UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Liftoff of Atlantis on the fourth flight to dock with the Russian space station.</s>JOHN HOLLIMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The major goal of this mission, to dock with Russia's Mir Space Station and to retrieve the woman dubbed by her astronaut colleagues as the "Queen of the Universe": Shannon Lucid, who's been in space longer than any American or any woman from any country.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Houston, contact and capturing. Atlantis and Mir are shaking hands.</s>HOLLIMAN: After the docking, Lucid literally grabbed her astronaut friends and pulled them aboard the Russian space station. It was an emotional reunion after half a year away from Americans.</s>SHANNON LUCID, ASTRONAUT: The night before they were supposed to launch it was sort of like Christmas Eve when you were a kid, you know what I mean? You're just...</s>HOLLIMAN: The space hab laboratory in the shuttle's cargo bay was central to all the experiments and transferring supplies for astronaut John Blaha, who was replacing Lucid on Mir.</s>JOHN BLAHA, ASTRONAUT: When I come back to the shuttle now, to me it looks smaller than I used to think it was. So the volume in the Mir is quite large, and that's the thing that I was impressed with.</s>HOLLIMAN: Now that Atlantis is safe on the ground, engineers will investigate a series of problems that came up, including the auxiliary power unit that caused mission planners to consider bringing the shuttle home early. The landing seemed to come off without a hitch. John Holliman, CNN reporting.
CNN 20: Astronaut Shannon Lucid Returns, September 26, 1996