First Flights

It was my fortieth birthday, and I couldn’t have dreamed of a better way to celebrate. I was hurtling through space at a speed of over five miles per second on board the Space Shuttle Atlantis, headed for a rendezvous with the Russian Space Station Mir! This was to be the first ever docking using the space shuttle, and our first join-up in space with the Russians since Apollo-Soyuz twenty years earlier. I awoke from our second night’s sleep on orbit to a surprise birthday party that my crew had arranged for breakfast—including an inflatable cake. There wouldn’t be time the rest of the day to think about anything but the task ahead, so they had my party early! The final stages of the rendezvous would take literally the entire day. Thinking back on it now, I often wonder if I hadn’t dreamt the whole birthday thing. That is until I look at the photos Ellen Baker, one of our mission specialists, shot as I pretended to “blow out” the candles on the “cake” while it floated weightless in front of me. Life has been exciting in the astronaut corps the past few years. When I joined the space program in 1990 we were flying shuttles with primarily U.S. mission objectives and U.S. crews. But in 1991, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev signed an agreement to open an exchange program between our space agencies, including the flight of a cosmonaut on the shuttle and an American on Mir. Since that time, the halls of the astronaut corps look more like the United Nations than an office in Houston, Texas. Astronauts from over a dozen countries (speaking as many languages) began to train in Houston for the assembly of the new International Space Station. In March 1995, Norm Thagard became the first American to launch on a Russian rocket when he and his two Russian crewmates left Kazakhstan in their Soyuz for a three-month mission to Mir. Our job on Atlantis was to bring the Mir’s replacement crew, two Russian cosmonauts, Anatoly Soloviev and Nikolai Budarin. Nikolai was a rookie, and he never would have thought his first launch to space would be on an American shuttle! The Atlantis crew came together in the fall of 1994 to begin developing the flight plan. Hoot Gibson, the mission commander, asked me to be his pilot for the flight. We had Greg Harbaugh as our lead flight engineer, and Ellen Baker and Bonnie Dunbar as the other mission specialists. Bonnie had been training as Norm’s backup in Russia, and now that he was in space, she joined Atlantis to be part of the science mission we planned for the spacelab module in our payload bay. Norm was the first American to spend more than two weeks in space since the Skylab missions of the 1970s. The science community was jumping over the prospects of getting their hands on him for medical data when we arrived at Mir. Ellen and Bonnie coordinated the science aspects of the flight, while Hoot, Greg, and I worked out the rendezvous and docking details as well as the usual ascent and entry control of the shuttle orbiter. It was turning out to be the most challenging shuttle mission in years; adding the Russian dimension made it even better.