 As Ellie mentioned, we had several launch attempts before we finally got off the pad. We were so desperate that last day, we decided to go ahead and turn our hats around backwards. Our rally caps. It must have worked because we managed to launch. Here we are in the launch pad. The final few seconds and feeling like we're finally going to go. We heard the main engine start at about six seconds prior to the launch. We could feel the twang as they called and then at boost recognition off we went. And I'll tell you, it was quite a ride. I guess from the ground it looked pretty spectacular because the shuttle was hidden by the smoke and vapor right after liftoff. As I mentioned before, we were all pretty happy on Ascend having an opportunity to look out the window feeling comfortable and one name I didn't mention that I really ought to is Joy Barkle. She was a team lead of all the trainers and she really pulled us and them together, I think. We were going uphill pretty quickly. At this point you'll start to see some vapors as the shock waves build up on the nose of the orbiter and external tank as we pass through the region of maximum dynamic pressure here. The shuttle really vibrates a lot. It's the rod of your life. That's about all I can say. This is a nice view of us as we punch through a cloud deck there and the shadow gets cast on the top of the clouds. SRB separation was just like it is in the simulator, I thought, a bright flash, a little pop and all of a sudden the ride changes from being really abrupt to and vibration to very smooth. First thing we do on orbit is open the doors and deploy the KU band. That was my job and Mike's job and that of course is the source of all the TV and on this particular mission we had digital data, six channels of digital TV down for the experiments which was really just great in terms of data management and resource management for us on board and the folks on the ground. But the first job that right after opening the doors, what Mike and Fred and I had to do as the blue shift or the night shift was go to bed. This was probably the hardest thing that we had to do the whole mission because it was just, I just can't tell you how exciting Ascent was. As Mike said, it's the ride of your life and it's something I just still look back on and grin and go into bed while I'll just say, at least we shut the doors. In addition to wearing our caps backward, I wore my lucky socks on the day that we finally got launched. That was the key to it. Two St. Christopher medals didn't get us off on the second attempt but the socks did it. After 30 days of quarantine, I knew I was ready to launch but I wasn't sure I could remember what the mission was. But when it came time to do space lab activation, it was just like in the simulator only nothing broke and everything powered up just like it was supposed to. We didn't power off the lab and we didn't do any hot coupler swaps so we stayed in good graces there. Everything came up just like it was supposed to. We were amazed and delighted. We had a fairly light day scheduled on the first day to accommodate anybody who might not feel well or space lab systems that might not feel well and we didn't have any of those problems so what we ended up doing on our first day is really set the laboratory up well for a two week space station. Make it useful to do all the experiments we needed to do over that time. Well, Kathy, now we're setting up the lab. Kent and I were doing a trim burn to get us just in the right orbit. We rolled the payload bay door partially in on the port side and went into the gravity gradient attitude. Then the next 15 days were pretty much the same and they usually started like this. Much like here on earth you brush your teeth, what I wasn't prepared for was after I was done brushing my teeth, there's no sink up there to spit this stuff out in so I had to have an alternate plant and mine was to kind of swallow and it didn't work out that well. You saw Al Shaven which is very much like here on earth and Mike now is riding the argometer and that was our main means of exercise and we exercised every day on orbit. Along with exercise comes the overhead cleaning up and without a shower the sponge baths take a while and then also wash on our hair. We had a rinse of the shampoo that worked really well and Katie's demonstrating it for us here and you'll see in a minute she managed to get her hair dry. I figure if I keep my hair clean everybody can. It worked out just great actually. I was a little worried about it before flight but keeping clean up there was no problem. Now this is, I'm at the glove box doing that protein crystal growth there and I'm actually using a restraint system developed here at JSC called Albert and we refer to this as Albert the Thing as opposed to Albert the payload specialist. I'm working on protein crystal growth and as you know these crystals are used to help design drugs for diseases and it's kind of a lock and key sort of effect where if we can grow more perfect crystals we know what the lock looks like and the drug is then the key. Here I am at the glove box again on Albert on Albert so to speak or Al squared and we're working in the glove box and I'm really looking at mixing profiles. It's very important in the zeolite community. Some of the zeolite community don't recognize that but it is. We have two reacting liquids together and on orbit we have some special problems. This is the bubble generation. Here we talk about bubbles so sometimes we don't want those bubbles and so now that we have them what do we do and what we do with them and this is the main experiment that I use that information to power up and to generate is you'll see me rotate this cylinder which has the solutions in them after we mix them and we rotate it not to take advantage of centrifugal force and throw the heavier fluids to the outside and make one big bubble which doesn't have what we call a lot of nucleation sites and allow us to grow fewer but larger crystals with fewer defects so that's one of the things that we had learned in USM01 and confirmed again on Spaceham. This is called CGF. We're doing electronic crystal growth here and Kathy's in the glove box of closed area. Very difficult task to take in and out we called SACAS and I help her a little bit once in a while and the command is documenting it so if we make a mistake everybody knows we haven't made a mistake but we didn't make any mistakes that we'll admit to. Here I am taking the SACA very carefully down to Stowe because as all PIs including myself they're a little bit paranoid about shaking and vibrating so it would be a terrible thing for one of the PIs to ruin a crystal so I made sure we didn't do that. In this shot I'm interacting with the geophysical fluid flow cell experiment. This experiment again simulates convection in planetary atmospheres. In this view you can think of it as a weather satellite basically looking at the southern hemisphere of the planet. The pole is at the bottom of the screen and the equator is at the top and you can see waves propagating around the equator and somewhat reminiscent of cold fronts propagating down from the pole. Another fluid experiment was the surface tension driven convection experiment. We all spent a lot of time on that one as well. Basically in that experiment you can repeat the top surface of the liquid and because there's a variation in surface tension with temperature a fluid flow occurs at the surface and also drags around the interior of the fluid. This experiment has a lot of importance not only to the film coating industry but also has impact on crystal growth. In this fluid experiment we were looking at manipulating a drop using acoustic fields. This experiment also had applications to drug delivery systems and there's a lot of interest in surfactants. In this particular case we're rotating a drop until it fissions. What experiments that we all fought to do get up in the morning and you're always tempted to actually change the payload activity plan so that you'd be the one doing drop physics because as you can see each input that you make to this acoustic chamber actually changes very dramatically what the drop does and so we have a chamber with speakers on all sides and we're changing literally the speaker pressure to distort the drop and also to do maybe spin it around like this. What you're going to see coming up is in just a minute is one particularly interesting experiment that we did where we actually brought two fluids together. This isn't quite it yet but we used this experiment to learn what happens when we do have two fluids, what happens when we have a bubble inside a bubble. But when we brought these two fluids together they actually had an interface in between them which we refer to as the beach ball and what this is going to be used for it was a development model for actually forming vesicles for drug delivery systems. Now we didn't really develop a drug delivery system but we did look at the way two fluids would interact in a single chamber. You can see that's what happens when you do the wrong thing with the knob. We had as Katie said six channels of video down and this may be the first space flight ever where video downlink was not the limiting resource in planning and also most of the PIs left Marshall at the end of the mission with all of their data whereas in USML one it took seven and a half months to get all their data out to them. So this was the first demonstration of that it's something that we'll certainly need for space station and that and the data uplink and downlink we had were kind of the first demonstrations of tele-science that I think we've ever done. Another fluids experiment we had on board which was an awful lot of fun was the fiber supported droplet combustion experiment. We put a small drop of fuel on a fiber and the only purpose of the fiber was to keep the drop where we wanted it to be and ignite it. In one camera view this one you could just see the drop shrinking as it's being consumed. In another camera view you can't see much of the color of the flame front but you can see that the fiber on either side of the drop is being heated and that's where the flame front is propagating. We learned a lot from doing a drop physics module on how to deploy these drops and get these guys burning. There was a little bit of trouble with this experiment as anybody who worked the flight here knows. Mike was our IFM person on this and got it working. We also had another series of theoretical I'd call them experiments on crystal growth and what we're looking at is hard sphere models and how they would represent the formation of a crystal structure and the interface between that crystal structure and the fluid from which it formed and we also use lasers to look at diffraction patterns to find out exactly where that interface was and what kind of crystal formed and the crystal structures that will form were not those that were predicted. They're still analyzing why that is so that was kind of a surprise. While the payload crew, the four of them were in the lab, the orbit crew, we had some experiments up in the mid-deck too that we were working on. We activated and deactivated some protein crystal growth experiments. Also, I'm from potato country in Colorado, I was pretty proud of the fact that we managed to grow five potatoes in space and I'll let Mike talk about that. This is just an example of me giving some CO2 to the plants inside and the real goal behind the experiment was to determine how to make a nutrient delivery system both water and other nutrients to the plants in case we for long duration missions we need to know how to grow those foods so that we don't have to take them with us. We also did our part for medical science and here I'm doing a neurovestibular DSO and it has to do with the rate your eyeball can track. This is how we got all those earth ops pictures you saw at the beginning of the presentation. Take one of those big hostile blood cameras pointing out the window and this is the scene that the operator would see. Up in the top is the west coast of California and you can see the greens and the trees and the mountains and then the yellow stripe there in the middle is the northern San Joaquin Valley. The next green stripe is the Sierra Nevada and then you'll see the browns of the high desert. Lake Tahoe and Pyramid Lake will just start to come into view. You can see it doesn't go by very fast, most of you have seen this sort of view before but you really realize you're going fast when you think of the distance involved in just this 30 or 40 second picture. First week we had really clear views of almost the whole United States so we got to take a lot of shots of a lot of different cities especially potato country in Colorado. This next sequence here is over the we're currently over India now looking north and those are the Himalayas there in the middle of the screen with the Brahmaputra river both on the south side of the Himalayas and also on the north side of the Himalayas and you can see the vast difference in both color which basically is vegetation and also elevation. This was super typhoon Angela which was taken over the Philippine Sea which hit that set of islands with winds over 200 miles an hour and you can just make out the circular formation in the clouds although on this particular shot you don't really get any sense of an eye in the middle of the hurricane but it was certainly strong nonetheless. This was an attempt at a night scene. We're over a sort of central United States here looking west and that line on the left isn't the horizon believe it or not it's the edge of the atmosphere and that will become more clear in a second but if you watch this star up here it will actually go below it and you'll see it what will look like through the earth so that's clearly not the edge of the earth so this is the thickness of the atmosphere and these are the lights of big cities there were Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and here comes the Big Apple and as the sun rises which is about to do it washes out the camera the sensitivity changes and sort of made our own fade to white I guess. The daily maintenance was done and filter cleaning and being the pilot I got to do that and filter cleaning and I enjoyed a lot more than keeping the WCS clean but I'm like here on earth dust there's no floor there's no dam so dust accumulates in the different places in the filters because it's always floating in the air so anywhere it's drawn it you've got to make sure you get to it. Space did lend itself to some innovative cleaning styles that were a lot more fun up there than on earth. We carried another computer on board to do the pilot simulation that was a really useful piece of gear I thought to help me prepare for my first space shuttle landing and this is what it looked like on the scene just like at the window of the real orbiter. This is the blue crew enjoying lunch as you can see I'm finishing up my lunch back there Fred is cleaning his silverware with a handy wipe and Katie is probably reading the news some humorous story but we did that we got an hour off in the middle of our 12 hour day and the mail we'd get up electronically on a keyboard sort of like email. We got our mail up on the KCA link I'll talk about that after the world series You may have seen us we got the chance to throw out the first pitch in Game 5 of the World Series which was really a lot of fun and more importantly we got a chance to watch it you can see us in the lower right hand corner watching the monitor and we're seeing the image that you see in the upper left hand corner and that at the end of the mission or close to the end of the mission we had put everything away we were getting a little bored so we decided that we would do a little magic show and I've tried for years to do that never been able to do it but now the trick was to get it down without doing something bad It's important to take those breaks on orbit to help you stay recharged and do good work while you're up there all good things have to come to an end and this is how we started getting ready to come home checking out the systems on the orbiter then it was time to close up the payload bay doors say goodbye to the view out the window and get ready to come home. The entry was spectacular it would be the first time we're sitting up in the front the orange pink glow was just fantastic looking through the windows this was a shot on the entry taken from a guy in Damberhead on top of his house with his handy cam and sent it to us. Anyway we came around the hack shortly after sunrise coming down the 18 degree glideslope with 300 knots socks just had the guidance nail doing a beautiful job and it's very dynamic it's like trying to land a bomb because this is similar to a bombing profile you'd fly in the Navy I got the gear out of 300 feet we came across the threshold right where we should have been touched in 2500 feet down the runway and the landing was so smooth I'd like to take this chance to brag about socks and it's uncharacteristic of a Navy pilot but this landing was so smooth it was like on an airline landing when the landing is so smooth everybody in the cabin just claps and cheers and in fact that's what happened on our landing when we touched down you could barely tell it touched in. You can't have to do the most important thing on the mission they'll get the gear down and you can see he did that successfully Columbia was a beautiful vehicle it was a little slow getting off the pad but it was worth the wait because when we got up there there were very few problems and it really proved itself to be a wonderful platform for science This is our crew patch and a couple of things jump out at you right away and those are the colors. I was in charge of the patch and we went about this very democratically I basically asked the crew what colors they liked the commander like purple and hence purple that's not exactly to it. There was a common thread in the orbiter crew which is represented by the background and although that may look black it is actually a navy blue. The different polyhedral you see on the patch they represent the basic elements fire, earth, air and water and what we're trying to show here is the space shuttle encompassed by the shape of its patch itself which is thought to represent the cosmos a dodecahedron is the space shuttle doing science on the basic elements the one symbol that looks like an infinity sign we refer to that as the Fred Leslie sign although the crystal like looking figures are actually polyhedrons which in turn represent fluids we put this other symbol on to emphasize fluids for Fred Leslie the next slide please great moment here after seven attempts and three strap-ins we finally got to launch on October the 20th I get a lot of questions about whether I was scared or not and I really in honesty was not scared and I think there's two reasons for that one was because it was our seventh attempt and the second one was because of our training team we had a great group of folks that helped us out and in fact I'd like to recognize Tori Palmer who was our data processing system and nav instructor Francisco Hernandez our control prop TQ Tran was our common instrumentation and Heckel and Jekyll, Tom Evans, I mean Tom Hanson and Craig Wilfeng were orbiter systems and Tom Evans and Rodney Brown taught us space lab systems and I think largely due to their efforts we were really comfortable going uphill I mean as a first time flyer this is quite an experience and it was nice to be able to really just enjoy the ride and feel that I was confident along with the rest of the crew to be able to handle any contingency that came up. I'd also like to thank Don Carrico who was our photography instructor who without his help we couldn't have taken some great shots like these. This is a shot of the eastern Mediterranean here and it's interesting for a couple of reasons. One check out on top here how black the space is that was something that really hit you during the daytime when you can't see the stars the blackness of space is just that it's the blackest black I've ever seen and then you can see quite a myriad of colors here this down here is the eastern Mediterranean this is the eastern end of the island of Cyprus this is western Turkey and you can see some coastal mountains here and a higher plateau this would be Syria and Lebanon down here as we're flying along there were different regions and different colors that stood out and this was one area when you cross the east coast of the US Florida the Bahamas and this is actually in the Gulf of Grand Cayman the coral reefs and the coral shells were just incredibly brilliant blue aqua that you can see in this region and so it's amazing but I bet all the islands even the obscure islands the Solomon Islands and the Pacific we wound up getting a lot of shots of because the contrast is just so great it captures you and they make lovely photos unfortunately the photos don't do it justice through what it really looks like this is a shot of another shot of the eastern Mediterranean but this time on the southern end this is the Mediterranean sea here this is the coastline obviously and this right here is a border between Egypt on this side and Israel on this side and what's interesting about this is you can really see the difference in the way the two countries use the land it's not often you can see a political boundary visually from space and this is a nice opportunity to be able to do that this part up here is the Gaza Strip and this is the Negev Desert here we're coming across San Francisco Bay area and it was amazing the detail you could see and we were fortunate that we had a lot of super clear days and we could look down and just see incredible detail in this slide it's a little tougher but right here is the Golden Gate bridge you could see with your naked eye buildings and depending on the lighting you could see shadows but you come on down and this region is San Francisco International and down toward San Jose which is actually under the tail Alameda Naval Air Station is over here off of this bay the one comment we got back from all the folks that looked at our photos where they said boy you know we can we sure know where their airports are because in the center of every one of our photos there happened to be an airport and I don't know if that had anything to do with the three of us being pilots on the flight deck or not but the runways because they're so long and straight and up and there's something that catch your naked eye or if you're looking through telephoto camera lens they really stick out. Next slide this is just kind of represent the different colors that you see when we get on a little bit open the payload bay doors this looks like to me like it's a shot over Australia representing the red land of Australia the other thing it shows you is the attitude that we flew in because of orbital debris we had the one door rolled in part way and unfortunately it did cut down quite a bit on our opportunities for earth ops targets as far as lead time we would see him once they get to the tail and go on the left side of us basically Dan went from us but up and coming targets were difficult to see with the door in this position. The good news is our free on loops didn't take a hit and they lasted the whole flight. That's also is a good reminder the awards that you saw before with the thermal teams this door being partially closed like that really caused a lot of headaches on the ground and thanks to them for us it was by and large transparent but they did a lot of work to work these problems. The picture before last was a bay area and in just about a minute and a half after the bay area this is what we're looking at and it was really interesting taking photos we'd be concentrating on say the bay area taking shots or whatever coastal city we were over at California and look up and the next thing under the tail there would be a view of this which is a large contrast to what you've just seen and this is an Arizona in Utah lake pallets about 180 miles long to come out of the river which is dammed up and then eventually goes on into the Grand Canyon but the contrast and colors are just gorgeous on this shot. This is clearly Cape Cod we have a couple crew members who have roots there Katie and Al Al obviously is from Worcester which if I'm not mistaken is right around there and this is a real nice shot on 39 degree inclination flight we don't quite get up to be able to take this shot nader but as you can see on a clear day you can really get a really nice synopsis here's the city of Boston here and in the bottom Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. In addition to shooting color film like you just saw we shoot some color IR photos this is a shot of Maui and you can see the clouds the IR does a real nice job of cutting through haze although there wasn't that much haze at Maui on this shot but certain times you go over cities like Mexico City a population of over 20 million very hazy and smoggy to the naked eye and the color IR film can help cut through that significantly and you can just see it helps represent the different contrast or fluid levels in plants and help you draw lines of vegetation This is San Diego Bay here you'll notice the detail in this shot and you'll notice the colors are a little bit different this is an electronic still camera shot which means the image could be down on the ground within 15 minutes of when we took the picture and out on the internet maybe an hour or two hours later if all the logistics were set up for it so it's nice to be able to send this kind of information from space down to the ground and with almost the detail that we can get with one of our 70 millimeter cameras and we wanted to throw you in another shot here if you look real close you can see the Johnson Space Center in the center of the picture and clear light. We'll leave it up there a second so you can kind of soak it in. Ellington Fields on the left if you need to get your bearings Hope we can continue to fly these space lab missions and bring back good things for us and for our kids