 This is his 50th flight, and I tell you, we don't worry at all about Pop when he's on the console and we thank him for all his years of good service and all of the questions that he's answered for me over the years, so thanks a lot to Lonnie. Thank you, Jimmy. He heard the words. And if you look off to your northeast, there's people outside waving at you right now. And Atlanta is near Houston. We've got a nice picture back in the space ham. He will talk to Moscow at the appointment. Both crew members has been transferred. The seat is being installed and checkout is not yet complete. Got all that, Jim. Thanks for the update. Okay. What I copied down was you want us to notify you of the completion of the treadmill test. Also notify you when the VRCS test begins. And it's scheduled now to begin at 17.25. Also need to notify me of the start of that test. And I need to update the flight period pages 34 and 35. He starts shuttle free drift at 17.54 and roll at 17.55. Thanks, Wendy. That's a good read back. Go ahead. Bella, we've just completed the MISD treadmill exercise, and all that was executed per the timeline on time. Great, Mike. Thanks. I'd like to welcome you on behalf of the ground as the newest crew member on board Atlantis. Great pleasure to be treading on US metal, if not soil. Thank you very much. Sir, NASA didn't decide to send you up in the shuttle until the last minute last week, apparently because of concerns about your safety. Mr. Wolf, all the world knows about the problems that the space station has been plagued with. Aren't you happy with the decision? I'm happy with the decision, and the answer is absolutely yes. I always believed that I was going on this mission, and I'm thankful that everybody looked carefully at the options and the safety issues. But I felt confident the more they looked, the more comfortable they would be with the whole mission. The space station has been plagued with. Aren't you just the slightest bit worried? I've got one of the finest spacecraft commanders in the world sitting right next to me here or floating right next to me, and particularly after being up here and seeing the quality of this machine, first of all, I'm having too much fun and enjoying it too much to be nervous, and really the answer is no. I'm very comfortable. We're well trained to handle any reasonable emergency. Well, we wish you well. Now to the soon-to-be-departing American astronaut, Michael Fowle. Mr. Fowle, you're leaving near after a four-and-a-half-month stint. How happy are you to be getting off the space station? I wouldn't be honest to say that I was not happy. I have a good friend here, Anatoly Sovyov, and Pavel Vinogradov, the port engineer, the flight engineer on the station. But I have a son at home who apparently has grown twice his height since I last saw him, and my daughter and my wife, and so I really do want to see them badly, and I would have been disappointed if the docking hadn't gone on time. I'm very pleased to be going back to them and seeing them again soon. This is one of the most rewarding experiences I've had in my life. It will have changed me, I'm sure, and when I look back on this, it will only be with the greatest fondness for the times I spent with Anatoly, Pavel, and the crew before that, Vassili, Sibylaev, and Fashiv Zuvkin. There were many problems during your tour of duty. Could you tell us what the worst or scariest thing was that happened? Well, it was definitely when the Progress cargo vehicle was about to hit the spectre, and at that time I knew something bad was going to happen, and I followed the instructions of the crew and went towards the Soyuz spacecraft, which is our safety vehicle, and for crew return in case of an emergency. And at the moment of impact, that was probably the scariest moment because I didn't know what was going to break and how fast the air was going to rush out. As it all turned out, it was OK, and we've managed to control the leak, and we've filled off the spectre. Anatoly has started work in doing the repair and establishment again of the power from that module for the station. So it all worked out well, but at that time I was quite scared. Are you at all frustrated that so many problems kept you from doing more scientific experiments? Well, there are pluses and minuses when you have problems. The pluses are those that you suddenly find you're solving new problems you didn't expect, quite challenging ones. For example, I actually got to do a spacewalk, an EVA without Attoly, quite unexpectedly. I did not expect that because of the problems. So that was a very interesting and rewarding thing for me to do. However, one of the minuses was that I didn't really start turning on some of the experiments I was meant to do in Perotta until just this last week. And so there's some disappointment there, but David's going to pick all those up and I hope he will execute them just fine. And now I'd like to turn to the Russian commander of Mir, Anatoly Solevyev. Commander, with the new equipment that Atlanta has brought to Mir, how confident are you that the problems aboard the space station will be eliminated? The shuttle has delivered to Mir new equipment with the help of which we hope to be able to obtain positive results of repair. But right now it's too early to assess or to say that we'll be able to do everything successfully and that we'll be able to do all of this with regard to the repair. But the chances are very good and very large. And I think that in the course of one or two EVAs and having performed this repairs, I think we'll have positive results and we will be able to say, we'll be able to talk about the time when we'll be able to open up the hatched inspector. After Mr. Fole and Atlantis leave the space station, what's the first order of business? One of the shuttle has brought us a new computer. We will replace the old one. This will take two or three days. In fact, while the shuttle will still be here, there will be some small repairs. But after the shuttle leaves, after two days we will be expecting a new cargo craft which will also be delivering equipment, a resupply to the mere complex and this will allow us to continue our work. But I think my impressions are that we are placing more of an emphasis on our scientific work over the next couple of weeks and we have been doing this and we've been working actively in scientific experiments and the percentage of our scientific work will continue to increase. Where you're sitting, what do you make of the arguments, the criticisms from people like Congressman James Sensenbrenner that another American should not have gone to the mirror? Do you have a question on that? I thought long and hard about American involvement in this program and also whether someone should follow in behind me and I think it's very important that he continues. The work here is not always easy and some of the experiments are interrupted by the repair work and the necessary maintenance that's done on this station. But the value in working together with our Russian colleagues is, I think, priceless and as a result of that work that we're doing right now and the experience we're gaining, not just with David myself and Anatoly and our Russian cosmonauts but also on the ground, most important, we will do so much better great space projects together internationally with Russia. I don't know if you realize this, but after you blasted off, your mother was quoted as saying she hoped you had brought your screwdriver. Are you seeing work for your screwdriver up there? There goes my call, but here's my screwdriver. What have you been hearing from Dr. Folle? What has he told you and shared with you about what you can expect in the next four months? He's assured me and that's very clear an experience of my life. This is just an amazing outpost of scientific civilization where Russians meet Americans in orbit at 18,000 miles an hour in an orbiting laboratory. It's just an incredible place. I wish you could get a panorama of the equipment and the gear and the people working behind us, shuttling gear back and forth. This is just an incredible event going on. During the collision with the progress back in June, you were inside. Can you describe for us what happened and what it felt like? The collision basically was unexpected. We were expecting the progress to not dock with us for another 15 minutes or so. But when I heard the collision, there was just a kind of a dull rumble in the station. It was a bit like distant thunder. At that time I thought it was behind us at the far end here where the progress was expected to dock. Other than that, the dark rumble and the thud, nothing much else happened. Over about five or so more seconds, we have an alarm signal. It's a kind of a crack and then that went off telling us that the pressure was decreasing which confirmed my fear that we had had a breach of the station's hull. Very quickly after that, my feelings were saged because I realized the pressure in my ears was not dropping very fast. And so I knew immediately, just by the feeling in my ears, that we had time to try and find the leak and close it off. And that's how it turned out. Dr. Wolff, briefly, if you will, explain what you expect to gain scientifically over the next four months or so. And I assume that there's some experiments you'll pick up that Dr. Foll didn't get a chance to complete. That's right. We're doing a nice suite of experiments on the human cardiovascular system and bone and mineral loss. The people's bones de-mineralize similar to osteoporosis of the elderly when we're in space and we're looking very carefully at that and how to prevent it. Exercise to keep the muscle atrophy from occurring. We don't know how long or how much or what type at this point. Protein crystals and alloy production are material sciences experiments and we're doing cancer research and preliminary work for our tissue engineering work that we plan for station, looking at how cells go from generation to generation genetically, normally in cancerous cells.