"We were a top secret classified department of defense mission. So, to this day, if I told you what we carried in the shuttle, you could never leave this hangar. One of the fascinating things about it was that my crew and I got briefed into what our capabilities in space are, in terms of the military, and again, it's not weaponry. After we had gone to orbit and on the first day, we deployed a major new intelligence satillite for the United States. And that's about as much as I'm allowed to say about it. Even to this day, this was 1988. So what's that 34 years ago?" -Hoot Gibson.
STS-71, First Shuttle-Mir Docking
Atlantis launched on June 27, 1995, on the STS-71 mission to carry out the third goal, the historic first Shuttle docking with Mir. Aboard Atlantis were Commander Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson, Pilot Charles J. Precourt, and Mission Specialists Ellen L. Baker, Gregory J. Harbaugh, Bonnie J. Dunbar, Anatoli Y. Solovyev, and Nikolai M. Budarin. After docking, Solovyev and Budarin would remain aboard the station as the Mir-19 crew, while Dezhurov, Strekalov, and Thagard would return to Earth aboard Atlantis, completing the first crew exchange in the Space Shuttle program. In its payload bay, Atlantis carried a Spacelab module outfitted with equipment to conduct biomedical investigations on the returning crewmembers. Two days after launch, Atlantis began its approach to Mir, a procedure rehearsed earlier in the year during STS-63, the Shuttle-Mir rendezvous (or near-Mir) mission. Gibson steered Atlantis to a smooth docking at Mir’s Kristall module as the two spacecraft flew 250 miles above the Lake Baikal region of eastern Russia, forming the world’s heaviest spacecraft up to that time – nearly half a million pounds.
Hoot Gibson’s Hangar, aviation’s premier podcast, hosted by America’s premier aviator, Hoot Gibson, “The Man That Can Fly Anything."
Don’t miss a single episode. Video podcast air exclusively on Air2AirTV and aviation’s premier Youtube channel - Dronescapes, producing aircraft documentaries, exclusive stories and interviews from veterans, pilots and aces, in their own words. WWII missions, Vietnam's stories and much more!
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"THE MAN WHO CAN FLY ANYTHING"
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