so
good morning columbia and especially to
lean it today with a little music to
remind him of home
our pleasure leonid
a happy thanksgiving to you this day is
a big family event throughout the united
states how are you celebrating it
well thank you uh happy thanksgiving to
you we're gonna celebrate it here and
right after this interview with a meal
of turkey and cranberry sauce and some
pumpkin cookies and pecan pies about as
traditional as you can get being 150
miles up
as i was saying it's a family day and
all of you guys are family men i
understand
have you been able to speak to the folks
back home
as a matter of fact we were able to
speak to the folks back home we had some
of us had family conferences yesterday
and some of us had family conferences
this morning and i tell you being away
from home uh it's always nice to be able
to uh to talk to the family and know
that they're doing well and to maintain
those ties with the folks back home
i'd like to stay with you uh winston
scott and uh also to taco toy this
shuttle flight has been a little more
exciting probably expected you had to do
a space walk to retrieve the spartan
observatory
observatory um what were you thinking as
you were doing that what were your
greatest concerns
yeah
well we um trying to uh capture the
spartans so i was just thinking how to
capture this southern satellite and uh
we are worried about uh
at the spot and of light
that attitude because we didn't know
whether that it has it had an easier
attitude for us to capture or it might
be very difficult so that was the only
concern but at that time we were just
determined to capture this upright
right
going to you commander kriegel you uh it
was your job to steer the shuttle for
that operation um what were you
concerned about when you were doing that
well of course my primary concern is the
safety of my crew
which is always is
but the flying qualities of the shuttle
are really
very nice so believe it or not
being able to fly the satellite within
just a foot of both west and takao was
really quite an easy task
scary for mr scott and mr doy at all
have a shuttle only a foot away
i'm sorry you're waking up can you uh
say that question again please
i was asking mr scott and mr doy if they
were at all frightened having the
shuttle just a foot away
as a matter of fact i mean
that was some excellent flying that
kevin did and while we were standing out
there with the satellite just a few feet
above
our heads
i at least wasn't uh
afraid at all it was very very
comfortable i was more concerned about
handling that large mass you know
spartan is about 4 000 pounds which is
more than most automobiles way and to be
able to capture something like that
manually oriented and birth it was was
more of a concern of mine than uh
than the flying it was really some
outstanding uh flying on kevin's park
congratulations to you on that
successful space walk but i understand
that you're conserving fuel right now
for a possible re-launch of the spartan
observatory is that affecting your
day-to-day operations the microgravity
experiments that you're conducting
well the folks on the ground are doing
most of the hard work carrying out ways
that we can get all the science that we
plan to do and also conserve fuel
they're just doing uh using their bag of
tricks
um and hopefully we'll have enough fuel
to maybe perhaps
do another spacewalk or hopefully deploy
the spartan satellite and get one of the
primary objectives of this mission out
of the way
another primary objective was to
test out a prototype
free floating television camera i
understand it's about the size of a
basketball
is that still going to happen or has
that been put off because of the
problems with spartan
well that's the air cam sprint it's a
little bit bigger than a basketball or a
beach ball and it's a free flyer that
pilot steve lindsay is planning to fly
but it needs to be deployed uh during
the spacewalk
so this particular spacewalk the time
that we spent capturing the spartan ate
up by that time unfortunately
so unless uh we get to go to do another
space walk we'll have to save that
particular experiment for another flight
why is the spartan observatory so
important to this mission what does it
do
well the spartan satellite is going to
be looking at the sun which of course
the sun
affects life here on earth and
particularly it's looking at the solar
wind and temperatures and try to
understand those characteristics
and particularly solar flares we know
solar flares affects life on earth it
affects our satellites that we tend to
depend on day-to-day but really it's
trying to understand that a celestial
body that affects us
everywhere here on the earth
well people down here on earth are
always very interested in life up there
in space and this particular mission on
this uh shuttle columbia is particularly
remarkable because it's very
international um i'd like to ask how
that's working out does that affect the
way that you relate with each other
yeah i'm very lucky that i am a member
of this international uh
the crew
and we are having fun exchanging uh our
original
native foods or uh discussing uh
in uh native languages sometimes
and uh it's it's just fascinating to
watch with
other people with different cultures and
it's a way that space dinner should be
in the future
all right i should mention that apart
from commander kriegel and winston scott
and taco toy that we're seeing we're
talking to you right now there's also
kalpana chawla who's originally indian i
believe and leonid
who's a ukrainian
um
have they been uh have they been
contributing also with their uh with
insights from what they've learned in
their countries
well they certainly have as a matter of
fact that during our evening meal last
night kc
we call it kc for short
uh
played some indian music for us and also
some hungarian folk songs and we all had
to all have a ball and leonard is doing
the same thing he's teaching us
some greetings in uh his native language
from the ukraine so we all are learning
a lot from each other and just having a
ball doing it
great i'd like to go back to taka takao
doi i understand this is your first
flight how do you feel for this first
experience
yeah since i was a child i
wanted to uh to
go to space and explore ebay so it's
just
my dream come true i was just fascinated
by watching the earth and doing eva
especially during the eba
we had a panoramic view of the earth and
the universe itself and
i really enjoyed being out there
i should explain to our viewers that an
eva is a space walker extra vehicular
activity i believe that it's short for
um back to commander kriegel i'd like to
ask you sarah
how do you look at this mission do you
think it's been a success despite the
disappointment with spartans
well each mission holds little surprises
i think one of the great things about
human space flight is the ability
of people to adapt we had a little
difficulties to overcome we overcame
them through teamwork here on the
orbiter and also several hundred people
on the ground who very quickly came
together with a plan
communicated that plan to us
so that we could recapture
satellites so i really think it's
success
and that the versatility of humans
working in space
congratulations to you on that and we've
spoken a little bit about the solar
research that
this mission
has been trying to
accomplish let's look at the other
primary objective the microgravity
experiments
what are they about
yes uh we have been running uh the
material science experiments in this uh
midday it's called the mic uh
intake roblox experiment actually they
are free experiments
from
a combustion science to uh
investigating the wetting characteristic
of materials and also
the interface phenomenon so we are
carrying a
material science experiment in this
midtech
also we have other material science
experiments going on in the pair of the
bay
how will your discoveries in those
experiments be put into action
well a lot of the work that we're doing
here is pure research
and they're looking at things like we're
looking at how to make semiconductors
make them smaller more reliable
of course you can see the applications
that in electronics along the same lines
we're doing a helium experiment that
measures temperatures to a very very
small degree and we're using this again
to be able to make things smaller we're
doing a lot of material science that's
looking at the structure of metals kind
of understand how they join together
perhaps make a stronger metals i like to
mention one of the experiments for fisto
is a combined u.s french experiment
again showing the international flavor
of both this mission
and the space shuttle and the
international space station in the
future