By WILLIAM L. SPENCEThe Daily Inter Lake

The first American to participate in Russia's cosmonaut space program was the guest speaker at a major scientific conference on Tuesday.

Norm Thagard spent almost 20 years with NASA before retiring in 1996. He flew four shuttle missions during that time, and also spent a record 115 days aboard Russia's Mir space station in 1995.

The former astronaut shared a number of photos and memories of his experiences during the opening of the conference, which was held at Grouse Mountain Lodge and attracted several dozen people from around the world. The three-day event was hosted by Semitool, which regularly brings some of the top scientists in the world here to discuss the latest technological innovations. This week's conference dealt with electrochemical deposition.

Thagard said his own interest in electronics began in high school, when he built a radio set from scratch. He later earned an electrical engineering degree, flew fighter jets during the Vietnam War and then earned a medical degree.

In 1978, he was selected by NASA for the first new class of astronauts since the Apollo moon program.

"I love the numbers: They received 8,079 applications and chose 35 of us," Thagard said.

His first shuttle mission came in 1983, when he was a mission specialist aboard the Challenger. He said it was his most famous mission, mainly because one of his fellow crew members was Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space.

He flew the Challenger again in April 1985 - less than nine months before the spacecraft exploded after take-off, killing seven people.

Thagard's presentation on Tuesday was mainly a long biography - he accurately refered to it as "What I did on my summer vacation." The last half dealt mainly with his experience in the Russian space program, as part of a post-Cold War astronaut/cosmonaut exchange.

"I'd always wanted to learn Russian," he said. "There were also a lot of firsts involved in this - the first American to train with the Russians, the first American to fly with them and the first American to be on the Mir."

Thagard and two Russian crew members spent 115 days aboard the space station. During that time, he lost 12 percent of his bone mineral and 20 percent of the muscle mass in his calf, he was anemic when he returned to Earth, his aerobic capacity has declined by about two-thirds, and at one point he'd lost more than 17 pounds.

However, he also enjoyed a view that only a handful of human beings have shared.

"The shuttle makes one orbit every 90 minutes," Thagard said. "That made me realize that Earth isn't infinite. You can see air pollution over Tibet, you can see sediments from deforested areas draining into the sea. It makes you realize that Earth doesn't have an infinite capacity to absorb all of these insults."