Rick Searfoss is a professional motivational speaker emphasizing leadership, teamwork, innovation, creativity and expertise. Former astronaut Rick Searfoss continues to stay right in the middle in some of today's most innovative leading-edge projects: Vice President of the Zero Gravity Corporation, XCOR Aerospace Corporation flight test, leader and spokesperson for numerous space entrepreneurial ventures.

Launching March 22, 1996, Rick Searfoss flew his second mission as pilot of STS-76 aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis. During this 9-day mission the STS-76 crew performed the third docking of an American spacecraft with the Russian space station Mir. In support of a joint US/Russian program, the crew transported to Mir nearly two tons of water, food, supplies, and scientific equipment, as well as US Astronaut Shannon Lucid to begin her six-month stay in space. STS-76 included the first ever spacewalk on a combined Space Shuttle-Space Station complex. The flight crew also conducted scientific investigations, including European Space Agency sponsored biology experiments, the Kidsat earth observations project, and several engineering flight tests. Completed in 145 orbits, STS-76 landed at Edwards Air Force Base, California, on March 31, 1996.

The primary mission objective of STS-76 was the third docking between the Space Shuttle Atlantis and the Russian Space Station Mir. It included a crew transfer, an extravehicular activity (EVA), logistics operations and scientific research. The mission also featured a SPACEHAB module, middeck experiments, a Get Away Special (GAS) canister and a 6-hour EVA. Planned Experiments included the Mir Electric Field Characterization (MEFC) experiment, numerous European Space Agency's (ESA) Biorack life sciences experiments, the Queen's University Experiment in Liquid Diffusion (QUELD) experiment, the Optizone Liquid Phase Sintering Experiment (OLIPSE) and a Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Get Away Special (GAS) payload Trapped Ions in Space (TRIS) experiment. TRIS measured low-energy particle radiation in the inner magnetosphere. Another experiment conducted on Mir during STS-76 was the Mir Wireless Network Experiment (WNE) which was launched on STS-74 in November 1995. It tested the first wireless client-server network in the space environment. The mission also included KidSat, a prototype of Earth viewing cameras and instruments that allows students in grades Kindergarten to Grade 12 (K-12) to see and direct the capture of pictures from space.

Rick Searfoss, Colonel, USAF Retired, former astronaut, is a distinguished teamwork and leadership expert speaker who has piloted or commanded three highly successful space missions. As a mission commander, he is also one of less than a hundred people in history ever chosen to command a human space mission.