The space shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir Tuesday night, January 14, on a mission to exchange American astronauts on the station and provide supplies.
     The shuttle docked with Mir at 10:53pm EST (0353 UT January 15.) There were no problems reported with the docking.
     Atlantis brought astronaut Jerry Linenger to Mir to replace John Blaha, who is concluding his four-month stay on the station. Blaha will return to Earth next week on the shuttle.
     The 41-year-old Linenger is the fourth American to live aboard the Russian space station, but he will be the first to take a spacewalk during his tour of duty on Mir.
     The shuttle lifted off Sunday morning, January 12, at 4:27am EST (0927 UT), after a trouble-free countdown. The pre-dawn launch was visible for hundreds of miles.
     "We're starting the year off right," launch director Jim Harrington said. "We had one of those boring countdowns that we like to have."
     Mission STS-81 is commanded by Michael Baker. The crew includes pilot Brent Jett, and mission specialists John Grunsfeld, Marsha Ivins, Jeff Wisoff, and Linenger.
     In addition to the crew exchange, Atlantis is bringing several tons of supplies for the three-man Mir crew which includes Russian cosmonauts Valeri Korzun and Aleksandr Kaleri.
     Also onboard Atlantis is the KidSat payload. The remotely-controlled electronic camera, making its second flight, is run by a team of high school and college students at the University of California San Diego.
     Students at 15 middle schools across the United States select regions of the Earth to photograph, and analyze the images after they are downlinked from the shuttle.
     Atlantis is set to conclude its 10-day mission with a landing at the Kennedy Space Center on the morning of January 22.

An unconnected hose was the cause of the failure of the landing gear of the DC-XA Clipper Graham spacecraft, which crashed and exploded after a test flight last July 31, a NASA panel reported January 7.
     The Clipper Graham Incident Investigation Board, led by former astronaut Vance Brand, found that a hose in the helium pneumatic system for landing gear leg #2 was not connected.
     Because the hose was not connected, the system did not pressurize and the landing leg did not deploy. The DC-XA was unstable landing on three legs and toppled over, triggering explosions in its fuel tanks.
     The panel pointed to several contributing causes, all based on procedures used by the ground crew to prepare the vehicle before each flight. Among the causes cited by the report were a failure to identify the landing system as a critical item and thus no special procedures to prepare the system before each flight, no record of confirming existing procedures for stowing the landing gear, and the possible "distraction or interruption" of the gear technician while working.
     "The McDonnell Douglas rapid prototyping guidelines or implementation of the guidelines may go too far in the direction of sacrificing quality and reliability," the panel observed in their report.
     The accident took place at the end of the fourth test flight of the DC-XA, a modified version of the original DC-X vehicle which first flew in August 1993. No further work on the project is planned, as resources are now being devoted to the X-33 and X-34 reusable launch vehicle programs.

The Bion-11 spacecraft returned to Earth after two weeks in orbit January 7, but one of the two monkeys on board the Russian spacecraft later died of a heart attack unrelated to the space flight.
     The Bion-11 capsule set down in Kazahkstan at 12:02am EST January 7 (0502 UT) and was immediately recovered by a Russian-American team. The monkeys and other animals and plants were recovered unharmed.
     However, one of the monkeys, named Multik, died after bone and muscle samples were taken under general anesthetic the following day.
     "Multik suffered cardiac arrest just as the air tube was being pulled out and he began to cough," explained Inessa Kozlovskaya of the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow. "We spent 50 minutes trying to revive him but we failed."
     Kozlovskaya said the death was not related to Multik's two weeks in weightlessness but an unfortunate stroke of luck. "There is a very low mortality rate in these matters, 1 in 2,000," she said.
     Most of the post-flight tests on the monkeys had already been performed, according to researchers. Laptik, the other monkey on the Bion flight, suffered no ill effects.
     The mission was criticized by animal rights activists in the United States, who claimed the experiments, which included placing electrodes on the monkey's brains, were cruel. NASA and independent review panels defended the experiments, noting that they had scientific merit and met guidelines for animal research.
     NASA paid about half of the $30 million cost of the mission. France, Lithuania, and the Ukraine also participated on the mission. The next Bion mission is planned for next year.