 I think there's a few lorises around the world that will be proud to hear that we played a song for them this morning, and how appropriate that there's a line in there about a couple of days, but we're up in Adam and ready to go for another great day. Thanks for the music. Currently the shuttle Atlantis is orbiting the Earth firmly locked to the mere space station as this live downlink from payload bay cameras aboard the shuttle indicate in view as the orbiter docking system linked up to the docking mechanism of the crystal science module with its omnidirectional antenna clearly in view in the upper left hand corner of this picture. In the rear of the shuttle's cargo bay the space lab science module where mission specialists Bonnie Dunbar and Ellen Baker have begun perhaps the busiest day of the five days of joint scientific operations on tap for the 10 astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the 225 ton Atlantis mere space complex. We're now getting live TV from the space lab showing the mere 18 crew back in the lab along with commander Hoot Gibson floating in the foreground as mission specialists Ellen Baker and Bonnie Dunbar perform a variety of activities mostly metabolic experiments. Vladimir Dujurov the mere 18 commander is seen next to Dunbar on the right hand side of the picture Hoot Gibson is in the foreground. In the rear of the picture was the mere 18 flight engineer he's partially obstructed from view right now. Now coming back into view that's gonna out he's strackel off the mere 18 flight engineer. Pilot Charlie pre quarters back there as well along with US astronaut Norm Thaggered who's wrapping up his fifth flight into space. Of course at the last three and a half months having been spent aboard the mere space station on board mere at the moment are the mere 19 crew who replaced Dujurov and strackel off that's Anatoly Soloviev and Nikolai Boudarin. They're in the process of checking out many of the mere's systems continuing their hand over from the mere 18 crew as they begin to set up shop for their two months stay aboard the mere they'll be relieved by another cosmonaut crew in late August. Landis Space Lab mere we're back with you to just West. Landis. Landis we confirm a nominal firing. Confirm the forward one. Roger that. Great copy Dave. 6 through 11 and then we'll stand by. I guess the data from the part one looks okay so far. Landis Hoot you acquired exactly the data that we needed. Procedurally it was just fine and we're still evaluating the data. We have no reason to think there's any problem. Special report from CNN. I'm John Holloman at CNN Center in Atlanta. We're about to go up about 217 miles above the surface of the earth to the core module of the mere space station where the 10 shuttle and mere astronauts and cosmonauts are waiting to spend about 15 minutes with us. We have to share our time with somebody else so we have to use the 15 minutes as effectively as we can. I'm going to start with Commander Hoot Gibson who just had a new baby daughter Emily as I told you a second ago Hoot it's nice to have new children. How would you when Emily gets to be eight years old explain what happened on this mission to her? Well John I suppose she's probably going to grow up hearing all about it so by the time she's eight years old she's probably going to be tired of hearing about it. I guess I'll tell her and grandchildren that it was perhaps the proudest moment of my life to be able to take part in an event such as this and an event the likes of which we haven't tried to do, haven't dreamed of for over 20 years now. It's certainly been the piloting challenge of my career and the flight operations challenge of my entire career to get to take part in an event like this and I'm really proud of the crew that I got to go up with and the folks on the ground that helped put it all together. I guess I'll try and convey all of that to little Emily as she gets bigger. How tough a job has it been really? You said it was the piloting challenge of your career. Tell me how it was during the docking in the last few seconds of that and tell me if you had time to listen or feel the two ships coming together. I've got a fax in from a viewer in Russia who wants to know that the sensations that you felt and heard and sensed as you were completing the docking. John, I'll tell you what we felt from over on the shuttle side and make sure you ask the Russian crew or the Mir 18 crew what they felt because I think they noticed more at the actual moment of docking than we did. The most demanding part of the whole rendezvous I felt was when we intercepted the alignment cone that we needed to fly up in and stay within that alignment cone. There was a fair amount of maneuvering and a fair amount of thrusting that we had to do with the orbiter Atlantis to get it established and safely within that corridor and keep it there. Once we had it there, it was a lot easier to keep it in the corridor than I thought it was going to be and we were able to fly a pretty accurate approach all the way up. The closer we got the more I was able to determine that we were going to be able to fly it very accurately and precisely and so it went very smoothly from that point on. At the actual moment of contact we didn't feel the docking mechanism capture or the actual contact when we first contacted the Mir. We fire a number of thrusters for about three seconds straight so of course we heard the thrusters and felt the thrusters firing but in terms of actual thump or actual contact it was a little bit of a let down. Although the word let down really doesn't fit here but there wasn't a bang or any kind of a clunk that we could hear other than the thrusters firing. Why don't you pass the microphone over to Norm and I'll ask him the same thing and he can pass the mic to Vladimir who was over there as well. Norm, it's interesting to me we've asked our viewers around the world to fax in questions. They all want to know what it feels like, what it smells like, a lot more than the scientific things that are going on there. Tell me from your position on board Mir what it felt like when Hoot piloted the shuttle into the side of your space station. Well John I've got some good comparisons. I've been here when we had a progress resupply ship dock and when that occurred I was probably a foot away from the node where it impacted. I felt nothing, I heard nothing. When the Spectre module docked with the station that's about 20 tons we felt a very slight vibration but really felt nothing. When the shuttle docked we felt it. The 100 tons hitting the station had some impact on us and it was pretty impressive given the mild sensations with the previous vehicles. Yeah, okay this is a question for Vladimir then I'm going to come back to Norm just to let you know where we're going here. Vladimir, you had never spent time on board a space station with Americans before, was it much different and was it much different with Dr. Norm Taggart there doing all these sophisticated medical tests on you the whole time you were together? No, there weren't any problems. We had a common language even when we were on earth so we worked together very well and implemented the program jointly. We didn't really feel any difference that there was an American on board or that he was any other nationality so there were never any serious problems or misunderstandings. Back to Norm Taggart for a minute, how much of a problem has it been for you Norm to be weightless for so long and what sorts of things have you done that our viewers might who follow the space program might not know that you might have done special this time to counteract the effects of weightlessness on your body? The Russians have had folks up for long duration space flights so they have a number of recommendations and I tried to follow most if not all of them. We wear some devices around the upper thighs that are supposed to help with the problem of fluid redistribution after a return to earth. We exercise two times a day and I actually for many days exercise the full hour and that's actual time either turning on a bicycle or running on a treadmill or walking on a treadmill. In addition to that they also use a device that folks may not be familiar with called a lower body negative pressure device. We've used it many times in the past to evaluate the status of the heart in 0G. The Russians actually use it for training thinking that it helps people with again the problem of orthostatic hypertension with medical term but in practical terms that means when you stand up the tendency to feel like you're going to pass out and fall over. And what that does is you get inside a device that completely encloses the lower half of your body. A differential pressure is created and actually sucks the blood into the legs to create the same sort of distribution of blood in 0G that the normal person would have standing in 1G. I've done all those things and I hope it helps and I guess I'll find out in about a week. You expected to be in space about 90 days. You've been up nearly four months now. How much of a hardship has that been for you and for your family on a personal level? I miss my family a lot. I've depended on them for support and I've gotten it through the years. It's tough to be away from home. I spent a year in Vietnam. I guess I spent nearly four months here. It's something that you feel you have to do but you also realize you're making sacrifices when you do it. And they sacrifice too and I feel badly sometimes that I get to have all this fun so to some extent the sacrifice is worth it. They don't get that benefit. Well, I'm going to come home and probably stay home a little longer this time and I miss them and I look forward to seeing them. Take a couple of cop days. Why don't you do that? That's what I'm going to do at the end of this mission as well. This question for Nick Boudard is the rookie in the Atlantis crew. You've been there for about a week now. What do you miss most about the planet Earth? Well, I'll tell you the truth. I don't have an opportunity to miss anything. There's a lot of work. We have a period of changing the guard as it were and a lot of things to do after the shuttle leaves. We will immediately prepare our spacesuits for an EVA in the middle of July. So we're not going to have too much. I'm not going to have too much time to miss anything. It must be beautiful from up there. We all watched the docking the other day and it was thrilling to see it went so flawlessly, Commander. I am curious. You had practiced it in simulation so many times. How did the real thing compare to the simulation? That's a real good question. The real thing was, if anything, perhaps a little bit easier than all of the simulations is because in all of the simulations we have a visual system that displays what the view out the window would look like. We have a number of computer systems in the simulator that have to play together and they frequently, or how do I put it? They're frequently less than perfect and we wind up having to extrapolate a little bit and assume a little bit when we're doing the simulations and actually flying the flight and actually flying with the onboard systems and all of the computers working correctly and working properly in addition to being able to look outside and see where the station really is, see what the view really is telling us, we have a whole lot better information than what we have in the simulator. So in some ways it's easier to do when you actually fly it. Commander, if you would pass the microphone to Norm Faggart, I would like to ask the doctor about his experience in space after so many months, three months. I understand that there are some physical changes on the body that's concerned about what is it, anemia and maybe some weight loss. Have you noticed any changes in your body during that period of time? You do get perhaps what would be considered anemia, I suppose. What happens is you get almost what would amount to a blood transfusion because all the blood that's normally sequestered in the legs redistributes to the upper body and I think blood cell production probably shuts down for a while. But as soon as those old blood cells start dying off, then you start producing new ones. So I doubt that there are really fundamental changes in the blood. Some question about whether there are immunological changes. The white cells, at least in the test tube, don't seem to be as active as they would be in a person who had not gone into ZERG. My true crewmates lost their weight. In fact, Valerian Gennady, I think at first actually maybe gained a little. I lost a little bit of weight, but I'll put that back on right away after I get back. There are changes, but none of them seem to preclude staying in space for about as long as you would want to. If there are limitations, they may have to do with calcium loss from bone and obviously the radiation that you experience up here over time. Dr. Taggart, if you would pass the microphone to... Good morning, Atlantis Mirror. This is Terry Casey, WJKF Jacksonville. How do you hear me? Good morning, Terry. We have you live and clear. Wonderful. Good to talk to you all. Thank you for the time. Question for Norm Taggart and Nicolai Boudarin, and if both of you would respond in English, it would be appreciated. Who's running that thing up there right now? All ten of you are in the mirror. The shuttle is actually running it, and I assume the shuttle's on autopilot, maintaining the orientation of the shuttle. The host complex, rather, and it has to do that because the mirror station depends on its solar batteries for electrical energy and they have to point to the sun. This is actually what I'd like to hear the response from both you, Dr. Taggart, and your comrade Boudarin. NASA's budget is facing dramatic cuts over the next several years. We've got some headhunters in Congress who want to kill this mission. You're in phase one of it. Russia is politically unstable. Anything could happen. Any time, given all that, do you all feel that you're fighting the odds up there, both you personally and what you're trying to do? Well, just think for a moment what it took to make all of this happen. Think of the technology that will require it, and remember that a lot of that technology has other uses on Earth. And in fact, a lot of what we take as commonplace on Earth is directly attributable to developments that came about through space research. The communication satellites we use when you pick up a phone to make a long-distance call, that's dependent on satellites that came out of space research. There are a number of medical items, most of them smaller medical items, but nonetheless useful that have all been developed first and depend on research and developments that occurred in space research. There are a very long list of things. But at the last, I think it's the spirit of human adventure that is our to explore, and you really move forward or you move backward. You can't stand still. This program moves forward. Space Libus and Park, we have a good life downlink at this time on TVC One. Okay, we copy.