Word: mir
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Sighting through a camera mounted within the shuttle's docking assembly and aiming at a target in Mir's matching equipment, Gibson gently nudged Atlantis toward the Russian station, foot by agonizing foot. At 30 ft. he stopped to make sure the alignment was perfect. It was. As millions watched on live TV and listened to the terse, four-way conversation between the two spaceships and their ground controllers at Houston and Kaliningrad, Atlantis approached to within a few feet, then inches...
...latches locked into place, an American spaceship and a Russian one were soaring through space together for the first time in two decades. The astronauts and cosmonauts checked to make sure the tunnel-like air lock linking the ships had no leaks. At length, the hatches swung slowly open. Mir's commander, Vladimir Dezhurov, floated through the lock and grasped Gibson's hand in joyous greeting...
...next few hours, there was not much to distinguish this space spectacular from the dead-end Apollo-Soyuz mission. Astronauts and cosmonauts drank toasts, exchanged symbolic gifts (flowers, candy and fruit for the crew on Mir; the traditional Russian hospitality offering of bread and salt for the Americans), toured each other's spacecraft and issued properly portentous statements about cooperation in space--as did officials on the ground, including Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin...
...result of the pressure to make space cooperation work, the Atlantis-Mir docking is not simply a one-shot space show but a calculated step in a series of missions that will take advantage of both programs' strengths. The goal: construction of a permanently manned international space station--an orbiting laboratory that, in various versions, has been on the books for a decade and that NASA administrator Daniel Goldin calls "the heart of the space program...
...first step either; that was taken in February when the space shuttle Discovery tested its maneuverability by approaching to within 37 ft. of Mir. In March U.S. astronaut Dr. Norman Thagard, fresh from two months of training at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, zoomed into space aboard a Soyuz capsule to begin a three-month stay on Mir--a record sojourn for an American, though nearly a year short of the Russian record. The current mission is, among other things, a ticket home for Thagard and his two Russian companions on Mir; in exchange, Solovyev and Budarin will stay...