 crew member of MIR and send him off with a tribute to his homeland. Pass that over to him as soon as we see him, I guess they're going to wake up in a half hour after us, but appreciate the words and we're off to a good start here this morning. Ready to go, start paying load, playing the loadmaster here. Houston, we're now live with you in the hab, pressed for the flight deck. Okay, yeah, I had to look through the flight data file and understand AS-01 for one of the return. Is that right? All five kits are still stowed in the AS-01. One more question for Commander Sibleyov please. The recent problems you've had with MIR's life support systems have caused quite a bit of concern in the United States. How serious were those problems in your opinion and how would you assess the station's overall health at present given the repairs that you've made and now that you have a new electron oxygen generator on board? The question is about the recent issues related to the life support systems. Could you tell us about the condition of the station at present and what's the condition of the station after the repairs you've made? You see, I'm alive and healthy, fully, smiling, so the condition of the station is just the same way. Of course, we've got now quite a bit of cargo and equipment that's old and outdated and we've either got to throw it away or take it away from the station, so we kind of pull of stuff here, but otherwise the station is fully is normal, everything is very reliable. So the problems that we had with the terminal control system was fully fully repaired, so everything's working fine. It's as a backup now, so we practically have no problems. Well just one more on those lines for you commander Sibleyov, I mean given the age of some of the components on mirror, how long do you think the station can reasonably be expected to operate in the future? What do you think about the situation between the station and what it can function with, and the fact that many components of the equipment have already been repaired? Well, we place them more often, the station will operate very long time. The station was originally planned for three to five years, so now it's here for 12 years, so it's rather more reliable than originally expected. Commander Precourt, this of course is your second visit to mirror. I'm wondering what are your general impressions of the station's health as you float around and look at everything and ask the American commander, are you satisfied, Mike Folle has a safe place to live and work for the next four and a half months? Yes, I am very satisfied. When we went over there yesterday, I could tell you that it doesn't look a whole lot different than what I remember two years ago, except for the fact it's larger now, it's two additional models. The parota and the docking module were not here when we docked on STS-71, but in addition, they've had a lot more equipment delivered, so there's not really that much more free space, and as Vasili hinted earlier, one of the problems they have is trying to find space to work. And the equipment that is no longer used on station is somewhat of a bother, and if we could find a way to unload that as we go on, it'll help them be a lot more efficient. Well, Commander, getting back to the current mission, I wonder if you can maybe give us a sense of how Jerry Leninger is feeling, how eager he is to get home to see his family, what he might have said to you since you've had a chance to chat? Jerry is ecstatic. He's had a really good mission, and I think he's feeling a real sense of accomplishment, especially now that Mike is here, he's really directly applying the lessons that he has gathered in his stay to prepare the next part of his mission. And specifically with that transfer, Jerry and Mike are working real hard right now to get the equipment for the science stowed where it's easily accessible for Mike, so he can be more efficient than Jerry was. And Jerry was pretty darn efficient, so he's got a real sense of accomplishment, he's got a lot to be proud of, and he's real happy to be coming home with us. A question for Commander Sibley of along those lines. Sir, you spent three months with Jerry Leninger, four months, I should say, with Jerry Leninger aboard Mir, and of course you already knew Mike Full. What are your thoughts about working with Americans on the station, how well do they fit in, and do they have enough training to help you and your flight engineer with station maintenance or emergencies? Well, it's always easier for me to deal with American astronauts because everyone knows their tasks, we don't interfere with each other, and we have to help one another, we never have any problems. So we say something like, hey Jerry, help us out with this, and he'll say okay, or he'll come with to me and he'll say I've got a problem and we'll help him. So we work together in this fashion, and it's very interesting. The major point is not to interfere with one another because everyone's got to know their own task, everyone's got to do their work correctly. So this professionalism is what saves us. So preparing for space is not something that takes one or two days, but it takes years, and it's the idea that you just have to answer for your actions and you have to know how to work with people. Thank you, and for Commander Precourt, changing topics a little bit here, this is the sixth in a series of course of nine shuttle mirror docking missions. Aside from helping the Russians keep the station supplied, what does NASA still have to learn from this program now that you've done six of these? Every time we come up here, we learn something new, and really our efficiency is growing immensely. I can remember just on STS-79 and 81, listening to the debriefings about the level of difficulty during the transfers to coordinate the equipment that needed to go across the hatch. We have yet another thousand pounds of equipment, yet our efficiency I think is higher based on the lessons from those previous flights. There's some incremental lessons being learned here. There's also some conceptual things about rendezvous, for example, some fairly large conceptual changes in the way we are going to approach the International Space Station are being developed using flight tests from the flights that we're doing here. If you just compare a flight test program for an airplane where you can take a flight a day and try to gain as much information with a flight every four months, you can see the difficulty in carrying those lessons forward. So, you know, six-nine flights is not a tremendous amount of flying when you've got as complex a mission as what we're trying to do. So every flight that we get is going to have immense benefit for our efficiency on the Space Station that we're building. And that's really the key here is how we can double or triple our efficiency over the coming years with the International Space Station. It's going to be four times as large, four times the volume, and we'll hopefully get more than four times the productivity out of it.