STS-71 was a crewed spaceflight that was the third mission of the US/Russian Shuttle-Mir Program. The mission began on June 27, 1995, with the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis from launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Atlantis became the first Space Shuttle to dock with the Russian space station Mir, delivering a relief crew of two cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Budarin to the station and recovering Increment astronaut Norman Thagard. Atlantis returned to Earth on July 7 with a crew of eight. It was the first of seven straight missions to Mir flown by Atlantis, and the second Shuttle mission to land with an eight-person crew after STS-61-A in 1985.
During the five days the Shuttle was docked to Mir, the combined spacecraft became the largest in orbit at the time. STS-71 marked several key achievements: it was the first Shuttle docking with a space station, the first crew exchange between a Shuttle and a station, and the 100th crewed space launch by the United States. The mission carried Spacelab and provided logistical resupply for Mir. The joint US/Russian crews conducted various life science investigations using Spacelab and performed the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment-II (SAREX-II).
Crew
Crew seat assignments
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"
! Seat
! Launch
! Landing
|rowspan=9| 150px<br />Seats 1–4 are on the flight deck.<br />Seats 5–8 are on the mid-deck.<br />Seat 8 was located to the starboard (right) side of Seat 7.
|-
! 1
|colspan=2| Gibson
|-
! 2
|colspan=2| Precourt
|-
! 3
|colspan=2| Baker
|-
! 4
|colspan=2| Harbaugh
|-
! 5
|colspan=2| Dunbar
|-
! 6
|Solovyev
|Strekalov
|-
! 7
|Budarin
|Dezhurov
|-
! 8
|
|Thagard
|}
Mission highlights
thumb|right|Space Shuttle [[Space Shuttle Atlantis|Atlantis launches on mission STS-71]]
The primary objectives of the flight were to rendezvous and perform the first docking between the Space Shuttle and the Russian Mir space station on June 29. In the first U.S.-Russian (Soviet) docking in twenty years, Atlantis delivered a relief crew of two cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Budarin to Mir.
Secondary objectives included filming with the IMAX camera and the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment-II (SAREX-II) experiment.
STS-71 was the 100th U.S. human space launch conducted from Cape Canaveral, the first U.S. Space Shuttle-Russian Space Station docking and joint on-orbit operations; largest spacecraft ever in orbit; and the first on-orbit changeout of Shuttle crew.
The rendezvous sequence began at 15:32:19 EDT with a lift-off in-plane with Mir orbit, at the opening of the 10 minute 19 second launch window. Ascent was nominal with no OMS 1 burn required. Almost three hours later the orbit was raised to more typical values of 210 x 159 nautical miles by the OMS 3 burn.
Docking occurred at 9 am EDT, June 29, using R-Bar or Earth radius vector approach, with Atlantis closing in on Mir from directly below. R-bar approach allows natural forces to brake the orbiter's approach more than would occur along standard approach directly in front of the space station; also, an R-bar approach minimizes the number of orbiter jet firings needed for approach. The manual phase of the docking began with Atlantis about a half-mile (800 m) below Mir, with Gibson at the controls on aft flight deck. Stationkeeping was performed when the orbiter was about from Mir, pending approval from Russian and U.S. flight directors to proceed. Gibson then maneuvered the orbiter to a point about from Mir before beginning the final approach to station. Closing rate was close to the targeted 0.1 foot per second (30 mm/s), being approximately 0.107 foot per second (33 mm/s) at contact. Interface contact was nearly flawless: less than lateral misalignment and an angular misalignment of less than 0.5 degrees per axis. No braking jet firings had been required. was involved in a historic marine salvage court case. The tank was being delivered by barge in November 1994, when the tow vehicle encountered issues in Hurricane Gordon. Their mayday signal was picked up by the oil tanker Cherry Valley, which responded and towed the tug and its cargo to safety. Under the tradition of marine salvage, NASA offered $5 million to the crew of the tanker as a reward, but the United States Department of Justice reduced the offer to $1 million.