 Good morning and welcome to the Johnson Space Center. Thank you for joining us here this morning for the joint post-flight press conference for the STS-71 and Mir 18 crew members. Now to start the conference and to introduce the rest of the crew members is the commander of STS-71 Navy Captain Robert Hoot Gibson. Hoot. Thank You, Ableen, and welcome to the post-flight press conference for Mir 18 and STS-71. It was a bit of a complex mission, and so I'm sure the debriefing will be done in a little bit of a complex way. But first, let me start off and introduce the two crews that we have here in Houston today. Seated immediately to my right, our mission pilot for STS-71, Charlie Precourt. Next to Charlie, our payload commander and mission specialist number one, Dr. Ellen Baker. Next to Ellen, our flight engineer, mission specialist number two, Dr. Greg Harbaugh. Seated next to Greg, our mission specialist number three, and the Mir 18 backup crew member, Dr. Bonnie Dunbar. And then we have the crew of Mir 18, starting with the board engineer, Mr. Gennady Strikolov, the commander of Mir 18, Vladimir Dejurov, and our very own cosmonaut researcher aboard Mir 18, Dr. Norm Tigard. And if we could start right in with the slides, the STS-71 slides, we had a crew patch that was designed by famous aviation artist Bob McCall, also designed the crew emblem for the Apollo Soyuz docking, which of course took place back in 1975. So it was a real pleasure for us to have Bob involved once again with the design of ours. We lifted off three months and about two weeks after the launch of of Mir 18, and we're finally on our way after a lot of a lot of preparations, we of course launched into a ground up rendezvous aimed at intercepting and rendezvousing with the mirror. So we did a number of rendezvous burns with the Ohm's engines to put us on the right flight path to intercept and actually dock. And this is one of those Ohm's burns performed in the dark. And I think this was our major height adjust burn that we did on the first day to raise our orbit up very close to the mirror. Here's a photo of Anatoly and Nick, Anatoly Siloviev, the commander of course of Mir 19 who's now on board, and Nikolai Boudin. The four Russians, actually all four of them, I can't think of four finer gentlemen to represent Russia, as well as four finer friends that we've come to know them as, we'll really be looking forward to getting back together with Anatoly and Nick after they're landing in Kazakhstan and back in Russia when we can visit them after their missions over the end of next month. This is a shot of the activity during rendezvous from the flight deck. You can see Greg working away with the handheld laser taking range and range rate marks on the mirror. And I'm in the photo in the lower right hand corner operating a laptop computer to control the trajectory control system lasers that were also used from the payload bay to get that kind of information for the rendezvous. Greg and Charlie and Hoot were operating the Amplite Deck. I was up in the front with the VHF radio and my job was to conduct communications with the mirror. We were able to make contact on time and then to exchange various calls on distance, range rate, and one particularly important call at 55 feet when I called out our range at 55 feet so that the mirror could desaturate their gyrodynes and then disable their attitude control. We had a very spectacular view of the mirror space station as we were closing in, gradually decreasing the range on flight day three leading into the rendezvous. That's an early shot of it. Here's a little bit later shot after the mirror has maneuvered to attitude and feathered the solar arrays getting ready for us to duck. This is kind of an interesting view and the lower viewport there is Volodja taking that video of us approaching and then the smaller upper window is Norm with another camera. I guess it was around this point where Hoot was thinking about maybe negotiating a price for the final closure and then this is a view from the Amplite Deck showing the hardmate what it looked like out the window and this picture doesn't do it justice in the sense that that whole big space station was just right outside that window. It was real close by. You may have seen and we're about to show a video in just a minute that will show a lot of this. We got to recreate an event that took place 20 years ago, almost to the day, the handshake between Tom Stafford and Alexei Leonov in the Apollo Soyuz docking and of course we were able to recreate this on Flight Day 3 of STS 71. The earlier slide showed the view out the aft window. This one gets a little bit of three out of the four windows. The mirror of course is huge and just filled up our view as we looked at the flight deck. So we took a couple different camera angles with a few different lenses but I'll tell you none of them really can convey what it did look like. You could just catch little clips of it with the camera. We also said about trying to get some different views of the orbiter than what you normally see. This is a picture that I took out of the Kovant II module out of that large viewport that Volodya had been taking the movies from earlier and this view is over the Crimea and the Dnieper River is very clearly evident there. And then here's a shot of Hoot that we took also from the same window. Nice close-up you can see he's got a big smile on his face there. This is a view of the Orbiter Tail of course and in the top of the picture, starburst view of the sun, gliming through some of the equipment you see the docking targets they're located on the mirror structure. This is from a port in the Kristall module as you transfer immediately leaving the ODS or the Orbiter docking system headed into the mirror. As you float by there you have this porthole that gives you this view and every time you float by there you think to yourself you've just got to capture this photo somehow and the colors are so brilliant and the size of the vehicle is so impressive sitting there right next to you that it's a really inspiring view. And on the inside coming from where I took the picture forward towards the module, the base block part of the module. This is in the Kristall and it gives you great perspective on how tight a squeeze it was to get through from the Orbiter into the Kristall and a lot of the equipment that's located in the modules as we head towards the base block. Well immediately after opening the hatch we exchanged positions in various modules. This happens to be after one of the ceremonies in which we presented Anatoly with his Houston's Rockets shirt. It was a little hard for him I think to remove it. This is in the base block and it's in front of the table. I have to mention that Anatoly became a fan in Russia. One Sunday there was a Houston Rockets game broadcast over to Russia. They won by one point. We were in class the next day and all he could talk about was that game so he's a real fan. And of course immediately after opening the hatch it was like coming to the home of old friends because the Mir 18 crew invited us into the base block and I got to say hi to the people we'd watched launch in March and it was a real nice experience to be greeted by Gennady. Well we had a lot to do of course once the ships were connected and part of our main objective was to gather some physiologic data on Norm and Gennady and Veloja after their three months stay. And so we got busy in the lab right away. In fact we got the lab up and running prior to docking and the day after docking got busy with a lot of our activities. In this photo I'm working with Gennady on the Barrow experiment. It will be a lot of discussion has been a lot of discussion about the various physiological experiments that we've conducted but the barrel receptors of the neck are partially responsible for making sure that you keep blood in your head when you stand up very rapidly or for people who come back from long space flights are able to walk around. It's involved in the cardiovascular system. It's an experiment that's flown before on space and life sciences space lab flights and Gennady was Gennady was not only a real trooper when it came to taking the measurements he was really an active participant in making sure we got good data as well. And there was a bit of transition for the mirror 18 crew to transition to be STS 71 crew members so I had to go rope Veloja into getting into the lab occasionally. He had a lot to do in the mirror to get ready for his departure and we of course had a lot going on in the space lab getting ready for our return. One of our big activities during the dock phase for those of us who were not doctors or scientists was transferring equipment. And here I'm filling a water tank. We actually transferred roughly two and a half times the amount of water that was originally targeted. And we transferred from the orbiter to mirror I think 250 pieces of hardware and returned 200 pieces of hardware with a success rate of about 99 percent. There were just a couple of things that evidently were not accounted for but we actually came back with a couple of things we didn't plan on coming back for so we we did better than 100 percent all told. This is a photo taken from inside the Soyuz descent module while we were doing communications checkouts the day prior to on docking. I had the distinct privilege of being able to climb in there with Anatolia and Nick while we did this checkout and snapped this photo while we were talking through the relay communication system with Houston and with Moscow. It was a real enchanted moment for me and here's Nick with his two buddies getting ready for the next day's activities. They were doing suit checkouts of course to prepare for the Soyuz on docking. One of the cornerstones of this program from the very start was adaptability and flexibility both on the ground and in flight and this is a small update to the on dock procedure we received the morning of on docking. And here's a shot this was taken of Anatolia and Nikolai just before closing the hatch prior to prior to on docking the night before on docking and this was our our last chance to shake their hands and tell them farewell until we get to see them again when they come back. This is a shot of the Soyuz after it had undocked and prior to our on docking actually during it Nikolai was up in a window in the front called the blister taking pictures and video of our undocking. We could see the whole Soyuz out the the commander's window on the port side of the the shuttle. It was a busy time the docking undocking and fly around time. We were lucky that we could get the camera out the window every now and then. We intended to take a lot more pictures than we did but it was just so busy on the flight deck doing the real work that we didn't have the opportunities that we thought we would prior to flight. And as we left the Soyuz we could see it in the horizon eventually receded into darkness and became a star which we saw for several days following that. And of course as Bonnie said we once the fly around was done and separation was done it sort of disappeared into the distance and we could catch a glimpse of it on some of the night passes. It was hard saying goodbye to our friends and we do look forward to seeing them again. We did get a few shots not many of for Earth observation. This shot actually is the coast of California. It gives you a look at the weather stopping at the coast and some of the topography and some of the fault lines in that area. We shot a couple of interesting photos like like Bonnie said we didn't get a lot of time to look at the earth but this was one of the shots and once in a while over cold water over the ocean you'll have cold water clouds above them and when a ship goes through underneath it'll precipitate a change in the clouds and you're able to see a shipwake reflected in the actual clouds up over the water and that's what we see in this picture here. Had some nice passes over South America this is a pass over the Andes Mountains. My crewmates reluctantly allowed me to put this photo in here since I'm from this area it's one of the more recognizable features of land on the planet at least for those who are from there. You can see clearly Boston Cape Cod at the bottom of the picture Martha's Vineyard. My hometown is up under the clouds that are in the upper left corner there Hudson Massachusetts. Thanks to my crewmates for letting me share that with you. It's always cloudy. As you probably saw we came back and landed at the end of a 10 day mission and for the first time in space we had together a 10 person crew and so we were able to make one of the largest starburst pictures on orbit that anyone has ever been able to put together. We had an 11th person taking the photo for us here. With that why don't we move right into the video. We've put together a film clip of the activities of STS-71 and again the crew emblem designed by Bob McCall. The breakfast in this case was a lunch and of course the crew members again the pilot Charlie Precourt Nikolai Buterin who's aboard the Mir still the Mir 19 commander Anatoly Siloviev Hoot Gibson of course our payload commander Ellen Baker and Dr. Bonnie Dunbar and Greg Harbaugh. We walked out at early afternoon this was a whole lot nicer day to be walking out to the orbiter than the previous attempt had been when they had to actually put the crew van under the awning because the rain was coming down too hard and so we had to make a quick ingress into the into the vehicle. There's a good shot of Hoot when we finally got the go for launch two minutes visors down pseudo two on and have a good flight we were off and running most folks maybe don't realize that rendezvous started right here we had a five minute launch window and we had to wait for the moment in time when Mir's orbit was right directly overhead of us and we could insert ourselves into the same plane that they were in and we hit that rate on time on this particular day the weather cooperated and it was a magnificent launch Anatoly and Nick were very impressed with the vehicle and we were off and running with a great start here. Okay once we got on orbit we had an awful lot of work to do to get ready for the rendezvous we opened the payload bay doors you can see the docking mechanism sitting there with the six black dots on the forward end of it we had just a tremendous amount of activity at the end of flight day one and then all of flight day two getting our computers ready to go getting our rendezvous tools set up we had one or two unexpected events including a little work that had to be done on the handheld laser but we got ready to go in time. We flew an intercept on the Mir that had us pick up the radius vector or essentially come in right underneath the Mir and fly up below them all the way into docking. This was a pretty intensive period as Bonnie and Greg have alluded to on the flight deck with the three of us flying and everyone else helping as we come in this is a shot that you saw earlier from the from the Mir of the orbiter over the Red Sea we had a very narrow corridor that we had to intercept and fly up so as not to disturb any of the solar arrays on the Mir with our plumes and as we got into about 500 feet or so the Mir started its maneuver to the final attitude for docking and as it did that we were able to start locking on with the TCS laser system because on the end of the docking module where the reflectors at that system could lock onto so I'm coordinating that activity here with the ground controllers and you'll see a shot here briefly of that final maneuver you can see the docking node in the center there starting to come more in alignment with our axis and you can also see them the relative motion of the solar arrays in this particular view and we were pretty much at the end of this event when the mirror was in attitude we were ready to go on with it as Ben alluded it was a very busy time we had again several calls going back and forth between the mirror and and the shuttle is docking occurred we borrowed a little bit of video from the the Mir 18 crew on that sequence as you may recall we moved into 30 feet and held for five minutes waiting for the timing to get exactly right it was our objective in the course of the rendezvous not to have to fire any braking pulses towards the mirror and we were able to work the the timeliness the closure rates and the distances such that that worked out just fine we're able to utilize natural orbital braking to bring us all the way into docking and never did have to fire a braking pulse all the way in this is the actual moment of docking as seen from the aft flight deck from the one of the payload bay cameras looking out and this is a shot that came down to the ground that showed both the centerline camera view as well as the view out the out the aft flight deck as you probably recall we had a very tight window on the actual docking well this was the hard part we had six people with cameras on one side of the hatch and two people with cameras on the other side of the hatch and of course everybody wanted to get a good picture we had a variety of different cameras stills videos i max you name it we had that we didn't want to miss the hatch opening in the handshake and you'll see we're flashing lights in each other's faces here but it was an awfully exciting time and we just couldn't wait to get that hatch open and and greet our comrades we had been training and preparing for this moment for so long over the preceding year working together with the mirror 18 and the mirror 19 crews when the actual moment came we found ourselves looking around and saying are we really here and if we really have we really made this work we had just a very brief greeting and a very brief ceremony if you will at the actual hatch and of course this was the first time that we had seen norm and velodja and ganadi i guess in the previous what eight months i guess it had been since we had seen it and of course going a little out of plan we had we had a plan prior to this and first thing we did was take that plan and toss it and we all lined up and and went into the mirror at that time all all 10 of us i guess were in there at that time and i kept the camera running as we went through the cristal module and arrived in the base block where we did our welcoming ceremony i think so there we were all accumulating ourselves in the base block or the core module obviously elated really happy to see ganadi and velodja and norm and they were i think happy to see us i think it's the first time there have been 10 human beings in one spacecraft to commemorate the occasion bonnie put a sts 71 crew patch up on one of their calm pieces of equipment the following day then we congregated back in the space lab and we performed a gift exchange and we also made it a model of the mirror space station with the space shuttle a little bit adrift there was also a tour of the space shuttle that was conducted for russian audiences norm did this and in these sequences he's taking ganadi around the shuttle and he'll later narrate this for a russian audience first in the commander's seat and now back in the aft flight deck where charlie is showing him the controls for the docking adapter once we got all the pao events out of the way we could get to work on some of the science objectives of the of the flight and the day after docking we did start on some of the experiments we had a small series of experiments to do on this flight that looked primarily at the cardiovascular system exercise fitness endurance those sorts of things and also some metabolic studies to look at biochemical hormonal changes in the blood changes in the blood chemistry things like that and bonnie and i orchestrated most of this couldn't have done it obviously without our subjects participation and full cooperation and it was a pretty long day as ellen mentioned we had uh had rehearsed this before and with our payload operations control center down here in the ground the pock it all went as planned as was previously mentioned that we performed several barrel experiments on all three of the subjects got some excellent quality data we're very happy with it ellen also performed a number of metabolic experiments called m gas here she's connecting up rebreathing bag to velodia we also flew the lower body negative pressure device as a joint experiment between the russians and the americans we had principal investigators from both countries on all of our studies the russians use lower body negative pressure as a counter measure we use it as a research tool and we used it as a little of both on this flight craig is wincing because he's having his blood taken there and he'd rather be jogging like i am here i think it didn't really hurt okay we as mentioned earlier we did an awful lot of transferring of equipment scientific and material here who does transferring something called the pc g and it's just one example of the the tremendous amount of effort we put into those five dock days and moving stuff back and forth between the two vehicles one unsung tremendous capability of the shuttle is its ability to return hardware back to earth and we took full advantage of it on this flight one of the more pleasant things we had the opportunity to do is talk to school kids around the world we had sarax contacts in california texas new jersey massachusetts and over in russia we used the sarax radios on board both the station mirror and the shuttle and as we showed in our slide where the big moments for us was to be able to show the new rockets emlin and present the shirt to anatoly who promptly put it on and decided to demonstrate his basketball style which i'm sure that is the envy of anyone who's been in zero j here we are closing the hatch and we've already said our last goodbye there and then there's anatoly saying goodbye to us eating a tortilla through the one of the viewports on kawant gregg and bonnie we're talking there about getting pressure checks done as we prepared for this moment the soya is undocks from the mirror on the opposite end of the station and begins its fly around we watched it with amazement at how well controlled it was and how stable and ellen's in the process of snapping it on the i max here which came out quite well we got to review that the other day but anatoly flew out of plane here as you see him moving between the panels to a position about 60 80 meters to the commander's side of the orbiter i guess the port side and station kept there while we prepared to do our undocking these scenes make the soya's look pretty small and look pretty far away let me tell you how close he looked when he was sitting out there his uh i guess he had a laser rangefinder and you can see some of the jet firings here as he was holding attitude uh just right out the window we felt like we could reach out and touch him uh because he was that close to us his range i think was about 65 meters but again he looked very very close at the as the actual time for undocking approach at about three minutes prior to the actual separation i sent the command to open the hooks and everything worked just like clockwork that mechanism worked superbly and there was a set of push-off springs that separated the two vehicles initially and then at about two feet hoot initiated a separation maneuver four pulses to complete the set sequence this is a view i guess from the soya's looking at us as we do that undocking of course when finally separated uh the emir 18 crew came up wave goodbye we had some exchanges on the vhf radio as well as we said sayonara uh you're also seeing on the left there the soya was redocking it was a little departure from our plan to dock an orbit later but you just see it start to close in there and it totally did an excellent job he uh i was in the commander's seat he flew from the port side of the starboard park aside of the vehicle did a very smooth redocking as we come completed that part of the the fly around and got the photo there we started a complete revolution around the mirror and got these real pretty views of the station and here you can see it uh rotating uh the uh folks on the ground are very interested to see views of the different sides of the mirror to see what kind of condition it's been in after a long exposure to space as charlie mentioned we flew all the way around the mirror uh doing more than a 360 degree fly around and uh finally got to a point overhead the mirror on what we call the minus r bar and did our final separation burn and started translating away from the mirror space station shortly after that we continued our work in the lab uh of course one of the things that would be important for norman his crew members to do is to maintain their conditioning and anticipation of entry uh the intent was to exercise twice a day i think we missed that a few times for for those guys but they did manage to get some of their exercise in and another modification we did was to use the recumbent seats at the shuttle so that they would have the gravity vector going through the chest rather than from the head to the toes and make the g forces of reentry a lot easier on them this of course shows the shuttle as we uh re-entered flew around the hack and uh came down final approach uh the uh one little surprise we got on final was a master alarm which proved to be a false sensor indication but uh that uh we just pressed right on at 300 feet i lowered the gear here and uh hoot set up on the outer glide path just nice and solid and brought it on in we were a relatively lightweight orbiter about 219 thousand pounds uh coming in for landing so we were shooting at a 195 knot touchdown uh as opposed to the heavyweight flights where we shoot at 205 knots and this is us touching down on runway one five uh at the kennedy space center on uh july the seventh ending a very successful 10 day flight we of course used the drag shoot we had a normal drag shoot deploy uh for this landing we had a little bit of crosswind not enough to cause us any real difficulty and uh we're able to fly a normal approach in landing all the way through the drag shoot deployment and drag shoot jettison that you see here