STS-71 was the third mission of the US/Russian
Shuttle-Mir Program and the first
Space Shuttle docking to Russian
space station Mir. It started on June 27, 1995 with the launch of
Space Shuttle Atlantis from
launch pad 39A at the
Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
As part of the mission, Atlantis engaged in the Shuttle program's first space station crew transfer. The shuttle delivered the Mir Expedition 19 crew of Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Budarin; and returned the Expedition 18 crew of cosmonauts Gennadi Strekalov and Vladimir Dezhurov, and astronaut Norman Thagard. It was the first of seven straight missions to Mir flown by Atlantis.
For the five days the shuttle was docked to Mir they were the largest spacecraft in orbit at the time. In addition to the crew transfer, STS-71 marked the first docking of a space shuttle to a space station, and the 100th manned space launch by the United States. The mission carried Spacelab, and included a logistical resupply of Mir. Together the shuttle and station crews conducted various on-orbit joint US/Russian life science investigations with Spacelab along with the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment-II (SAREX-II) experiment.
Atlantis returned to Earth on July 7, becoming the first mission to land with a crew of eight since STS-61-A in 1985.
Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova (
Russian:
Валенти́на Влади́мировна Терешко́ва) (born 6 March 1937) is the first woman in space, now a retired
Soviet cosmonaut. Out of more than four hundred applicants and then out of five finalists, she was selected to pilot
Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963 and become the first woman to fly in
space. This also made her the first civilian in space (she was only honorarily inducted into the USSR's Air Force as a condition on joining the Cosmonaut Corps). On this mission, lasting almost three days in space, she performed various tests on herself to collect data on the female body's reaction to spaceflight.
Before being recruited as a cosmonaut, Tereshkova was a textile-factory assembly worker and an amateur parachutist. After the female cosmonaut group was dissolved in 1969, she became a prominent member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, holding various political offices. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she retired from politics and remains revered as a hero in Russia.
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