 Hello Mike. You look terrific. How do you know not how do you look? Pretty good here. We just got up and we're getting ready for a new day to unload the progress a little bit more and start getting ready for this pretty exciting EVA. I think my two guys are going to do the Celia and Sasha in about a week's time we think. Did you get everything you need in the progress vehicle? Yes, I did. I'm really grateful to the guys who were really hustled. They did an amazing piece of work in about two weeks to get some pieces together for me. I'm pretty much set up now in the Command 2 module which is where the airlock is for going outside. It joins on to the node of this station complex where the EVA is done by Celia and Sasha. Are you getting enough rest and do you think everyone will be ready for the EVA? Yes, I think so. I think the ground understands that we have an awful lot of work to do here and we're getting through it pretty fast and efficiently I think. We'll probably get the extra day or two of Grace that is going to be in the EVA session. I think it's important that we know what your own physical constraints are and your living constraints. I'm glad to see that you feel comfortable about that. How do you feel about your safety? Do you feel comfortable, sanguine with it at present time? How do you feel about the safety conditions on board right now? Are you sanguine with it? I think basically we have time to move even in a pretty extreme situation where we have a leak and the pressure is falling pretty fast. We had time to think and consider about what we're doing. This is our friend that we brought up on the progress that's going to be used to allow the pass through of the umbilicals from the module spectre. This is going to attach onto the module spectre onto the end cone. Imagine the spectre stretching off this way to the side and on the inside of the node there will be accessible to us under normal pressure these connectors. But what the cilia and Sasha are going to do is on the back side there will already have been stuck some cables. I can kind of a reducer of cables and then during the EVA the cilia and Sasha will connect to these cables. The power cables that are now floating free in spectre that would provide the means to get the power from spectre to the base block. I'm distracted there by this thing floating in by me. Generally the safety concerns here though I think are well met and I'm not worried. Tell you my hats off to our Russian colleagues. That's one incredible piece of hardware to put together in days. I wish we had the rapid reaction time in the United States that I see sitting in your hand there. We have a lot to learn from the Russians. The plan has come together. Sergei Kriklov was on the console asking us questions even if by a day or two after the accident. I had to ask you what are you inventing? I could tell there's something going on and this is what they invented. I must say the plan is looking like it's coming together. We had a lot of questions but still are questions about how to do the EVA where I'll be during it in the Soyuz and what we'll do. But I think those questions are being answered. Well I'll tell you I think this is a very valuable experience and I salute your courage and vacillia in Alexander because this could cover a contingency situation which could occur on the International Space Station and learning how to work through this I think is very important and sticking with the mission is very important. I agree with you entirely on that. I think the biggest lesson I'm getting out of this is how do we respond to a situation and the situation isn't going to be a one off occurrence. We're going to have events like this I think in the future in our combined space programs and the way we're letting to work together, the way we're understanding how people respond to these emergencies is very very useful. You know we're getting down on the surface of Mars and I don't think you've had the privilege of seeing some of the incredible pictures. Michael, train because you're still young enough to go to Mars. Boy I'd love to hear that. No we have been really thrilled to hear about the Mars landing and I must say I think some of the few people actually were off the planet but you know from Earth who have not seen those pictures yet we won't see very much and I've only been thinking about what's going on on Mars with that fantastic man, the Pathfinder. When we're flying over Northern Africa it's a red, red sand now there's almost no clouds present and of course it's a little bit of a blue tint to the horizon but it makes me think about what it would be like to be in orbit around Mars and I do think we should be doing that pretty soon. We've got wonderful briefings today from the brilliant young people here at the Johnson Space Center and I challenge them to get us to Mars for a very very low price in a short period of time and do outstanding work and I tell you we're going to pull it off and I think we're going to do it in your career time. Well I can believe that because I'm so impressed by the way the Pathfinder mission has gone off I think the way that was done for so much less money than in the past and done so quickly was really really impressive. You should see the excitement of the young engineers and the mature young engineers at the JPL, they are just on fire I've been watching them on television, I'm so proud of them, I tell you I'm so proud of the whole NASA team you folks in space are Russian colleagues and the people here on the ground and I'll try my best to get some pictures up to you and Vasili and Alexander as soon as humanly possible because I'd like you to share the excitement with us. Thank you very much, we'd appreciate that and I'd like to offer my congratulations to the JPL team and the NASA team that pulled all this stuff off and I'd like to thank everybody in particular for the incredible response in our own presence at the moment. I found the response instantaneous, helpful, there was never any feeling that the communication was down or lacking and I'm very grateful for the NASA team and for the Russian team for what they've done. Well I tell you Michael we think you're terrific, we think Vasili and Alexander is terrific there's a lot of people on the ground that read about you and see you on TV day and night our thoughts are with you and play it safe. My name is Natalie Wood from Shaw High School and what is your role as the mission specialist? The mission specialist on this flight is to do a lot of science experiments. I'm a member of the orbiter, the payload crew here. We're split up into two halves, half the astronauts are running the shuttle and taking care of all the shuttle systems the other half are taking care of the experiments back in the space that module where I am right now and I'm part of the payload crew and we work back here in two ships around the clock 24 hours a day. My name is Katie Ruda from Magnificat High School and how do you start a controlled fire in space? Well we have a number of combustion experiments and to control the fires we have special combustion chambers that protect us and the fires from spreading and they have many layers of containment so they don't get out of control and I'm standing in front of one of the experiments right here it's a droplet combustion experiment and it's just an example it's a pretty heavy steel chamber where the combustion process actually takes place so we're well protected from any explosions or from the fires you know getting out and affecting other parts of the shuttle. My name is David Laska I'm from Holy Cross School and I'm in a university program for the summer and my question is do you ever get a chance to talk to your family in private? That's a great question and it's a coincidence that I just talked to my wife and my son I'm a two-year-old boy and I was able to talk to them and on this flight it's the first flight since I've been an astronaut that we've been able to have two-way video so I could actually look at a little video monitor of my wife and my son sitting there and they were having they could see a monitor watching me and we were having a conversation for maybe 15 minutes and then maybe two hours later I had a chance on our amateur radio to talk to my mother up in Bloomington, Indiana so we typically we get a chance maybe every four days or so to talk to our families to have one of these video conferences we do have electronic mail that we can transfer back and forth and we talk to our families send messages back and forth on a daily basis and it's one of the greatest things every day one of the highlights outside of doing the experiments looking out the window it's always great to get messages from home. My name is Maya Davis. I'm from Laurel High School and I was wondering how do you go about preventing muscle and bone degeneration? Okay, I understand. Yeah, up here you don't use any of your muscles you know if I want to move throughout the orbit it just takes a little push with my finger and I go across the space lab module here so I don't have to use any muscles walking or getting up or moving anything around so your muscles do attribute up in space what we do is we have an exercise by called an ergometer and each of us ride about a half an hour a day and that helps get your cardiovascular system gets the blood pumping again and help keep us in shape a little bit for landing when we land you know you are a little bit out of shape I feel like a thousand pound person trying to get out of my seat at landing but it takes you know half an hour 45 minutes or so and you're able to get up walk around and feel pretty good. My name is Katie Haller. I'm from Magnus Cott High School and my question is what environmental information do you hope to gain from your combustion experiments? Yeah, the combustion experiments the main goal or two-fold one is to maybe increase the efficiency of burning you know so much of our energy down in the ground from automobiles to power plants and electrical generation they're all combustion processes and we're trying to understand maybe ways to improve the efficiency if we can just improve it one or two percent a very small fractional increase it would have a major impact around the world. Secondly, we're trying to understand the soot process when flames burn if you look at a candle flame you'll see a black soot coming emanating from the flame and we're trying to understand better what creates the soot how do you control that and that'll have a major impact potentially on the ground from a pollution point of view. Hi, my name is J.L. Panagaris from North Ridgeville High I was wondering what kind of preparations do you have to go through so that you are physically and mentally ready to perform your tasks? That's a great question. Physically all astronauts try to stay in pretty good shape most people run, we have a gym that we all work out at in my main activity I like to go swimming so I swim a mile and a half almost every single day that I can when I'm back on Earth and so that's a physical part of it mentally you just have to get prepared you got to know all your material and work really hard at it for all these experiments that we're performing on the shuttle here we've been training for a year and a half or two years on each of the experiments to make sure we know exactly how to perform them inside and out so that if we have a problem we can solve it up here so it's a lot of mental training and physical training and then come to launch morning you're pretty psyched to get on the shuttle I'm probably 20% a little afraid and 80% just psyched out of my mind and excited about going on the trip so this is some footage from yesterday where Roger and I did an in-flight maintenance procedure back in the lab and the purpose of this procedure was to rewire a thermocouple in the LIF furnace and basically the way this works is the ground research is it for as much time as they need and then they fax us up a procedure which basically in this case involved routing some wires from pins on one side of a connector to sockets on the other side of the connector and so we got the wires out of a little kit that we carry in the orbiter and then Roger and I both together very carefully made sure that we got the wires going from the right pin to the right socket as in sometimes the case in space things don't work out exactly the way you planned and as it turned out the darned sockets on the ends of the wires were a little loose in the sockets on the connector so they wouldn't stay in and so here you see me getting some duct tape and I'll tell you I think we'd be lost without duct tape up here we use it for pretty much everything and anyhow we were able to duct tape those things into place and then you can see how we've got them restrained there and it worked it was very successful and we're back up and working with the science so that was a good example of how we can work together as a team with the ground to fix little problems that occurred during the flight one of my jobs on STS-94 is Earth Observation we have an extensive Earth Observation program and it has been ongoing since the beginning of the shuttle program we're interested in all types of Earth Observation