Atlantis, Mir Link Up in Historic Embrace : Space: Aboard largest craft to orbit Earth, Russian ignores custom and shakes the hand of U.S. commander.

The first contact was as soft and quivering as a kiss.

Speeding together at 17,500 m.p.h., the American shuttle Atlantis and Russian space station Mir linked up Thursday, creating the largest single spacecraft ever to orbit Earth and giving a huge boost to plans for an international space station to begin in 1997.

Atlantis commander Robert L. (Hoot) Gibson--who had traveled hundreds of thousands of miles to get there--was off a mere two seconds and seven-tenths of an inch. Moving at a barely perceptible rate of one-tenth of a foot per second, he advanced with painstaking care, so as not to damage Mir’s delicate gold solar wings.

The seven U.S. and Russian crew members aboard Atlantis looked out their windows to see the Mir crew--two Russians and one U.S. astronaut--bobbing upside down and flashing huge satisfied grins, waving out the windows like kids in a family station wagon on their way to the beach.

At the moment of capture, the combined spacecraft shivered slightly before settling down; thrusters on Atlantis pushed the two together while enormous springs serving as shock absorbers damped the motion.

And 245 miles below, mission controllers in Houston and Kaliningrad cheered and applauded.

NASA chief Daniel S. Goldin, watching from Kaliningrad, said it was “a dream come true.”

Speaking to the crew in his unmistakable New York City accent, Goldin said it was “an emotional experience for me. Godspeed on your mission.”

His Russian counterpart, Yuri Koptyev, congratulated the crews on their work. “What has been most important is that this experience has created cooperation and mutual trust,” Koptyev said.

“What you saw today was a baby step . . . toward exploring the universe,” said Wilbur Trafton, director of the international space station program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Gibson, speaking for everyone, said: “It’s a great feeling to be here . . . . It’s great to be back joined in orbit again.”

And then, the moment everyone had been waiting for:

“Houston, we think it’s time to open the hatch.”

Right on schedule, Gibson slid open Atlantis’ hatch and looked down the three-foot-long connecting tunnel to another world. Microphone in hand, he slowly made his way into the darkness, and extended his hand toward Russian Mir commander Vladimir Dezhurov.

After several seconds of fretful conferring with ground controllers in Kaliningrad, Dezhurov threw cultural caution to the wind and shook hands with Gibson as he floated upward through the cylindrical threshold.

While shaking hands upon meeting might be common courtesy in the West, any greeting over a threshold--be it a kiss, a hug or a hand clasp--is considered an omen of bad luck among superstitious Russians, from the space center’s cleaning crew on up to its rocket scientists.

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One by one, the other Atlantis crew members squeezed through the narrow passage toward Mir. First, Gregory J. Harbaugh, celebrating his 40th birthday, trailing his white-stockinged feet behind him. Then came Bonnie Dunbar, who trained for a year in Moscow as backup for the U.S. astronaut who just completed 105 days on Mir, Norman E. Thagard. Then Charles Precourt, the pilot.

Like typical American tourists, each toted a camera.

“Let them leave their cameras behind for heaven’s sake,” complained one of the Russians. The rest of the Mir crew--Thagard and Gennady Strekalov--made their way to the Mir central module from the other side.

In a tangle of floating cables, cameras, microphones, heads and legs, they embraced and shook hands. For the group portrait, Gibson and Dunbar had to reach up and grab Harbaugh from the ceiling, where he floated.

“It’s been a long time,” Gibson said in Russian.

It was the first time ever three commanders had been together in the same small room in space.

“Hello from all your friends in the United States,” said the disembodied voice from Houston. “We all feel a part of it down here.”

Thagard, due to fly home on Atlantis, demurred: “You’re missing all the fun.”

Then, the Atlantis crew--perhaps the first international taggers in space--scribbled their names on Mir’s wall.

“After all the years of preparation and training,” Gibson said, “it seems hard to believe that we’re actually here.”

This first embrace between two former enemies in 20 years of frequently dangerous competition in space turned out to be an almost perfect match.

Unlike the Apollo-Soyuz docking 20 years ago, when the U.S. ship thudded into Soyuz, this mating was painstakingly slow, tentative, exploratory--with both craft careful not to hurt each other. Mir angled its vast solar wings, which normally follow the sun like a flower, into an out-of-the-way position. Atlantis angled its thrusters outward, away from its partner.

Atlantis moved in cautiously, easing to a point just below Mir before dawn Thursday morning, then coasting toward it, stopping every now and then for the crew to check things out. The docking ring on the shuttle slid into the receiving end on Mir like hand in glove.

“It couldn’t have gone slicker,” Gibson said.

The $18-million docking mechanism was built by the Russian space agency for its own shuttle Buran, which never got off the ground. (It was flown only once, unpiloted.) The mechanism was fine-tuned and added to by U.S. contractors in the kind of symbiosis both sides hope to see a lot more of.

“We are certainly getting our money’s worth,” Trafton said of the $400-million U.S. deal with the Russians. “No one has enough money in their budget to do space exploration alone. . . . If it weren’t for the Russians, we wouldn’t have an astronaut today with 100 days in space.”

After the docking, handshakes and hugs, crews gathered for safety briefings on both spacecraft. Then they prepared to switch, with the three-person Mir crew making Atlantis their home ship and the two cosmonauts launched on Atlantis moving into Mir.

For the next five days of the mission, those will be their “home” ships, although all crew members will be free to move about either craft.

The rules of comportment are somewhat flexible, Gibson said, but at any time, any one ship can tell the other ship to separate--for example, if danger threatens.

“It’s sort of like a house guest,” he said.

Then the astronauts and cosmonauts prepared to bed down. It’s not Capt. Kirk’s Enterprise yet, but a lot of people are hoping it is the first step.

“What we witnessed was the beginning of the assembling of the international space station,” Trafton said.

Today the crew members are to begin what amounts to an enormous moving operation: unpacking food, water and scientific equipment, transferring tons of goods, figuring out where to put them.

Early this morning they are scheduled to exchange symbolic gifts. Atlantis brought boxes of chocolates, oranges and silk flowers; Mir brought the traditional bread and salt.

But as the crew said good night on Thursday night, Gibson told mission control that he could not find the special medallion and the Russian and American flags that were supposed to be packed for today’s ceremony; he feared they had been taken off the shuttle mistakenly to make room for a last-minute tool jury-rigged to fix a balky solar panel on one of the Mir modules.

The combined Atlantis-Mir craft is so large--250 tons stretched to the height of a 15-story building--that it can be seen as a star rapidly moving across the night sky. In Los Angeles, it will pass by at 10:09 p.m. today at 20 degrees above the horizon, looking west-northwest. The projected sighting directions for the remainder of the joint mission:

Saturday: 9:14 p.m., 21 degrees, north-northwest.

Sunday: 9:54 p.m., 21 degrees, west-southwest.

Monday: 9 p.m., 22 degrees, west-northwest.

The Atlantis is scheduled to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 7.

Times staff writer Carol J. Williams contributed to this story from Kaliningrad, Russia.

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Shuttle Success

The two spacecraft are secured by adapter featuring shock-absorbing outer rings that cushion the impact of the two vehicles.

Source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration