 All systems grow in orbit for the crew aboard the Shuttle Columbia. Astronauts have been conducting experiments all week making up for lost ground following the mission in April, which was cut short due to a defective generator. For details on just what's been accomplished so far and what's to come in the week ahead before Columbia Cups comes back down to Earth where you go far above Earth this morning to the Shuttle, where we're joined by mission specialist Michael Guernhardt and Roger Crutch. They join us from inside the space laboratory. Gentlemen, thank you for being with us this morning. Nice to be with you. Roger, Crutch, you've got about a week to go left in the mission. It's the first reflight in history. How is the mission going? Well, we've got a few little problems that we're working on, but overall I think everything's working real well, getting some real exciting science results, and we're all real pleased about it. You're studying in some of your experiments the behavior of fire in the absence of gravity. How are you conducting that experiment and what do you hope the results will show you? We're conducting several experiments of that type, and most of them are in a self-contained sort of a real safe environment so that none of the fire fuel could get out and cause a problem. They're relatively small fires. Some of them are just a little droplet of fire hanging on a wire so that we're looking at that. What we hope to learn from that is a better way to have more efficient fires on Earth so that we can cut down on pollution and through efficiency save a lot of fuel. Michael, because this is the first reflight in history, what were you able to learn back in April that's being applied to the mission now? As you point out, this is the first reflight in history and it's the fastest turnaround in shuttle history and the fastest turnaround of any astronaut crew. It's a great opportunity for us because we trained for a year for the first mission and then we had a chance to do a dress rehearsal under fairly demanding circumstances with the fuel cell power down. And from that, we really fine-tuned all of the salient points of spaceflight and this mission has been really smooth. Roger could talk to the science. We actually learned some things on this science that helped us change things and optimize this particular mission based on the past one. Michael, before I understand by ham radio, what's it like buzzing by and seeing neighbors in space up there? Yeah, we talked to Mike the other day and at certain points in our orbit we're able to see the mirror space station. It looks like a very, very bright star. Maybe two or three times as bright as Venus looks from up here. It would be nice if you could actually see the shape of the space station. It was great talking to Mike. He sounded really good and things seem to be progressing pretty much the way they want to on board. We had a supply of food and spare parts and so forth. So the concept was it was Christmas on mirror with all that new stuff there. A question for Dr. Gernhardt. We've taken a look into your background. It includes extensive experience in deep sea diving and oceanography. We're wondering if you see any similarities between your work on the ocean floor and in outer space. They're actually very similar in a number of different ways. They're both an operational environment where you really can't breathe and work in the atmosphere without some type of life support system or shelter. On my first mission I did a space walk and that was very analogous mentally to doing the deep sea commercial diving work that I did. And then the other thing that's real common is just working as a team with a group of people. We had to do that in the offshore diving business and it's critical of critical importance that you be able to work as a team in a shuttle mission because the shuttle is so complex that no one person can do it by themselves. That kind of teamwork translates very well into space operations. Roger, you mentioned your age a little bit earlier. Also this week we heard that former astronaut John Glenn said he would like to fly again even at age 75 and NASA is said to be seriously considering the idea. Think about that. He is 20 years your senior. Think back 20 years now for me. Is your body going to be able to withstand that, do you think? Going up there, learning a little bit more about what we can do in space at a more advanced age? Oh yeah, I think a lot of times the chemistry of the body changes as we get older but I think that a person like Senator Glenn keeps himself in good shape. I'd be glad to go along with him as his junior brother and then go again when I'm 75. That would be kind of a cool trip I think and then we could compare my data than he is. We saw also as we were setting up for the interview I believe you had a teddy bear strapped to your knee. What's that all about, sir? Sometimes NASA lets you do things that keep you in touch with your family and that's just a little bear that's been in my family screaming myself for my fiance and my kids for several years and I take it on travel with me a lot and this is just a trip that I thought would be real nice to bring along with me in NASA, let me do that. Isn't that nice. He sleeps with it too. We won't go there. Here's the tool, you can see it's Phillips and on the long ratchet wrench with the Phillips number 2 from the ISM kit. You can see Mike is pretty good to get some good force against the assembly and Roger was turning it while Mike was pushing and it just strips the access through that hole. That's the hole through the setup valve. You can't get to the back side of the screw if there's anything that would help on that screw. In Columbia, Houston, can you confirm the, perhaps point to them the places where the screws are binding? Third from the right, fourth one down from on the right side. Fourth one down on the left side. Okay, those are the ones we copied. I haven't tried the top yet. Understand Mike, and we're asking ISM if they want to get you to position the camera for any particular view, so stand by. This is the top of the panel to do the top fasteners yet because that was not where we were in this sequence. Okay, now I'm on this as you face the panel and going down still in because we haven't tore them for two fasteners and we managed to get that one out of you previously. Okay, now we're forward and moving up in the vertical back to the starting point. And Columbia, Mike, that was excellent. We really appreciate that. That gives us a good idea of what the situation is and we'll try to come up with some words for you on that. The other thought that we have and we're not sure this will work is the possibility of... I know I can get the J13 connector from the access panel here and we're wondering probably get the J18 if we removed the connector tool that we could try if you guys think that makes sense. Okay, we copy. We'll add that to our thinking. It's a 95 PSI on both of them. Is that what you want or do you want something a little higher? 95 is fine and CM1 says it looks good on the ground here. Okay, this is test point 07 Alpha opening. Copy. Greg, we're very happy with that burn. CM1 team knows ahead of time that they're going to want me to do a different procedure than in the procedure book. If they can tell me ahead of time, then I can be sure to do it the way they want from the beginning rather than having to mess up the first few seconds of the experiment. And Columbia Houston, Jim, we're with you there on the flight deck. It's exercise and we try to get in and we have an hour scheduled for exercise. It's only about 30 minutes of that. It's actually on the by-deal of the 30 minutes. It's been getting ready and then afterwards, we're planning to change it back into work clothes. We've got a little video here that Greg made explaining some of the combustion processes back in the lab. What I'm going to do is give you a mid-deck downlink and start the tape. We copy. One of the experiments on our mission is the combustion module wanted to rack design for multiple experiments. And one of the experiments in it right now is called the laminar sick processes experiment. The purpose of this experiment is to study sick formation in microgravity. The principal investigator on this project, Professor Jerry Faith at the University of Michigan, is one of the preeminent soot researchers in the world today. And he believes that by studying sick formation in microgravity, we can learn important insights about sick formation in many important practical devices here on Earth. Soot formation involves the growth of a solid particulate gaseous material. And it's indicated here by this model. The soot aggregate is made up of a very large number of much smaller primary particles. Primary particle joins to the soot aggregate and the soot aggregate grows. By studying this process in microgravity, we can learn much about the sick formation process. Well, that's it. We had a successful day working in a glove box experiments for combustion. Dom was busy with that all day and had a really successful day. So we thought, like, chuck another one up for STS-94. Not every collision. Thanks for joining us.