MISSION CONTROL CENTER
STS-71 Status Report #18

Thursday, July 6, 1995 6:30 a.m. CDT

The Atlantis crew received a lighthearted wake-up as a parody of the
Beatles' "Hello, Goodbye" and Paul Anka's "Lay Your Head on My
Shoulder" greeted the eight crew members at 1:30 a.m. today.

Today marks the final full day on orbit for the astronauts and
cosmonauts on board Atlantis and preparations for tomorrow's planned
landing will occupy much of their time.  This morning, Commander Hoot
Gibson, Pilot Charlie Precourt and Mission Specialist Greg Harbaugh
powered on one of Atlantis' hydraulic systems and cycled the flight
control surfaces that will be used during reentry.  They also fired
the orbiter's reaction control system jets in the traditional
preflight checkout of the Shuttle's systems prior to Friday's
scheduled homecoming.

Even as crew members prepared to return home, the pace of biomedical
investigations in the Spacelab module continued with the Mir 18 crew
members --Vladimir Dezhurov, Gennady Strekalov and Norm Thagard.
Thagard and Strekalov once again climbed into the bag-like Lower Body
Negative Pressure device which pulls fluids from the upper body to the
lower extremities.  Sessions in the LBNP are part of the
countermeasures program to prepare the Mir 18 crew to return to Earth
following more than 100 days in orbit.

Also in the Spacelab, Harbaugh will join Mission Specialist Ellen
Baker in setting up the special recumbent seats the Mir 18 crew
members will occupy during reentry.  Baker and Bonnie Dunbar also will
begin deactivating some of the Spacelab's systems in anticipation of
Friday's landing.  Some systems will remain powered on so that
exercise equipment in the Spacelab module is available to crew members
in the event weather precludes a landing Friday morning.

Early this morning, at 2:15 a.m., a voice check from the new flight
control room in Mission Control to the orbiting shuttle was
successfully completed.  STS-71 is scheduled to be the last shuttle
mission to use the current mission control center for on-orbit
operations.  Beginning with STS-70, set for launch on July 13,
on-orbit flight control will take place in the new flight control
room.  Wednesday night at 8:16, flight controllers in Houston passed a
milestone as communications commands issued from the new flight
control room in Mission Control were successfully uplinked to
Atlantis.  The commands were sent as Atlantis flew 218 nautical miles
above the Indian Ocean.

Atlantis is scheduled to land at 9:55 Friday morning at the Kennedy
Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility.  A second landing opportunity
at KSC is available at 11:31 a.m.

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