various techniques and pieces of equipment that would be used during the docking missions that followed. Five weeks after Discovery flight, the March 14 launch of Soyuz TM-21 carried expedition EO-18 to Mir. The crew consisted of cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and Gennady Strekalov and NASA astronaut Norman Thagard, who became the first American to fly into space aboard the Soyuz spacecraft. During the course of their 115-day expedition, the Spektr science module (which served as living and working space for American astronauts) was launched aboard a Proton rocket and docked to Mir. Spektr carried more than of research equipment from America and other nations. The expedition's crew returned to Earth aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis following the first Shuttle–Mir docking during mission STS-71. The primary objectives of STS-71, launched on June 27, called for the Space Shuttle Atlantis to rendezvous and perform the first docking between an American Space Shuttle and the station. On June 29, Atlantis successfully docked with Mir, becoming the first US spacecraft to dock with a Russian spacecraft since the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975. Atlantis delivered cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Budarin, who would form the expedition EO-19 crew, and retrieved astronaut Norman Thagard and cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and Gennady Strekalov of the expedition EO-18 crew. Atlantis also carried out on-orbit joint US-Russian life sciences investigations aboard a Spacelab module and performed a logistical resupply of the station. The final Shuttle flight of 1995, STS-74, began with the November 12 launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis, and delivered the Russian-built Docking Module to Mir, along with a new pair of solar arrays and other hardware upgrades for the station. The Docking Module was designed to provide more clearance for Shuttles in order to prevent any collisions with Mir solar arrays during docking, a problem which had been overcome during STS-71 by relocating the station's Kristall module to a different location on the station. The module, attached to Kristall docking port, prevented the need for this procedure on further missions. During the course of the flight, nearly of water were transferred to Mir and experiment samples including blood, urine and saliva were moved to Atlantis for return to Earth. Priroda (1996) Continuous US presence aboard Mir started in 1996 with the March 22 launch of Atlantis on mission STS-76, when the Second Increment astronaut Shannon Lucid was transferred to the station. STS-76 was the third docking mission to