 There are 50 days. So from a personal viewpoint, I was happy that we went from five to nine days. It takes a big team to launch something like the TDRS-IUS complex. They're used in communications with the shuttle from the shuttle or in orbit. And they're also used to process data from a lot of the NASA satellites, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Things said about the ozone layer and what destroys it and what doesn't. Certainly I think it's well documented that it can be destroyed both by natural phenomena and man-made phenomena. But the extent of the damage and how those things play against natural cycles in the ozone layer is not well understood. Lower body negative pressure in conjunction with fluid loading has proved to be a more effective countermeasure than fluid loading by itself with regard to orthostatic intolerance. What that will cause is a stress on the heart, roughly equivalent to one gravity here on Earth. This was taxing into the ramp, our second launch attempt, getting ready to go for our mission. Again, as you saw there by that little bit of a lead-in, a lot of things go on leading up to a flight and a lot of training. And that was a little bit of a summary of it, just to try to encapsulate that timeframe of the flight. This is about 7 a.m. We're getting our launch and entry suits on and getting them all checked out before we go out to the vehicle. It's going out to the crew van, I think, if I could remember the time about, let's say, 7.50 in the morning. Out on the pad, and about this time during the count, you really start putting your thinking hat on because you've got to go to work. The main engines start running and we run them for about 6 seconds. The computers make sure they're good and all the smart people have figured out how to make all that work. And that's amazing to me that we have people in our country that know how to do that and bang, boosters light up. Boy, those people with thigh-call have been doing a great job as far as I'm concerned with all our new processing techniques and all our new safety inspections. In fact, I think the first 2 minutes, 10 seconds of this ride is the safest time during that timeframe. It doesn't bother me at all. I've watched those people with thigh-call, really proud of them. And we sure had a good ride here. Right now it's probably about a minute and a half into Ascent. I'm getting ready for the solid rocket motors to separate. It's kind of a nice shot here. You can see the shock waves on the orbiter and on the external tank. We pushed the limits this time a little bit more of the envelope. Went to a higher dynamic pressure than we've been to before. At this point it's probably about 2 Gs, 2 to 2.5 Gs. The ride is a little bit rough on the solids. It smooths out quite a bit once you get rid of the solid rocket motors. There they go. Another close-up shot of the SRB SEP. That makes your front windows in front of them bake and I go opaque. They literally just go opaque. Very bright flash when they come off. Of course the rock-a-dine engines keep on running and boy, those motors are complex. I see all those people and they do a great job making those engines run. Our major activity on the first flight day besides the launch was to launch the TDRS IUS complex. Here we are. We're up at 58 degrees and getting ready for the deploy. Inside the cockpit there's a lot of activity. It takes all five crew people working together to launch something like this. Jim and I were the primary people that were involved in checking the IUS systems, making sure everything was ready for deploy. And Mike's job was to make sure that the shuttle was in the proper attitude for the deploy. David was the person that did all the fine photography and it's his work that we're looking at right this minute. And then John's job was just to make sure all the rest of us were doing our jobs. And when we actually did the deploy it looks like it's coming out sort of in slow motion. It's not. That's real time. And the thing that always surprises you is how close it gets to the vehicle. And we're all looking out and commenting on how close it was to the vehicle. And then John puts in some impulses to move the shuttle away from the IUS. We'll see this in just a minute as we begin to move away. Now to do a deploy involves not only the crew people inside the shuttle, but involves all the people in mission control that are monitoring systems. It also involves people out at Sunnyvale who are monitoring the IUS systems, involves people at Boeing, involves the people up at Goddard who are looking at the TDRS systems. So you can see it's a huge teamwork of people, big network of people all across the United States that are involved in launching something like this satellite. Now our job as a shuttle crew ended as soon as we got the satellite out of the bay and then a little bit later as we backed away from it. But then people had to continue to monitor as the IUS was bringing the TDRS on up to Geosynchronous orbit. Now after we got rid of our major payload then the activity sort of focused down in the mid-deck. We sort of looked at the mid-deck as a place where we do our eating and our sleeping and it's also our laboratory that we have on orbit. And here I am working with a biomedical manufacturing module. And this module had flown before and it's going to fly several more times and it has several syringes and then you can put in different samples and the samples that we had we were growing different types of cells and cell culture to see if they would manufacture different amounts of enzymes that would be of use and a later type of manufacturing process. And the mid-deck is a very, very valuable asset that we as a country have to do all these types of experiments. As Shannon has indicated we turned the shuttle into a flying laboratory after we deployed the IUS TDRS satellite and here you're seeing us perform, Shannon and I are performing one of about a dozen physical science type experiments. We had about an equal number of medical supplementary objectives or experiments on board. This particular one is a setup for an optical coupler that actually transmits video and audio signals through fiber optics and through video couplers in the windows that you see here. This is really a test to find out if it's practical to use fiber optic technology to transmit audio and video type signals in and out of the cargo bay from the crew compartment of the shuttle. You're seeing a whole maze of fiber optic cables here that I'm manipulating there and also the audio and video signals that come from the TV monitors and go to the video tapes that we have on board the shuttle. Shannon and I did a series of experiments using this equipment and took about an equivalent of about three hours of data on video tapes to bring back for analysis to find out how good a quality we could maintain and what the practicality is of doing this in the shuttle. This is another experiment where we undertook to analyze the propagation of flame fronts in solid materials, in this case an ashless filter paper that's inside a containment. I'm igniting it here with my push button. You see the flashing light and the moment you'll see the flame you'll notice that the flame is round. It doesn't point up like a candle flame. In zero gravity a flame forms a sort of a ball flame front as the paper burns. We've got a series of thermal couples attached to the filter paper above and on the paper to determine what the nature of flame propagation is in zero gravity. Okay this is the view of the payload bay and on the right side you can see Cher. Cher was the space station heat pipe advanced radiator element. It's a mouthful but we took that up. It consists of two heat pipes which you can see here that we tested for use on space station. These would reject heat on space station. You could use many of these elements in a row basically and the advantage is there's no moving parts, no pumps involved if they were to take a meteorite hit the whole system would still work unlike the systems that we now use on the shuttle for instance. The results of the test were excellent. It worked just as expected. One of the experiments that we did for the space station was evaluating different kinds of cursor control devices for use on board the data management system on space station. We used a Macintosh computer and four different kinds of cursor control devices. Jim Adamson, Shannon Lucid and myself evaluated those throughout the mission. One of the privileges that we had on this mission was to fly some new software and some new computers. The first time that the combination had ever flown together in the space shuttle. We've upgraded both systems and among the software changes that we've made is a new digital autopilot for flying on orbit called an alternate digital autopilot. In this particular scene I'm working with John to do a series of 22 flight tests on the digital autopilot to find out what kind of responses it provides for the vehicle. This is just a little view up on the flight deck that I put in just to show you three really great people working on orbit. This is in between while I had different clocks running on different things they're doing. I'd catch them like this every now and then so I thought I'd capture this once on film. But it's really a neat thing to see all these human beings working in space so well with the ground trying to get everything accomplished and I just think a lot of that and think a lot of that capability that we have in the country. There's another demonstration of some physical principles in zero gravity. You can see a pair of long nose pliers there that are very stable in that mode. When you open them up a little bit you can see that they've got two stable modes. You can see them flipping back and forth between those two. I saw David do this once so I told him I had to get that on film. This is Jim working on the aft flight deck for SSBUV, the Space Shuttle Solar Backscatter UV experiment or data collector actually. It took both of us essentially to work this secondary payload that's in a gas can out in the payload bay. It took the orbiter to either earth viewing attitude or solar viewing attitude and Jim would operate the APC to open and close the lid and start the different modes of the SSBUV. The experiment was housed in what we call a gas can which stands for getaway special and you can see the mechanical lid that we actually activated from inside the crew compartment using a little computer and entering inputs. Very fascinating experiment not designed to measure the ozone layer but actually to calibrate other satellites and instruments that do measure the ozone layer. What we would do is actually measure the backscatter ultraviolet rays directly emitted from the sun and also then backscattered off the earth so we would actually look at the sun with the experiment and then turn around and look at the earth. This was the Battelle Materials for Commercial Development of Space Investigation of Polymer Membrane Processing. The bottom line is microgravity. They can get some idea of the physical and characteristics of materials and as a result develop improved membranes here on the planet to be used to help better filters for liquids and solids. I think this was a sunrise and this is up on the flight deck. It's just a nice picture of the flight deck and space. Me looking at the flight plan there and it was something I did a lot so somebody took this picture of me once. We thought we needed a picture of John being the commander keeping track of all of us doing our thing and making sure we stayed on the timeline. A great man to work for. This is down in the mid-deck. Again you'd see this a lot. Different people trying to get different types of work done all in parallel and so it's just a busy place on the mid-deck. Shannon and the medical kit here I asked her to get me some sleeping pills and while she was getting them I thought I'd take a picture of her getting them for me. You can ask her about... Several of the experiments, the medical experiments that we did had to do with assessing the cardiovascular systems. This particular one was called Blood Pressure Variability in which we donned an automatic blood pressure cuff and a Holter monitor. You can see we were wired for sound right there and for 24 hours, three different times during the flight we had our heart rates and our blood pressures taking constantly. Bakes, John and I all did that. In fact we had to do that pre-flight two or three times and we've also done that post-flight two or three times. John's given a sign language there to say that that's measuring his heart rate there. Another one of the cardiovascular medical experiments that we did was running on the treadmill. John and I did that virtually every day for about 30 minutes per day. When we did this we donned a heart rate monitor that went around our chest. We also had a watch on our wrist there that contained a readout of what our heart rate was as well as a time and during this 30 minutes every 10 minutes we had to attempt to step our heart rate up to a different, higher level there. Again, John and I both did that on orbit. Jim was a control subject. He did it on the ground and so we've got some good data of all three of us pre- and post-flight. You're going to see David enter the scene here. While I was running down there I looked around once and saw this and I thought that was quite amazing. He was trying to beat me running around the world, I think. This was our hamster experiment. It's much easier to run on that without these straps. Probably the biggest medical experiment that we had was called lower body negative pressure. In this experiment Bakes and I would slide inside that can there, if you will, which had a waist seal that would come up and seal around our waist and we could lower the pressure inside that bag to about minus 50 millimeters of mercury which is equivalent stress on your heart of standing up in 1G. Again, this took place during four separate days on orbit and as you can see here with the lower body negative pressure device there it took three people, took up virtually the entire mid-deck whenever we did this. You can see Shannon Lucid was taking some ultrasonic images of our hearts while we were in that. She's got an American flight echocardiograph machine that is actually recording that data there. You've got the subject in the bag and then you've got another person that is operating the controls down on the lower end there and entering the heart rate and blood pressure data on board a Macintosh computer. Again, this took up the major portion of our days for four separate days while we were on orbit. As I'm looking at this I'm just thinking I'll comment that the space shuttle is an absolutely incredible machine. I mean it has tremendous flexibility and so as you've seen here we deployed a satellite on the first day and then a tremendous amount of scientific and medical research for the rest of the mission and a real national treasure. In fact the only thing in the world that has this kind of capability so boy Americans ought to be very proud of this system. You might add also that I flew this on SDS-32 and they've made some great improvements both in the comfort of the device as well as the hardware itself. It's more automated and easier to use now. The picture on the flight deck in between experiments. You'd catch different people with different cameras here. Bakes has a telephoto Hasselblad lens camera and Jim had an IR filter on different people trying to take different pictures for oceanographers, meteorologists, geologists all around the world are different requirements. This is a beautiful scene of our planet. It's just a big blue white ball basically. Blue Planet is a good description from the IMAX movie. It's a little sequence where I caught Mike taking some pictures out of the pilots window. This is looking into North Africa. You can see the earth limb there at the top. Morocco, Algeria, Libya. The Mediterranean Sea really quite beautiful our planet and of course these pictures don't do it any justice but they're the best we can return to you. Absolutely beautiful this planet. Make sure you realize there are no international boundaries because I don't see the boundaries of any of those countries there and a real nice place we need to take care of it. There's the Sinai Red Sea down into the Nile River Delta there. Really beautiful coming out of Cairo. Heading down south towards the Oswan Dam. Lake Nasser is coming to the scene here in a second. The real reason I'm showing you that is I had flown on two other missions and I never saw the Oswan this time I did. As John has insinuated, Earth observation is one of the favorite pastimes on orbit for astronauts flying in space. And I think one of the things that impresses me the most about it since I was a young man going to high school, the geology books as a result of the space program have been almost totally rewritten and the whole concept of plate tectonics and shifting continental shelves has really been totally rethought as a result of observations made in space. This scene you're seeing right here is one of the bad scenes. That's all the Kuwaiti oil fires. Burning running south down in Saudi Arabia and boy I saw that and as murky as it looks there that's just was the contrast that we saw on orbit. I mean the planet's beautiful and you got to that area and where it looked like the planet was out of focus. There's no question the Kuwaiti oil fires are putting a lot of stuff into the environment affecting the lives of five billion people and billions of animals and plants all over this planet and hopefully get those fires out soon. You're not seeing this real good you're looking into the velocity vector people always say what does it look like on orbit as if you're on a space vehicle well you're looking right down the velocity vector here approaching the northwest portion of Australia they're quite beautiful you're moving at 17,500 miles an hour and that's what it looks like. One morning I was up eating breakfast and while I was eating breakfast this is what I was looking at boy what a lucky person I am to be able to see this scene really a very beautiful planet except when you see a scene like we saw there in Kuwait it's another flight deck picture of some people taking pictures here of the hurricane that we saw Mike, you want to talk about that? You saw that a lot? Actually we saw about four hurricanes on our flight this was Hurricane FIFA and we had the opportunity to fly right over the eye which was really quite spectacular the first river so that we saw this hurricane the eye was not really well developed and then when the timing was perfect for us as soon as the eye became developed we flew right over it if you keep your eyes on the top left of the screen you'll see a shooting star just went by it's kind of interesting to see that from space as you're looking down on it and sitting up at it We saw different stars there on the bottom of the space and the planet of course dominates the upper 7-8s of that picture and this is a bunch of lightning storms going on people always ask what do they look like from space so I thought we'd throw a little of that in this time and I think this is the sunrise here and we're getting ready for entry day and you're going to see the payload bay doors coming closed I think David came up with the camcorder and got a pretty good sequence of Jim and Shannon putting that in progress on the left side there the payload bay doors starting to close every time I see all this I wonder how does it work so much complexity and I think it's really incredible it's about two hours before the orbit burn roughly about the time they close these doors this is the entry time frame and we're about 250,000 feet here and out the front windows you can really see the glow come up with the fire it's quite an amazing ride every time you do it you say wow what an amazing vehicle and what a beautiful ride to come in Jim took this photography as John has indicated you spend most of your time on orbit falling around the earth at about 17,500 feet a second and in order to get back to earth the trick is to take some of that velocity out of your orbit and actually slow down which causes you to fall back into the gravity field of the earth and in doing so you generate an awful lot of heat and some of the fire that you've seen shooting up over the top of the vehicle is a symbol of that here we're going subsonic coming over top to Kennedy Space Center and getting ready to turn on to the heading alignment circle that's about 90 degrees a turn to go when I looked out the far left window it was clear blue down there by the time I got to the front window I thought I was going into the LA smog that's just what it looked like roll down on final boy all our shuttle training aircraft training we get all of our training in the KC-135 and all that really pays off here you feel like you're right at home Biggs put the gear down and boy what a beautiful flying machine to me it's easiest airplane to fly in the world in this time frame a lot of excellent training that makes it easy it's kind of incredible to think that that vehicle lifts off on top of a bunch of rocket engines pushing it out into space you do all that stuff and then it comes back in and lands like this like an airplane unbelievable I don't know where we got all the people that knew how to make that work but we do quite an amazing machine with tremendous flexibility to do many different missions and of course we tell you about that every time you hear about a different mission a lot of people wonder why it takes the crew so long to get out of the vehicle after we land and of course going through the re-entry and everything we need some sort of cooling on board for all the avionics and once we close the payload bay doors we don't have the radiators anymore so one of the things we use to cool the vehicle here is ammonia boilers and the ammonia being given off by the ammonia boilers creates a kind of a cloud around the vehicle and in this particular mission we had to wait a little while to get out there was a lot of ammonia outside blowing out of the ammonia boilers so it was pretty smelly trying to get out of the vehicle so we had to wait a bit for that to clear this little scene there showing you the crew working on that flight deck after landing we've got to do a bunch of little things and I don't know if you've seen that before so we thought we'd throw it in coming out of the vehicle here again I feel very privileged to have had such a great team of people to work with up in orbit and wish them luck in any of their future endeavors they're really a super group of people and here's just a scene of the Kennedy space team putting the vehicle getting it ready for STS-44 in November