Word: mir
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...100th manned launch, the two men, Robert ("Hoot") Gibson and Anatoli Solovyev, along with four other U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin, were both on board. Their mission was a more ambitious reprise of the earlier Apollo-Soyuz flight: rendezvous and dock with the Russian space station Mir, orbiting 245 miles above the earth...
Atlantis climbed quickly into a matching orbit with Mir and, over the next day or so, slowly closed a 4,000-mile gap with its target. Thursday morning, with the spacecraft 250 ft. apart and orbiting through space at 17,500 m.p.h., Gibson and shuttle pilot Charles Precourt began the delicate and risky maneuvers aimed at linking the two great ships. One careless burst of a thruster jet, and Mir's feathery solar panels could be destroyed; too forceful a bump from Atlantis, and either or both craft could be severely damaged. And if Gibson and Precourt couldn't align...
Atlantis Commander Hoot Gibson gave a Houston Rockets T-shirt to Cosmonaut Anatoly Solavyev, as theRussian and American crews wrapped up the final day of their joint mission aboard the Mir space stationin a celebratory mood. Pulling on the shirt, Solavyev, who became a Rockets fan while training for the mission at the Johnson Space Center, took advantage of gravity-free conditions to vault over his fellow spacemen. Astronaut Norman Thagard, who celebrated his 52nd birthday aboard the MIR space station feeling like "a lab rat" as fellow astronauts collected blood and other biological samples, said he wished he could...
Commander Robert "Hoot" Gibson had the demanding task of steering the 100-ton Atlantis to within three inches of the 123-ton Mir, at a closing rate no faster than one foot in 10 seconds, while the two ships sped in tandem around the Earth...
...only two minutes to do this, so that Mir could maintain contact with a Russian ground station. The shuttle has no such constraints; it is in near-constant contact with Mission Control via satellite...