so
and good morning you magnificent men and
women in your magnificent flying machine
good morning houston and thanks for the
magnificent music
for
and good morning eileen
and charlie and jean-francois with you
in the tunnel
and atlantis houston we're on board
looking into the space hab hello jean
francois
go ahead for biorack
for 11 step 6.
copy
atlantis houston for the folks in the
space hub we're looking over your
shoulder in
atlantis houston in preparation for the
upcoming biorec activity per our
pre-flight agreement we think it'd be
more efficient to split the air to
grounds
roger that chris and uh would you like
us to configure for underground two back
in half
affirmative and we're setting up the cic
on the ground to match
okay we'll go underground two in the hab
and if somebody has a flight deck
we got a good centerline image we'll
downlink that to you now
we see it charlie and it uh it's a good
clear image
chris the
the green cross here is not dead center
it's
tangent to the four o'clock position of
the circle
tell me aren't you a bit scared about
boarding the russian space station
because it's been a pretty dangerous
place to be hasn't it
no the most difficult thing we did uh we
did yesterday and that was the liftoff
and that has by far the highest risks in
it because you're going from zero miles
an hour to 20 uh 17 000 miles per hour
and when you're traveling at that kind
of speed it's also quite hard to know
over which part of the country you are
at any one time because you're moving so
fast
we've done that we're in space we have
all that energy now we're in all this
and the rest of it is actually quite a
lot easier
thank you michael can i first of all ask
you um how do you view the prospect of
more than four months on mir will you be
lonely
uh no i don't think so there are two
other people going to be on board that
spacecraft with me and uh that's the
city superlative and sasha lazukin i
already know them well and uh have spent
some time with them both in russia where
i lived for a year and a half and then
uh also on travel with them
in houston
and as a result i feel quite close to
them and we've exchanged some messages
before my arrival
and
my email that is
as well as also uh by radio from russia
from my house in russia
so i thought i'm going to be uh with
friends and so i won't be feeling
particularly lonely in any way
how confident are you that mir will be
safe because it has had some serious
problems recently hasn't it
well i i don't know
if other people see it this way but i
see the mirror is a very successful but
old um car in a way it's it's been in
space up to 13 years and they've been
putting uh new parts in replacing all
parts and if anyone's had a an old car
and maintained it you know that as you
keep on adding and repairing things
continue to break around those new parts
and that's really a fact uh
a function of the fact that the mir is
living a lot longer than it was
originally designed
and uh yes there has been some problems
but none of these are ever big
showstoppers they are serious to some
extent but we can always continue to uh
repair improvise and work around those
problems and the russians have been
extremely good at doing that today
now this is all in preparation for the
international space station which is due
to be uh built soon in orbit uh what do
you see as the main purpose of the space
station the space station program base
the space station program is basically
uh conceived to conduct science and
operations
uh development in space
and a big big part of that is the um
endeavor of international countries
working together to achieve those goals
as a result of an international
cooperation in space you not only get a
a good science platform in orbit around
the earth in which many many
investigators from other countries can
all work in or send experiments to
you also get the experience of many
countries working together
and uh working in a great project
which i see is leading us eventually out
of earth orbit to the moon and to mars
and
settle other planets
now i put a question to the commander
charles precourt uh what's it like
having a british astronaut among you is
he made of the right stuff
he's warning me that i better say yes to
that one
mike's a great asset to the nasa program
and he brings a load of experience from
a lot of different areas to us
and you know he kind of hinted at the
fact that the benefits of an
international space station is that the
fact that we bring together the talents
of many different nations and in fact
many different cultures and new ideas
bring new ways of doing things and we
discover new things together so yeah
mike is a great asset we're going to
miss him when we close the hatch but
we're glad that he's representing us
when we do
mike again can i ask you um what are you
um looking forward to most
well that's a hard thing to answer
because when you're looking at a flight
that goes on for four and a half months
or more
um there's a whole number of events
and of course you always choose the
operational ones as being the most
glamorous and therefore you say the most
interesting well
and there are one or two out there there
are evas being done by the russian
cosmonauts they're also we're going to
get in the soyuz spacecraft at one point
uh put on our
spacesuits leave the space station near
in the soyuz and then fly around to the
back side of the mirror and join up
again with it so we'll get a nice fly
around to the station i'm sure that will
be a great thing a single event to look
forward to but really the best thing is
actually just
um living calmly and easily in space
with two friends and uh spending time
together
uh houston atlanta's time back in the
hab
we've got you on the downlink
and eileen ecom is happy with the bag
okay i'll go up and take some samples
you