Atlantis' Mission in Photos!

STS-71 was the third mission of the US/Russian Shuttle-Mir Program, which carried out the first Space Shuttle docking to Russia's Space Station Mir. The mission used Space Shuttle Atlantis, which lifted off from launch pad 39A on June 27, 1995 from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The mission delivered a relief crew of two cosmonauts, Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Budarin, to the station, along with recovering American Increment astronaut Norman Thagard, and was the first in a series of seven straight missions to the station flown by Atlantis.

The five-day docking marked the creation of the largest spacecraft ever placed into orbit at that time in history, the first ever on-orbit changeout of a shuttle crew, and the 100th manned space launch by the United States from Cape Canaveral. During the docked operations, the crews of the shuttle & station carried out various on-orbit joint US/Russian life sciences investigations aboard SPACELAB/Mir and a logistical resupply of the Mir, along with the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment-II
(SAREX-II) experiment.

Mission statistics :
Mission name: STS-71
Shuttle: Atlantis
Launch pad: 39-A
Launch: June 27, 1995, 19:32:19 UTC
Landing: July 7, 1995, 14:55:28 UTC, KSC, Runway 15
Duration: 9 days, 19 hours, 23 minutes, 9 seconds
Orbit altitude: 170 nautical miles (315 km)
Orbit inclination: 51.6 degrees
Distance traveled: 4.1 million miles (6.6 million km)