's one task on board and I've never seen anybody do it better was keep track of all our consumables And he's making sure everything's right We carried the Rinsedless body baths and shampoo to keep ourselves clean and they worked surprisingly well We were able to to clean ourselves up real well It's the same same baths and shampoos at hospitals used in their intensive care units Nobody wants to live with somebody that hasn't cleaned up in 15 days. I Mentioned exercise here's a shot of me exercising. We had some very strong Courage that isolated the ergometer from the floor to help damp Oscillations I had a great opportunity to talk with the Japanese student using amateur the ham radio And it was fantastic And they are the people in my hometown was so excited It shows our pattern operations where we have an opportunity to send messages home As you can imagine it being away from home for 15 days You get a little homesick just like going to summer camp and that was always a great thing You get messages from home We were fortunate enough to be airborne for the anniversary of Apollo 11's launch and And the first steps of humans on the moon and so we Had a presentation at the time of those first steps there Jim mentioned in that still photo the importance of keeping the windows clean Jim got so carried away. He was keeping everything really clean But it really was important the Cape gave us a Fantastic vehicle and we wanted to deliver it back to them as clean as they gave it to us And as I said before we couldn't have got all those great pictures without having clean windows to shoot a motto Here's Jim getting ready to take some of those pictures while I was talking on Sarex in the background I'd like to give a tribute to all of our trainers in this case the photography training people were able to take somebody Who had never really taken pictures before and we were able to return something useful back to the experimenters here This is Australia shark Bay and then looking Toward the upper upper left portion of the screen the whole South the west coast of Australia there down to Perth It's just a beautiful view and this is the Coburg Peninsula in the northern territories of Australia there's a wildlife preserve attached to it and Just a tremendous view is Australia sort of looks like Mars. It has a reddish tinge to it as you fly over it Here's another shot this time from the video camera that Bob set up of hurricane Amelia I told you how I was exercising on the ergometer and this came into my the field of view at that point in time Bob was talking to a school in Sarex and I think by the expression on my face He knew something very special was happening outside So while he was simultaneously talking on the ham radio He fired up the the video camera and we were able to get these shots It really was an awesome hurricane This is a very special shot. I really enjoyed this one. This we're going over central South America And you're gonna see some very special things happen up here. You're gonna see Thunderstorms lightning at night. These are city lights now. I want you to look right here And you're gonna see something right there was a Meteorite entering the Earth's atmosphere you're gonna see another one right up here right there And we got the opportunity all of us during the course of the flight to just happen to be looking out the window at the Right time to see a meteor re-earning entering the Earth's atmosphere from above. I think that's a very special memory Here's our tribute to the people the Cape Months before we launched they told us to the second when we were going to launch They gave us a perfect vehicle and right here you can see the Cape That should be the shuttle landing runway right there the vertical assembly building right there the crawlway going out To the two pads our pad being that one right there. I Was amazed at the level of detail you could see just with the human eye Unfortunately all good space flights have to come to an end and here Jim and I are finally getting to do some pilot stuff We're doing the flight control system check out the day before our first entry attempt Jim is using a pilot here. It's a little portable computer We had on board actually a workstation that actually has actual orbiter software in it That he can practice landings on Unfortunately, this is as close as Jim got to landing the space shuttle But when you're up there for a long period of time it gives you a chance to look at the Displays and get your mindset on landing again. What you need to look at and what you need to prepare for for a landing So this was Jim's one view of landing and we're going to give you another one here pretty soon And this is the end of the space lab portion of the flight I'm shutting down the although we don't and I spent the day shutting the facilities down and now we're just turning out the last bits of light and Putting up closing up the hatch that closing out the tunnel part that goes out the space lab This is just after entry interface. You can see the pink glow out the windows Rick said wave at him He's got a handheld camera the flashing that you see is from the energized plasma and the overhead windows the light reflecting off Our suits and helmets and Rick's got the camera and that's what it looked like out the overhead window It's just awesome. That's not the tail of the orbiter Just the whole reentry was at night and it was just a bright pink glow You can't quite see it here, but there's little sparks flying by as pieces of the orbiter are heating up and coming off little small pieces Here is small Here we are coming on Turning on to the heading alignment cone getting ready to land at Kennedy and the space shuttle is just absolutely Fantastic machine it it launches like a rocket flies like a spaceship You can turn it into a space station and it flies like a super airplane Here's a little subsonic aero maneuver. We did a little flight test to document the Flying qualities of the vehicle get some aerodynamic data. You can see the VAB out the window there transitioning from the 18 degree outer glide slope at 300 knots to our One and a half degree inner glide slope. We were trying to touch down at 200 knots about 2,900 feet down the runway Here we are pulling out about 1,800 feet above the ground and Don't miss this. This is my big moment 300 feet above the ground Jim that was it Jim lower the gear Jim did a great job on that that's career limiting if if he doesn't get those down I'm gonna recommend he gets to fly again And here we are coming in touching down at the runway 33 a KSC And you're gonna see the shoot come out here in a minute Bob said he was supposed to touch down at 200. It was what 199.2. Yeah, I missed back a little less than a knot The drag shoot is just an extremely effective deceleration device. It really slows the vehicle down I did hardly any braking at all Jim deployed it at 178 knots. We derotated at 175 and then it's 60 knots he jettisoned it And here's a nice wheel stop shop shot Columbia's home And it was the end of an extremely rewarding and successful mission