MISSION CONTROL CENTER
STS-71 Status Report #21

Friday, July 7, 1995, 3:30 p.m. CDT

  Commander "Hoot" Gibson and Pilot Charlie Precourt guided Atlantis to
a smooth touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center at 9:55 AM Central time
this morning to wrap up the first mission to linkup a Shuttle with the
Russian Space Station Mir.

  After firing Atlantis' braking rockets at 8:45 AM, Gibson and Precourt
brought Atlantis home to runway 15 at the Kennedy Space Center's
Shuttle Landing Facility to complete the 4.1 million mile mission, the
first of seven planned docking flights to the Mir as part of the Phase
One program leading to the development and construction of the
International Space Station.

  About an hour after landing, Mir 18 cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov,
Gennady Strekalov and U.S. astronaut Norm Thagard were brought out of
the Shuttle into the Crew Transport Vehicle alongside Atlantis for
their ride to the Operations and Checkout Building at KSC for initial
postflight medical testing. The Mir 18 crewmembers spent 115 days in
space following their launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket from the
Baikonur Cosmodrome on March 14th.

  Dezhurov, Strekalov and Thagard will be flown back to Ellington Field
in Houston in an Air Force C-9 Medevac plane for several weeks of
medical tests and reorientation to a gravity environment after almost
four months of weightlessness. They are expected to arrive in Houston
about 9 1/2 hours after landing. The rest of the STS-71 crew is
scheduled to Houston around 9 PM.

  Atlantis was towed this afternoon to the Orbiter Processing Facility
at KSC to begin a maintenance period leading to its next launch in
late October on STS-74, the second Shuttle-Mir docking mission, in
which a Russian-built Docking Module will be permanently mated to the
Kristall science module's docking mechanism on the Mir.  That will
enable Atlantis to linkup to Mir on future flights with enough
clearance to avoid interference with the Russian Space Station's solar
arrays.