1 One commander likened the moment to 'a fairy tale.' His counterpart repeated 'beautiful' over and over. It was a spectacle: two 100-ton spaceships, flying only 37 feet apart at 17,500 mph.
2 'Unbelievable,' Discovery commander James Wetherbee said as the shuttle and the Russian space station Mir participated in an 245-mile-high orbital ballet worthy of '2001: A Space Odyssey.'
3 'It's a beautiful sight. It's a great world,' he said.
4 Monday's rendezvous, the first between U.S. and Russian spacecraft since the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz docking, was a 10-minute rehearsal for the first shuttle-space station docking in June. This time, Discovery and Mir hovered between 37 and 44 feet apart.
5 'We are bringing our spaceships closer together. We are bringing our nations closer together,' Wetherbee said at the moment of closest approach.
6 Mir commander Alexander Viktorenko said it was 'almost like a fairy tale . almost too good to be true.'
7 Three Mir cosmonauts and six shuttle crew members -- including Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Titov -- took pictures, chatted via radio and waved enthusiastically from windows during the three-hour rendezvous.
8 'It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in space,' Wetherbee said. One of the Mir crew broke from Russian to English and echoed, 'Beautiful, beautiful.'
9 Discovery's crew was still talking about the sight early today as Mission Control awoke them with 'The Blue Danube,' a Strauss waltz played in '2001,' the 1968 science fiction film. By that time, they were 52 miles away from Mir.
10 'We were thinking the same thing yesterday,' said shuttle pilot Eileen Collins. 'When we saw the Mir up here, it sure felt like we needed that music in the background.'
11 The crew returned to work today on about 20 secondary science experiments in a shuttle laboratory. Titov was set to release a 2,800-pound ultraviolet telescope with the shuttle robot arm for two days of free-flying research.
12 Discovery's eight-day flight is to end Saturday. The crew still also has a spacewalk on its schedule.
13 'While this has been a very invigorating exercise and taken a lot of energy up to this point, there is still a long way to go on this flight and a lot of work to be done yet,' said flight director Phil Engelauf.
14 It's doubtful, however, that anything else on this flight could match the spectacular video images beamed from space Monday. Some showed parts of both Discovery and Mir with a backdrop of blue-and-white Earth.
15 'Just a few years ago we were pointing missiles across the ocean at each other,' said NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, who watched with President Clinton in the Oval Office. 'And just 15 minutes ago, I saw a Russian cosmonaut sitting in the cockpit of the shuttle Discovery waving to the cosmonauts on the Mir station.'
16 'If this isn't a change in the approach to the world I don't know what is,' he said.
17 The close encounter almost didn't happen. Russian space officials waited until three hours before the rendezvous before deciding to allow the maneuver. They feared that fuel leaking from a Discovery tail jet might damage the station, but agreed to let the shuttle approach if the troublesome jet was shut off.
18 NASA wanted to learn how the shuttle handles near the massive outpost before seven Atlantis-Mir dockings planned through 1997. After that, the U.S. and Russian space agencies plan to start building an international space station.
19 After the rendezvous was over, President Clinton called Discovery from the Oval Office to congratulate the astronauts.
20 'We're all so impressed,' Clinton said. 'This really proves, I think, that Russians and Americans can work together and that we can make this international space station project successful. I can't tell you how much I appreciate all the work that all of you have done to that end.'

One commander likened the moment to " a fairy tale . " His counterpart repeated " beautiful " over and over . It was a spectacle : two 100 - ton spaceships , flying only 37 feet apart at 17 , 500 mph .
two 100 - ton spaceships ,
What were these spaceships?