It's really a good feeling to know that we put this up there, that it's working, that all these people's plans that worked so hard came together and things fit and we've got a real space station.

We're on the same radius from the Earth, and then we start to swing around to where we're ahead of them on the velocity vector, so we come in relative to the station from this forward velocity position and dock on to the forward end of the Lab.

A lot of these things will fly in later forms on the space station themselves, or a later form of that research will, once they kind of find out some of the basics from flying it on shuttle.

I grew up watching a lot of the coverage of the early U.S. space program, all the way back starting with Mercury and then through Gemini and Apollo and of course going to the moon as the main part of the Apollo program.