DISCLOSURE / FILE
A preliminary NASA transcript of the Gemini 4 Part II crew debriefing that preserves James McDivitt and Edward White's visual-observation discussion, including spacecraft debris, Earth and sky observations, and one aurora-like curtain of moving light seen from orbit.
NASA-UAP-D017, Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part II, 1965
A preliminary NASA transcript of the Gemini 4 Part II crew debriefing that preserves James McDivitt and Edward White's visual-observation discussion, including spacecraft debris, Earth and sky observations, and one aurora-like curtain of moving light seen from orbit.
Prepared by NASA's Spacecraft Operations Branch on June 18, 1965, this preliminary Part II transcript comes from Gemini 4 crew debrief voice recordings taken aboard USS Wasp on June 9 and completed at the Manned Spacecraft Center on June 12. The table of contents places Visual Sightings at internal pages 188-213, covering countdown, powered flight, orbital flight, and reentry. In that section McDivitt and White describe mostly explained visual material: launch and separation debris, Earth features, star visibility limits, airglow, reflective particles around the spacecraft, shooting stars, and reentry plasma. The standout uncorroborated observation is an aurora-like curtain of parallel light rays, which McDivitt thought may have been near Australia, recorded on voice tape and described as below the airglow layer, moving like neon signs, and possibly photographed.
Just plain debris was all it was . Just pieces of whi te junk came by.p.199
We could see wakes of ships. We could see roads. We could see towns .p.200
They were just paral l el r unning lines of lights radiating from the earth up toward us but at a distance away, and i t sort of looked like a curtain.p.209
This thing was in motion, too . It wasn ' t a stationary thing. It continued to move the way the lights on neon signs do. It was wiggling back and forth .p.210
At this time we had a l l the fuel particles from the fuel from the boosters spewing out all over, and my whole view out t he win dow was j ust completely full of these reflecting particles .p.212
I saw quite a few shooting stars.p.214
It finally went from a dull glow to a bright one, and finally you could see the leading edge of it eroding away.p.219
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• Authority: 65 NW 91526 l I To ur tf Fj~fr {ft~E -----------"-==-----~ By authority of-E---'-:---'--'-=--::....-~-=-__,___.c.....:::=---1 Cha nged bY--..£:::%:.:~~!l"~~==-- PRELIMINARY GT-4 FLIGHT CREW DEBRIEFING TRANSCRIPT PART II Prepared By Spacecraft Operations Branch Flight Crew Support Division June 18 , 1965 This material contains information affecting the national defense of the United States within the meaning of the Espionage Laws , Title 18. U. S. c. Section 793 and 794 , the transmission or revela tion of which in any manner to an unauthorized person is prohibited by law. Group 4: Downgrade at 3 year intervals Declassified after 12 years NOTICE: This document may be exempt from public disclosure under the Freedom of Infor mation Act (5 U.S.C. 552). Requests for its re lease to persons outside the U.S. Government should be handled under the provisions of NASA Policy Direct:ve 1382.2.BB . b i - j | b | : , ae ® 9
PREFACE This preliminary transcript was made from voice tape -recording3 of the GT-4 flight crew debriefing conducted aboard the recovery ship, the USS Wasp, on June~' 1965, and concluded at the Manned Spacecraft Center on June 12, 1965. Although all the material contained in this transcript has been edited , the urgent need for the preliminary transcript by mission analysis personnel precluded a thorough editorial review prior to its publication. Errors in this transcript will be corrected as soon as possible and an official transcript will be published at a later date. Thia document contains a transcript of the second part of the total debriefing. A preliminary transcript of the first part was published on June 16 , 1965 , and it contains the crew ' s description of the mission from an operational standpoint.
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itit 4Fl8E!I ◄ • I Jlt'&' TABLE OF CONTENTS Paragraph Page number 8 . 0 SYSTEMS OPERATION 8 . 1 Pla tfo:r,n ................................................ . 1 8 . 2 O ..AMS ....... ............ .........• ...... ...............• . 5 8 . 3 RCS ................................................ , ... 17 8 .4 Environmental Control System •••·················••••···22 8.5 CoDlDlunications ........................................ . 68 8. 6 Electrical System ...................................... 82 8 . 7 Computer ............................................... 87 8.8 Crew Station .......................................... . 93 8 . 9 Bio-Medicat ........................................... 134 9 . 0 OPERATIONAL CHEDKS 9 . 1 Apollo Landmark Identification (D- 6) .................. 144 9 . 2 Apollo Y aw Orientation •••·•··•·•••·•··••·•••···•·•·•••168 9 . 3 One Attitude Thruster Fail ure Check ... ......... ....... 171 9.4 Horizon Scanner Track Check •·•••·•• ••·• · •• · •••• ·•·•••• 172 9. 5 Horizon Scanner Check ....................... ...... ~ ... 173 9 . 6 HF Transmission Reception Check ....................... 181 9·. 7 Orbit Navigation Check ................................ 182 9.8 Rela tive Humidity Test ................................ 185 9.9 Zodiacal Light C heck .................................. 186 10.0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS 10.1 Cotllltdo\.lll .................•.•........................ . 188 10. 2 Powered Flight . ................... ..... ..... ... ... . .. . 188 10 . 3 Orbital Flight . ............................... ........ 191 10 .4 Reentry .................... . ......................... . 213 11 . 0 EXPERIMENTS 11 . 1 Two-Color Earth-Limb Photography (MSC-10) ............. 217 11 . 2 Synoptic Terrain and W eather Photography (S- 5 and S- 6) . 219 11. 3 Simple Navigation with t he Sextant .... ......... ....... 219 11.4 Electrostatic Charge (MSC- 1) .. .. ......... .....·........ 229 11.5 Proton- Electron Spectrometer and Tri-Axis Flus-Ga.te Magnetometer (MSC- 2 and MSC-3) ........................ 229 11 . 6 Radiation ( D-8) ........... ... ......................... 2 30 11 . 7 Inflight Exerciser (M-3) . ........ .. . . .. ... ... ......... 230 11 . 8 Inflight Phonocardiogram (M-4) . . ...................... 232 11 . 9 Extravehicular Activity . ... ... ...... .. .......... ...... 232 11 . 10 Miscellaneous ................. . ....................... 232
12 . 0 PRE-MISSION PLANNING 12.1 Mission Plan ( Trajectory) ....... .......... ...... .. .... 234 12 . 2 Flight Plan ..................... ... .. .. ............... 234 12 . 3 Spacecraft Changes ............. ... . . .................. 239 12 . 4 Mission Rule s ........... ..... ... . ....... . . . .... . ...... 240 12. 5 Experiments ........................................... 241 12 . 6 Training Activities ................. .... . . ............ 24 5 13. 0 MISSION CONTROL 13.1 GO/NO GO ' s ............. .. .............. .... ........... 249 13 . 2 PLA and CLA Updates ...................... . ............ 249 13. 3 Consumable s ............... ... ............... .. ........ 249 13.4 Flight Plan Changes ....................... .. .......... 250 13. 5 Systems ............................................... 254 14.0 TRAINING 14.1 Gemini Mission Simulator ..... . . .. ................ .. .. . 255 14. 2 LTV Simulation .................. . ...... . ........ .... .. 260 14.3 Centrifuge ...................... .. .......... . ... ...... 261 14.4 Translation and Docking Trainer ...... .. ............ ... 262 14. 5 Planetarium ..................................... .. . ... 26 3 14. 6 Systems Briefings ................................ .. ... 266 14. 7 Flight Expe rimen ts ............ ... .............. ... .... 267 14 . 8 Spacecraft Sys t ems Te s t .. . ...... ... ... . . .. .... ... .. ... 273 14 . 9 Egress Training ........................ .. ..... : .... . .. 27 4 14. 10 Parachute Training ................... . . ... ............ 275 14 . 11 Launch Simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .............. . 276 14 .1 2 Network Simulation . .... . ............ . . .. . . . . . . . . . ..... 277 14. 13 Zero "G" Flight ........ . .......... ... . .. . .. . ... . ...... 278 14. 14 Flight Plan Traini ng .................... . ............. 279
8. 1 Platform McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt 8.0 SYSTEMS OPERATION Actually, the first portion of any alinement is to cage the thing. The case of caging the thing is much more important than the alinement itself. In the daytime I felt that I could cage the plat form to a reference with an error plus or minus about 3 or 4 degrees in all axes . Did you think we could do that wel l? Only in the daytime. The yaw was a little problem. It took longer to get it, but if you kept after it for awhil e , I felt that you could get down to just a few degrees. Within a couple of degrees . The big thing is that you have to stop your yaw rates, and then sit there and look outside for awhile and see which way you're going, straight ahead or sideways . If you are going sideways you rotate around for awhil e and stop the rate and then look out again. Ri ght? I felt you could get the thing ca ged quite well. We. didn ' t do it BEF at all, did we? We never did cage in BEF.
2 White McDivitt White McDivitt --, I ' m not sure. The caging of the thing with small- end-forward in the daytime was r elatively easy . At night I don't think it would be quite tha t simple . I think what you would have to do at night time is to point the spacecraft down at the ground pretty much so you can see the track ac ross the ground, I could see which way the land was moving under me . I felt--although I never did this--that if I could do that and then roll around to where I had no bank angl e , and fac e in my yaw direction, either small-end or blunt-end- forward , stop t he ro l l t her e and pitch up to the horizon I could cage there withi n plus or minus 10 degrees for sure . It was much less accurate at night, I felt, than in the daytime . You aren' t kidding! We both felt that on those dark nights when you really couldn ' t see anything on the ground, pure star reference for yaw was pretty rough . Pure star reference for yaw was almost impossible to use. That was the only place where that thing we decided not to take with us--the view of the stars through the window--might have been of some
3 White McDivitt use to us. We knew the stars along our track but you couldn't see enough of them. The quickest way to get the yaw reference was to look down at the ground. Once we got the platform caged, aline ment was quite simple . All you had to do was just hold the needles at zero and the platform alined itself. Of course you had to have the scanners on , The modes--the SEF and the EEF wer e identically the same except the spacecraft is pointing in different directions . You tended to null the needles by using pulses and just hold the needles very close to null and the platform alined itself through the horizon scanners . Orbit Rate was a satisfactory mode, I thought. As a matter of fact, it was very good. I liked that Orbit Rate, Yes, because we finally had a reference where we didn't have to look out and s ee the ground . It 's like having the old altitude indicator back in an airplane . The only thing was, we had the wrong orbit rate in the spacecraft because it was s e t for an orbit rate t hat was to take care of, I think, a 60 nautical mile circular orbit. This was to take care of the short period of time between ~~ SQ -lii4Q"itsll- lM.- .
4 White McDivitt going to Orbit Rate at T- 5 and firing the retros at TR. We wanted to have exactly the right rate in there so when we did our closed-loop reentry we wouldn ' t have an error. As I said , I had the most accurate platform in the world with nothing to do with it . I think the displays were adequate and the controls were adequate . After t he first couple of revs I really didn ' t have any confidence at all in the platform. I had done nothing to establish any confidence in it . I really didn't get the chance to get the thing alined, and I real ly didn ' t have the view out the window to check it with. We were hurrying and scurring through there . We finally shut the thing down before I really got a chance to use it very much. When we powered it up there on the third day and we saw that thing coming around there• -and cage properly, we compared the out- the- window attitudes and that old a ttitude reference was right there. That's when I got some confidence in the platform. This is where we lost a couple of bets . That ' s right . We lost a couple of beers on that platform . At retrofire I had a lot of confidence in the platform , but the first two and a half to
5 White 8.2 OAMS McDivitt White McDivitt three days I really didn't have anything with which to establish any confidence. It was just an unknown. Jim did the majority of the work in this area and I think his comments reflect my opinion also . On the pad we did the thruster check that we wanted to. We went around one whole cycle and got nothing. We went around another whole cycle and got nothing until we got to the l ast one. We were going yaw left pitch-down, yaw right pitch-up, yaw left pitch- down, yaw right pitch up . When we got to that second pitch-up, I heard the thrusters fire for the first time. · You can hear them. It was very distinct. That's right. And then we went around and yawed left and they fired again. We -waited 20 seconds and fired a yaw left again, and they fired again . These were the bottom manifold jets. We said, "Okay, we're ready to go.", and that was the end of it. So, it -was a pretty straightforward check. The inflight checks--I got my operational checks on the OAMS systems while chasing the booster around. I had Direct, Pulse, and Rate Command in Le !~FllffiPMxMii t a J
6 White McDivitt there as I chased it around, and those were the only modes I intended to use right then . Later on, I checked out the Reentry Rate Command and I checked the Rate Command before we thrusted. It did seem to be operating fine . Why don ' t you go through the next part , Eli? All right . We're going to get into the source temperature and pressure , the regulated pressure , and the propellant quantity . Let ' s take the temperature first . The temperature of our OAMS was 75 degrees all the way down the line . The i nit ial indications on the pressures were approxi mately 2800 psi for the source and 320 psi for the regulated pressure . The quantity gage operated all right except that, as I mentioned earlier , the thing seemed to wander up and down somewhere between 2 and 4 percent , depending upon where you were in the mission . You ' d read it one time and it would be 60, and you'd read it a little while later and it would be 62, and you 'd r ead it a little while l ater and it 'd be back about 60 . The greatest variation in that thing that ever occurred was when I went to sleep one time with it reading 60 and woke up and
7 White McDivitt White it was reading 56. Another hour or two after that it had climbed slowly back up to 60 again. I had a long time to look at it in the same position. When we ended the cha.sing-around at the end of the first hour, we were down to 70 percent indicated and we never got below 50 percent in four days. I'll tell you, the position it seemed to stay for days and days was 59 to 60 percent. We fired in Pulse Mode for a long time with the gage at that position, and all of a sudden that one time it dropped down to about 55 percent . But then it came back up to 60. I guess it did , didn ' t it? The temperatures all stayed fairly constant. If I recall .right, they dropped down to around 70 degrees. It seemed to me they continually decreased throughout the flight. I noticed this particularly in the RCS, but I guess we'll get to that later. The propellart quantity though , I think we mentioned earlier , ended up on our gaging at about 3 percent at the end . We got a little bit of ground information on the 0AMS propellant. I felt a little suspicious of the gage when it kept staying there at 59 to 60
8 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White percent for so long. We were pretty miserly with that OAMS fuel . We set out to save the fuel and w e sure did it . I think that in future missions , if they permit the crew to use the Puls e Mode in a saving-manner they could do a lot more with the mission--if you could use Pulse Mode instead of just free-drifting around. In other words , line yourself up so you can make some decent observations. Shoot! We were in Horizon Scan Mode when we got the last data, and I don ' t think we used any more fue l than we were when w e were in free drift. That ' s right. We certainly got more out of the orbit than we did when we were just drifting free. I 'll tell you one record that we ought to hold. We've looked at the earth from more different angles than anybody else in the world. Well, maybe not . I guess the Russians did , but we sure got a lot of different views of that earth as we rotated around. I thi nk the ground information that they called up on the status of our OAMS wasn't as much as they could have called up to us, but I 'm really satis fied that our OAMS was staying pretty constant .
9 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt So did I. The way I felt was that I knew that we had to be as miserly with the fuel as we possibly could, so we got as much out of as little fuel as possible . There wasn ' t going to be anything to change that velocity. We just went along and I really didn't care how they were plotting that fuel on the ground. I knew that we were starting to get ahead of the schedule, because I was plotting it roughly onboard the spacecraft . I could see we were ~p above the line that we needed to remain above to handle our OAMS retrofir~. Actually , we followed the profile rather closely, We leveled off there at first, and then when we started using it , we we~c right down the profile, We were a little below the line and we just held the same fuel level until we walked out across it and got up on top of i+ Then, we went on down above it. I think the controls and the switches were all satisfactory. I think so too. The attitude controller worked fine and dandy. We didn't have any trouble with it. The stick forces weren't too high. We didn't get a chance to use it in any other mode besides
10 I White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt Pulse . It seemed to wor k all right in Pulse. don't really have any comments to make on the atti tude controller . As a matter of fact, I didn't ~se any Rate Command . Didn't you really? We didn't use the Rate Command . I got to use Direct a couple of times . I used Pulse a lot . Everytime you 'd go to sleep, I ' d rea lly have a bal] I could tell that by the wiggling. No . That was real ly great--flying that spacecraft . That ' s right, and I think Pulse is the mode . You ca.n do a lot with it . With a little bit of planning you could get to the attitude--if you start out 5 or 6 minutes ahead of time. That's what we were doing. At 10 minutes before I was supposed to be at a certain atti tude I ' d start, and one or two little pulses and you'd--boop, boop, boop, boop- - th€ bad thing was if you were in an attitude where you couldn ' t see the horizon and didn ' t know where you were. You would give it a couple of pulses and nothing would happen, and you ' d have to give it a couple of more pulses. It ' d t ake a long time sometimes before you would get to where you could see . As a matter of fact, if at 5 minutes before @i~FfDENTI>4ct
11 White NcDivitt White McDivitt we were supposed to be at a certain attitude we weren't approaching it, I 'd start pulsing a little harder. You'd hear a series of about five quick pulses. It was a very economical control mode. The ma.ne·,..;ver controller worked the way it was supposed to. What about the deadband? Did you think the dead bands and breakouts were all satisfactory? Yes, just like the one we used in the simulator. You've got a lot of slop in it when you're making gross maneuvers because you're not fixing your elbow and manipulating around tmt point. You're fixing your shoulder and your whole arm, and it's just like shoveling coal--you've got about that much finesse to it . I don't think there's much you can say about it. The controls weren't too gross and they weren't too minor. The whole thing was adequate. We did have an inflight mal function, or irregularity. We were in Horizon Scanner Mode one time and Fd wanted to yaw around. He started to yaw and the thing rolled. The Horizon Scanner Mode fired the roll thrusters to level it back off- -
12 White McDivitt White M cDivitt McDivitt I couldn ' t get the yaw . W e had a circui t breaker off. Finally , after you did that a couple of times I looked up and saw we had knocked a circuit breaker off. That was one thing that we didn't cover in EVA that I should have mentioned . Ed was a real hazar d to the switch positions in that he was all over with his feet, arms , and hands - - . I don't think I threw any though . Did I? Come on now. You ' re not guilty until you ' re convic ted . I don ' t know . You kept putting your foot on the HF Reentry Antenna Switch and stepping on it . Ha . Ha . Ha . As for the att i tude control modes--I mentioned the Rate Command in OAMS seemed to be tighter than the Rate Command i n RCS , a l though t hey use the same electroni cs, the same gyros , and the i,,rhole thing . It might ha.ve just been my imagination, but I felt that the Rate Command system in RCS was a lot looser than it was in OAMS . The Reentry Rate Command operated just the way it should . It had a 4 degree dea dband , and handled the spacecra ft very well during reentry . Direct had a lot m ore a uthor ity than I thought it would, but it was
White McDiYitt 13 ~IDE ►~llM. pretty straightforward. I think Pulse was the best mode on the spacecraft for the orbit phase . We were able to save all kinds of fuel, it worked fine, and it was just about what the doctor ordered . We didn't use the Horizon Scan Mode during about the first three days of flight, except for the second orbit when I think I \\18.S in Horizon Sca.n so that I could have the freedom to help Ed prepare for his EVA. The last day we used the Horizon Sca.n Mode, and I found it to be an excellent mode. There was only one case when it broke lock and didn ' t recover. Wasn't that it, F.d.? You've got it in the book . We've got in the book and we'll check on that . The Ho~izon Scan Mode worked essentially for 24 hours without any problem ~and I think it' s an excellent control mode, It seemed to be very economical on fuel . We were doing a lot of yawing around and right at sunrise a.nd sunset it seemed to get a l ittle nervous , especially if we had the horizon scanner pointed within about plus or minus 45 degrees of the sun. The moon didn ' t seem to affect it at all. I noticed that, occa sionally, we would ~et some thruster blips with the sun n&Q·tslfiO EtslltAIA ·
14 White M cDivitt Whi te McDivitt White McDivitt :iObJ FIDE1'4 Tf,t(ilfr pointed toward the hori zon scanner although we never got an unlock light . We wouldn ' t get an unlock light , but we 'd ~et a bunch of maybe four or five thruster blips right there. Particularly at sunrise . It would hold. I thought the Ho rizon Scan- - It was definitely getting some spurious signals through but not enough to break it out all the way. I thought the Horizon Scan Mode was an excel l ent attitude-hold mode. Did you notice the water boiler venting, Jim? Yes, I did. We kept yawing around to the left . I believe it was left. I did notice the fact that we were yawing , but not very much. We were yawing a t rates that w e r e extremely low and it just took a pulse every once in a while to handle the thing. As a matter of fact, when we were chasing the booster around a lot a t the beginning, I never even noticed. It was when we were i n the Pulse Con trol Mode for a period of time,when we didn ' t do m uch thrusting in yaw, that I noticed we did start drifting off in yaw . So I did notice the water boiler venting.
White McDivitt • 15 I didn't think you noticed it earlier when we were working. Well, I did notice it a little bit in that first orbit, but it wasn't distracting at all. It would just drift off a little bit and I'd whop it and it would be back . At SEX:;0 + 30, I used the trans lation thrusters to damp the booster-spacecraft rates . One of them was a little higher than the other, although they were both down in the order of a half of a degree/second. I did fire one thruster one time or possibly two times to damp the rate. I don't know if it was pitch or yaw . You know, you are working in spacecraft pitch and booster yaw and spacecraft yaw and booster pitch. I was getting my coordinate system transformed around in my mind, going from booster coordinate system to the spacecraft . I don't remember whether it was yaw or pitch, but I did thrust once or twice. By the way , I could hear those thrusters fire. At SEC0 + 30 I said, "Thrusting, " and I started thrusting. "Separate" , and Fd punched the SPACE.CRAFT SEPARATE. We were in Direct and I thrusted straight ahead for about 5 seconds. Then I went back into Rate Command. Separati on was
16 White McDivitt just smooth--we didn ' t come off with a rotational rate . I think one of the things you mi ght commant on , Jim , is that you fired most of those thrusters during that initial time . I ' m sure I fired the upward-firing thrusters a number of times . That isn ' t any more difficult to control than t he other one . Actually you can fire these thrusters whether you are in Rate Command, Direct or even in Puls e . When you fire them, you get a rate and you just damp t he rate out with the a ttitude controller . When you are firing the translation thrusters , th0 things t hat you r eally hear are not the translation thrusters, but the attitude thrusters . Those translation thrusters are really tough to hear , but the atti tude thrusters are very easy to hear. I doh ' t understand why. They must be mounted differently because their location isn't that m uch different. I think I fired the aft-firing thrust ers a couple of times and they didn ' t make any more noise than the f orward-firing thrusters, that I could tell . The up and down and left and right ones were just as easy to fire as t he other ones . Our OAMS retro
I • 17 White McDivitt 8.3 RCS McDivitt was 127 feet/second which, incidently, happened to come out exactly 2 minutes and 40 seconds. suspect that we selected OAMS retrofire on the basis of time, rather than on the basis of t::,.V. Very convenient , wasn't it? Very convenient. It -was obvious there is no more difficulty in timing 2 minutes 40 seconds during our OAMS retrofire than it is during any other thing. We had no trouble with it . I was convinced that when we got through with it, that was really the proper conversion factor between t::,.V and t::,. T. We had exactly 127 feet/second, and we sure had the time nailed down. The operational checks that we did on the RCS occurred at about TR minus an hour. When I checked the system out it seemed like I had a lot less authority and a lot sloppier Rate Command than I had in OAMS . The operational check consisted of pitching up and down , yawing left and right, rolling lef+ and right on each ring in Rate Command and Direct. Direct worked as I expected it to. In Rate Coremand, however, as I pitched up and down I noticed that my top left yaw thrus ter was doing
18 White a lot of firing , too. I started out checking the Rate Command , so I thought I might possibly have one bad pitch thruster that was causing a rolling moment that was bei ng counteracted by the yaw-roll jets. When I did it in Direct, however , it wasn' t doing that . It wasn't rolling either , so I felt that it must just be a very tight deadband that was trying to hold us in there. So , the operational checks were all right . The only thing we had to monitor on the system was the temperature and the pressure of the propellant . It seemed to hold pretty well . I have some comments on that. I kept a running log of them as we went along . The tempera ture started out at 75 degrees and 3000 pounds . It held that way pretty well until about the 65th hour , when the temperature gradually went down. The temperature decreased to a point where we started getting the RCS heater lights that we noted earlier. W e got about eight series of RCS heater lights . It took about 5 minutes to extinguish the light . It was t he A-ring,then the B- ring, and then the A-ring. I t s eemed to alternate each time back and forth and it came on for about 15 to 20 minute periods of
19 McDivitt White time . It started right after a night cycle . It seemed rather natural to me that there wasn't really something wrong, but that we actually had a cold RCS thing out there and it did need some heat . After heat was applied it did appear to go away. I decided to go ahead and set up a slow roll rate in the daytime, and I kept that roll rate in for several orbits. Whether this actually helped to get the light off or not, I don't know. We didn't get anymore lights after this time . I think there ought to be one other comment on the RCS , and that is the temperatures and the pressures stayed up pretty well except when we actuated the system. The pressures then went down further than we had expected them to go . They went down to 2400 to 2500 p~i. This was a little lower than I expected to see. I think the pressures in the RCS A and B dropped by about 100 pounds throughout the four-day period. They were slightly over 3000 pounds and they got down to slightly under 3000. The lowest temperatures I noted were in the neigh borhood of about 63 to 64 degrees. They started out at 75 degrees.
20 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDiv.itt Let me ask you a question? Yes. When you turned on the RCS heaters , did you turn on the heater s on both r ings , or did you turn on the RCS Heater Switch and then turn off the cir cui t breaker on the ot her ring? I turned the heaters on and then I checked to see which ring it was that was ac tually heat ing up by using the circuit breakers . The first time I went ahead and left them on and then the other ring came on . I fel t that one of them was about as cold as the other, so I left the heaters on both rings throughout the heating cycles . Good. They were in perfect sequence--A and B, A and B, and about 15 minutes apart . The regulari ty was surprising. The temperatures at the time when these lights came on were indicating about 63 or 64 degrees and it seemed like it would come up a little bit, and then come right back down and pop back on again. I felt it was not an actual temperature problem . I used Rate Command, Reentry Rate Command and Pulse control modes. I didn ' t use Direct . They a ll
- '-OtslF-tD- E~.l lA:L:;;. 21 operated as I thought they should. I've already mentioned I thought Rate Command was a little sloppier in RCS than it was in OAMS . It certainly did a fine job of holding the retro attitude during retrofire. Retrofire attitude control was excellent. W e didn ' t deviate more than about a degree from the attitude we were supposed to hold, and I had plenty of authority there . From my standpoint it couldn ' t have been any better. I was really happy about it. I used the Reentry Rate Command with roll rate gyro off, so that I had essentially Direct in roll and Reentry Rate Command in pitch and yaw axes. It had the typical 4 degree deadband that it was supposed to have. It did do rate damping as it was supposed to. It performed just the way it should. Fd, you want to cover that heater-lights thing again? I think you've already got that thing pretty much in detail. White I have the precise times at which the lights came on. It started at about the 64th or 65th elapsed time hour . At 06:47, the first light, in the A-ring, came on . At 08:23 the A- ring light came on again. That was the last time . During that period of time the A and the B-rings cycled on and off inter - MWfiO,ftSl;QAJ•
22 mittently . McDivi t t During descent , we turned the power off to see if t he drogue chute was unstable . It wasn ' t . We turned the power back on and the propellant valves of f and burned up a l l of t he fuel i n the manif olds . We had no fumes after impact . 8.4 Environment a l Control ~ystem McDivitt White McDivitt Whit e McDivitt I thought the suit mobility was as good in the s pacecraft as it is anywhere else . I think these sui ts are pretty good suits . I didn' t f i nd any trouble with them whatsoever i~ the spacecraft that I wasn ' t a lready awar e of . The pressure held up good . I did a pressure check on the suit . It bled down about 0. 2 or 0 . 3 psi in about 30 s econds , w hich real l y wasn ' t too bad . The temperature was a lways good. It ran between about 50 and 55 degr ees diring the entire flight except when we really worked hard . I don ' t think it ever got up over 60 . Do you , Ed? No. We had reasonably good temperature contro l . The ca bin tem perature got up pretty high one time and then it came back down . Yes , on about the first orbit . __ w,f_.., ..... I '
23 White McDivitt White McDivitt That's r ght . It got up to about 90. 100, it was. We turned the cabin heat exchanger on for just a short time and it went right back on down to 80 degrees. It stayed in the area of 82 to 83 degrees the whole flight. The humidity in the suit must have been pretty dry because rrry foot dried out. I didn't take any wet bulb readings inside the suit. The CO 2 stayed at zero all the time. It never did go up except when we'd go to o High Rate, when it would bound off 2 the top peg and fall back down again. The comfort and suit controls were pretty reasonable. The o 2 demand regulator seemed to work all right . My umbilicals were short. My fingertip lights were lousy. Before _launch I only had one that worked. On rrry right-hand glove one of the bulbs obviously didn't work. One of them did work. On rrry left hand glove the switch on the batteries would only turn the lights on if it was in one exact position, vh.ich wasn't full throw in either direction. So I found out I had only one fingertip light that worked. However, during the flight I didn't use my' fingertip lights except one time when I used ·
24 them for a flashlight. I had my gl oves off and I reached over and got my gloves and turned the fingertip lights on and shined the gloves on some thing . I didn't use them a lot . I do want to comment on one thing , though , since we ' re talking about the suits here . I launched without the plug that goes in the blood pressure port in the suit . I don ' t feel we should launch these things with no plug to plug up the blood pressure port in the suit , especially when we ' re going EVA . I think that was a mistake . The only pressure points I had in the suit were in the helmet . Those were just above my ears where I tended to move my head back and forth within the helmet. I finally rubbed up all the hair so that it was going in the wrong direction . When you press against hair for a long time in the wrong direction it becomes very uncom forta ble. At about the end of 2 3/4 days I took my helmet off for a couple of hours, and it felt a lot better. The only problem is that when you have your helmet off there is no place to stow it. We had the foot wells full of gear , so when I had the he lmet off I just let it float around on my lap , and over in Ed' s l ap . There wasn ' t any place to
25 put it. The micro-meteroid blanket that I had strapped under my right leg wasn't a detriment. As a matter of fact since we had no place to stow it , I just left it strapped to my leg until reentry. Then, I felt that if we had to get out in the water I didn't want to have any straps hanging off me that I didn't need. So, I took it off and threw it on the floor a long with Ed's sleeves . I don't have anymore comments on my suit . White I wore the ENA suit . I think the mobility of the suit was about what I had expected. Actually, I think the mobility in some respects was a little better, and in some respects it was a little less than I had expected. I wasn't able to get into the right-hand aft food box as well as I had thought I was going to be able to in zero g. In fact, the position that I had figured out to use, which was leaning forward and reaching in backwards with my left arm , didn ' t work out well at all. I had to actually turn around 90 degrees in the seat and reach in with my right arm. This worked out all right. I was able to get hold of things in the box. The surprise that I got though , was that I could get into the right- hand aft refuse box much
26 McDivitt White White McDivitt White McDivitt White easier than I had thought I ' d ever be able to . It turned out t ra t I was able to get into that box ea sier while in orbit, by far, t han- - It ' s a rubber covered box. It's a rubber covered box on the right hand side . I think that box does have the capability of s tow ing refuse in it and stowi ng some things prior to l aunch in it , too . Did you try that box during flight , Jim? Yes , I did. I didn ' t find it easy to get into . I thought the things we had stowed in it wer e real good things--items that we didn ' t need at all in flight and possibly might not need- - I used all four defecation bags that I h~d on my side . I used them up during flight . In fact , you used one of them. That ' s right , we did have a bag of those defeca tion bags out . It just happened to be over on my side where you could get to it. You were asleep. I had to get them or wake you up . I pres sure- checked rey suit . I checked it at 8 . 5 and it bled down several tenths of a psi . I was satisfied with the pr es sure-holding of rey suit .
27 There was one thing though with the suit that I wasn't too happy with. I was hot all the time in the suit. It got so that after a while I got used to the normal temperature as being warm. I could incr ease the temperature , which seemed rather strange to both Jim and me, by putting out zey gloves and closing zey faceplate . I could go to sleep. At that time zey temperature would go up considerably inside the suit . It seemed like I coul d stay in there only an hour or an hour and 15 minutes and rest before I had to either open up the faceplate or do something else. So, the temperature got uncomfortably warm in about an hour or an hour and fifteen minutes with the face plate closed, the sleeves on and the gloves on . The humidity in the suit, I thought , was quite dry. I had quite a tendency for zey lips to crack and nzy- nose to get very dry . In fact, I noticed zey nose was itching considerably. This was an indicator to me every time I would go to sleep. I would wake up with zey nose itching and feeling quite hot and uncomfortable. }zy- lips got to the point where I thought they were going to crack,
28 and I was trying to be very careful and keep them from cracking and getting anymore uncomfortabl e than they were . Jim mentioned the CO sensors 2 stayed on zero, which I was happy to see . I think one thing that I was fairly happy about was that the suit , as bulky as it was , wasn ' t depres singly uncomfortable. I felt that I did have a pretty heavy suit on most of the time , and I was a little bit constrained in my mobility. The i dea to have the detachable sleeves that I could take off after the EVA work was , I felt, a very good decision. I felt much more comfortable , and I had a much higher degree of mobility around with my arms in the spacecraft. It was not as tiring to move around as it had been when I was inside the heavy sleeves . So , I was quite happy to take them off. We took them off, I believe, shortly after my first sleep. I slept with t hem on the first time, and then we took them off . think they were quite easy to take off. As a matter of fact, I think if you went EVA at a later time you could take those sleeves onboard , and if they were made just a little aasier to slip on and off over the wrist, you could take @e 14 rte Et<4,t,\ t I
29 McDivitt White them on and off in flight if you wanted to. I don ' t know. I'd hesitate to recommend putting them on in flight . It might get pretty tricky. I think if you put them on in flight , you'd want to put them over all the harness, rather than i.mder the harness. That ' s exactly what I was going to sey. I think if you took the life preservers off , you could actually make the sleeves big enough so that you could slip them on and velcro them across the back over the harness. This might be for the type of operation of throwing equipment in and out . I think in the future , though , a suit as heavy as this might not be required. The controls and the switches in the suit , I felt , were satis factory. There wasn ' t anything that I couldn ' t get at in the spacecraft . It was easier under weightless conditions for me to operate certain controls. In fact, I think I was able to get down and unscrew the bellows in the gun hose as well and maybe a little easier than you could, Jim. At least initially, I was able to get down there . Of course you weren ' t really particularly trying to do it at that time. @8 ~ •••i-EM-liaJ.;;
30 McDivitt White McDivitt White I suspect I probably could have gotten down there as easy or easier than you if I had really gotten around to trying. I don ' t remember , but , anyhow, I was surprised with the ease which I had in getting down . We were trying to dump the pressure in the bellow before we went EVA with it . Right . The demand regulator was satisfactory. Ivzy umbilical,I thought,was very easy to use and disconnect . I was quite happy to have the micro dot in there. One comment on the micro-dot--the first time we exercised the micro- dots on our suit , they were pretty hard to operate . Mine got progressively easier to use each time I used it . The fingertip lights that I had were better than Jim ' s . I ha:l lights with Lexan tops on them. All my lights worked, and r felt that their operation was quite satisfactory. We had decided to put my lights between the first and second joints for several reasons . We thought the EVA gloves would be easier to don and there'd be less tendency to break them. I think, though, the position of the lights was still a little too far forward if it was intended to put them back between
McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt 31 the first and second joints, because the lights were resting right on top of my first joint . I think if I had worn my gloves anymore, I would have gotten a very sore first knuckle . If you are going to move them back, I think they should definitely be moved back behind the first knuckle. Where were they getting you, .fili? Right on the top of the knuckle . You think they ought to be back? If they are going to be anywhere, they ought to be back here, and I'm not too sure that is necessary. In fact, I think the best place is behind the fingertip and in front of the first joint . But, with the pl astic covers over the gloves. With the plastic cover on the glove , and I think we've got the right position for the lights . I don't think they should be back behind the first knuckle . I think they should be in front of that first knuckle and behind the fingertip, That's a good place for them. That's where we've been using them in the past. I think thf' Le::mn cover on the light bulb is a darn good idea , Yes, I think so.,. too . Shoot! I checked my lights before launch and found out that I already had one
32 of them out on my right hand. I wasn ' t too happy about it . White I was a little disappointed. I think the only discrepancy I found in my suit was that I had no blood pressure plug either. A point that I was pretty happy with was that I had no pressure points from my suit at all on my body . I had one set of pressure points from my helmet pressing down on the front forward part of my head. I lmew why this was . I 'd had Joe Schmitt adjust my cables so that I could pull my helmet down to a maximum amount for the EVA work. I felt that I just bought this discomfort by having my cables adjusted in this manner. It was pretty uncomfortable though . I checked out the use of the emergency bottles on the EVA equipment and they worked as they were supposed to . I was able to regulate the flow. Incidently , before I went out the reading on the EVA bottles was full-scale, 3400 pounds . I was happy to see that . Al l in all, I was quite happy with the suit . I think it was a very well designed suit and it met the requirements that were levied upon it . It was a heavy suit and a big suit to wear for four days, but I felt the auit wasn ' t as € ~~f-~ L
33 bad as I had expected it was going to be. I have one more comment. I'd like to comment on the inner liner. We decided to go with the inner liner. in and I felt this was a good decision . The inside of the suit was comfortable , and I didn ' t get any pressure points . I think one reason why neither Jim nor I got any particular pressure points from the suit was that we had worn these suits a heck of a lot of time . I had over 50 hours on my flight suit. I don't know how many hours Jim had on his.
34 McDivitt White Actually Ed had just finished talking about his inner liner . I 1 d like to comment about the inner liner too . I thought about it when he was talking about his . I think that was one of the reall y wi se decisions •- to go with that inner l iner . I felt that it offered a lot more comfort than wearing that rubber suit up against my body, or up against my underwear. I sort of felt that I was really quite comfortable in this suit . I didn ' t find my mobility limited by my inner l iner at all , and I had made sure that it fit . I think that has a l ot to do with it. I worked the suit once for about a four-'hour period with just the rubber ins i de . I did no - tice it sticking to me, and I didn ' t feel as com fortable . After I got inside the suit with pres sure on my body , the suit felt pretty darn good. I had the knees cut out of my suits . The knees are still too short . Having been in it for four days , I know the dimensions are wrong . The di mension from my knee down to my foot is not long enough . I t ' s not just the inner line~ but the 1 f¥18~4AL ··~
35 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivit-' - White McDivitt White link net in itself just isn't long enough. You wouldn ' t say you had a pressure point though? No, it was just a constant pull on there all the time. Did it bother you very much during the flight? Yes, it bothered me a little bit . So you really did have sort of a pressure point then? Yes, to some extent in that area . I had had that one so much before. It had been so extreme in some cases that it really didn't bother me too much . Both of us should mention something about the visors . I thought you ought to mention something about your visor problem, your EVA visor or the other one. Well, I have briefed the visor on the EVA pretty well. The one that I will mention now is the visor that I had on my regular helmet . I thought that the vision through it was quite good . I noticed no distortion at all through it, but I did immediately put a couple big scratches on it
McDivitt in the beginning when I was unstowing equipment . I continued to scratch it throughout the mission. When I finished , the visor was considerably scratched up as you would pr obably notice if you looked at my suit . I don ' t know what there is to do about this other than to accept a scratchy visor . If you ' ve got the visors down in front of your face, you don ' t tend to scratch it up as m uch . I think it was really worn out because you started opening up your visor and leaving it up over your head a lot earlier than I did. At about the two and a half or three day mark , I looked at your visor and it was really a mess . I took the helmet off and cleaned the visor because it was dirty on the inside and the outside . I looked at my visor and had very few marks on it . I had a few l ittle scratches , but very minor. Then I started putting my vi sor up more and mor e be - cause t hey w anted us to stay open . Because I ' m a lot taller than you are, I really started beat i ng mine up . In the last day, I think I caught up with you and maybe even surpassed you in the
White McDivitt White McDivitt 37 amount of marks on it . I'll say another thing . I'm sure glad we didn ' t go in for those Lexan visors that they wanted us to fly with, cause the distortion woul d have driven me batty in about the first six hours . I think you must insist on perfectl y optically clear visors . That ' s right . You 've got to have good optics . I took my helmet off about three times , and I didn ' t leave it off very long. I took mine off about two times . I took it off one time for an hour because my hair right above my ears was really bothering me . I didn ' t bother getting a light- weight headset out , and when any body called me , I had the thing sitting in my l ap and I could hear it . I took one of the • ~ . ~ and pulled it back and I hollered into the mike, Ha , ha. ! 1 till I could hear it . I s~id , "I ' ve got my hel met off . Unless you 've got something im portant to tell me , don't bother me ." .Ha , ~a! And he said, "Okay . " It was one of those passes , you know , where you only talk to one guy for about an hour . Then I took it off one other time for about a half hour to rub my ears . I was quite s€0 ► ~ ~t8l!lttfif 1Aif:r: J
White McDivitt comfortable with my helmet on for two days. Do you want to know something that ' s kind of strange? I was more comfortable with my helmet on than off. I n fact, I kind of got used to those pressure points on the top of my head with the helmet on . When I took the helmet off and moved my head around , I felt a little dizzy from not having these restraints. I didn ' t feel as comfort able as I did with my helmet on. The times I had my helmet off were when I was running D-9. I ran the D-9 Experiment several times with my helmet off so I'd have better use of my sextant . I took it off one other time near the end when they indicated they would like to have every - thing off . I didn ' t feel particularly comforta ble with my helmet off any more. I got so us ed to having that thing on that I put it on so I could talk better with the stations . They were calling me from time to time , and I thought it would be a little better. Before I forget, I think the portable headset is really a lousy design . I concur. I think it ought to be thrown out . -
39 White McDivitt I've seen the ones they've got in the MCC and they're good plain old headsets. I don't see any reason why we can't get one that stays on your head and stays in your ear . You put this thing on and it pops off about two minutes later . It's not built to stay on my size head and I noticed it didn't stay on Jim's very well eit~er . I think the portable headset idea is a good idea, but we ought to have a good headset for it . Okay. As we mentioned earlier the cabi n pressure relieved at about 5. 5 and held that way during launch . It went back down to 4.9 or 4.8 and this is where it stayed for the re mainder of the mission. I think that they prob ably overshot their zeal to correct the cabin pressure that John and Gus had had on GT-3 and put ours down so that it was actually relieving lower and sealing lower than it would have been desirable. I was expecting it to seal up around 5.5 or 5.7 like it was advertised. I checked my suit gage against the cabin pres sure g-age and my suit €8,ge read higher than: the cabin pressure gage by about .3 of a pound.
40 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White Yes, mine was right on it though . I know . You checked your suit gage against the cabin pressure and yours read just about on it, didn ' t it? W as it a tenth of a pound higher or was it right on it? Right on . Okay . So mine was reading a little higher, indicating to me that possibly the cabin pres sure was higher . But since Ed's read with it, I don ' t know w here we were . Well, the pr essure at which it relieved at went right into the problem of the temperature- pres sure relief in the cryogenic oxygen system so t hat those two problems kind of lashed together. The venting in the o 2 system was set at around 970 . 967, I think the poop sheet said. Well , it was about 967 or 970 . We had the pos sibility of losing oxygen in a steady manner out of the spacecraft if we let the pressure rise up above- -well , the ground felt 960 , and I concurred with that figure . So throughout the flight we had to keep venting our o system 2
41 McDivitt White down so the pressure woul d remai n down below 960 . They initially told us to vent it to keep it at 930 to 960 . Then they told us to vent it on down to about 890. From then on, we vented it down in the neighborhood of between 890 and 93, depending upon who was asleep and who wasn't asleep. It sure seemed to be an unsatisfactory solution to two problems--one of the cabin hold ing at a higher pressure than they wanted it to on GT- 3 and also the problem of the o system 2 venting outside of the pressure gage . In the oxygen system I think the solution to putting the venting down at 967 was a poor solution to the problem of having a poorly designed ga ge . I think the gage was agai n poorly designed and it should be designed to read about 1200 pounds. Rel ief should be up in that area . I f they really went ahead and jacked down the relief pressure, to get it on the gage, I think that is one heck of an approach to an engineer ing problem. I think that ' s a gross thing to do and if they did that deliberatel y, I thi nk they deserve a
42 McDivitt White M cDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt very black star for that one. They need their heads examined t I guess we beat that one around pretty well, didn 't we? Yes~ The way that we were venting the cabin was by going to o High Rate and venting the 2 oxygen out through the cabin vent or going to cabin repress and using up the oxygen through the cabin and through the cabin vent valve that way. I was quite satisfied with the cabin temperature . It started out and got pretty hot at one time early in the flight and went up to 100 as you noted,and then it went back down into the 80's. I think it actually dropped into the 70's a time or two. That ' s right. It was in the 70's most of the time . Right. Let's get the data book , The dry bulb tempera ture was 80; 80, the first time we tood it. Then it was 79, 79, 79. Then it was 75, 75, 75, and then they stayed between 75 and 77,I OQ\ilIi~L
White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt think, .the rest of the flight . No, here it is down as low as 72 . So it got down to around 72 late in the flight, and here we are with a whole bunch of 70's to 73's and a couple of 76 1 s. So I guess that 75 was the average temperature throughout the whole flight. I think our cabin temperature gage was reflect ing a little higher temperature than these. No, let's see . It was down around 75. It went down to 74 at one time, I remember. Yes, I think 75 was a good average cabin temp erature for the whole flight. I thought this was a pretty satisfactory cabin temperature. The suit temperatures were also down. They stayed down from about 52 to 54 most of the· flight. I thought that was a pretty satisfactory temperature there. I believe that there was a difference in suit temperatures be tween Jim and me because I was continually hollering about being hot. I think that temp erature-wise Jim was relatively comfortable . I was vecy comfortable, and as a matter of fact, when I went to sleep, I tended to get just a
44 White McDivitt White little bit cool , especially if I had urinated all over myself. I don ' t remember one time during the flight during which I was cool in the suit . I think I was hot most of the time in the suit . I got used to i t after a while. The only time that it was not satisfactory, as far as I was con cerned, was when I was trying to sleep. The humidity data that we got doesn't go along with what everybody was expecting. No, not by a l ong shot . No, not at all . Our l i ttle gage seemed like it was working properly. We didn ' t have any visible moisture at any time at any pl ace in the spacecraft . It seemed to be indicating down around 62 to 63 percent relative humidity which was a big surprise to myself. With this type of data , I began going open faceplate and open gloves fairly early in the flight, about a day or a day and a half, and continued in this manner just about throughout the flight . We used the wrist dams quite a bit of the time . But I had my faceplate open with my wrist dams ' CiO t ◄ F10 E._ffd +b
' McDivitt White McDivitt on a great deal of time also. I think you had your faceplate closed a little more than I did . There at the end we were both going to an open-faceplate and open- gloves all the way . Yes, we were especially going open-faceplate at the end just to see if we could jack up the humidity. I actually preferred to have my faceplate closed, as opposed to having it open. I went ahead and left it open trying to get the humidity up . We never really did get it up over 60 percent. That seemed to be where it was going to stay. We were happy to see that the CO 2 sensor gage stayed down low the whole flight . It would pop up any time we turned the o High · 2 Rate on and go up to a pretty high reading, and then settle back down to zero. I didn't notice any particular discomfort versus day versus night . No, as a matter of fact, I didn't either. We took some temperature readings on the cabin window frame and they varied by about 6 or 8 , 10 degrees at the very most .
White McDivitt White McDivitt White Yes, I don ' t think there was any discomfort associated with the day-night cycle. We didn't use the cabin fan as we planned during the ., flight. We did neglect to turn it on initially during the preparation for retro. We noticed that we weren ' t cooling off in the cabin as much as we would have liked to . So, we turned the fan on and immediately the temperature dropped down about 10 degrees,if I remember right . Yes , that cabin heat exchanger and that cabin fan really do the job. It really cooled it off. Early in the flight when we got the tempera ture up to 100, we turned the fan on and the temperature went down to below 80 in about 20 minutes, or so. It really did the trick . The cabin pressure relief valve was venting just a hair abouve 5.4. We checked this out very many times. Every time we filled the cabin up with o High Rate, it vented,or if 2 we used the repress l•ever the cabin would vent .
47 McDivitt f '3@>rNfff)EttlIM:· Here we had an environmental control system that was supposed to protect us . We found out that the darn thing was overpressurizing. The first couple of times, to keep the ECS o 2 bottle from venting, we vented the cabin it self . I found myself sitting in there vent ing this thing with my gloves off and my face plate open. It began to dawn on me that the pressure went down inside the cabin at a tre mendous rate. If this thing ever stuck open and I had my gloves off and my faceplate open, I would be a dead man . So we made it a proce dure to suit up when we were going to dump this thing . This meant that every four hours we had to put our gloves on and put our face plates down and lock them and get all suited up just in case this vent valve didn ' t reseat. Frankly, as much of an inconvenience as it turned out to be, I think that was a wise maneuver. I would never suggest that anyone vent that cabin again without being fully suit ed. I thi nk there is such a risk involved that you would be fool- hearty to do it . For
48 White McDivitt White GO~ ifli itl.. l,tct 0 that reason I think that we ought to make an effort to get the ECS o tank vent and the 2 ECS o tank pressure gage compatible and at 2 a l ot higher pressure than they are. This ' suiting up and unsuiting every four hours is for the birds. I thoroughly agree with you, Jim. There are two things I want to know. I want to know if they deliberately lowered the venting pressure for the o 2 system down to 967 to solve the problem on GT-3. I would also like to know if they deliberately lowered the cabin venting down to 5.4 . I'd like to know the answer to those two questions. I think the combination of those two situations make what I feel is an unsatisfactory situation in our flight. It occupied far more time- - That's right, we were screwing around with that ECS o . That's something we never had 2 touched. It was a eage that we should have monitored, instead of a thing that we manipu lated all the time. Right, Okay, the cabin pressure regulator.
49 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt I didn't have any comment on that. Neither did I. It seemed to be doing a good job . I felt the cabin vent valve was set lower than I had thought it was going to be . I thought it was supposed to be set up around 5.7. I'd like to know if it was cha.l'lged in tentionally. The manual vent valve worked fine. When we wanted to vent the cabin, it vented. The cabin repressurization valve worked fine . I was very happy to see how well it worked also with my chest pack. Any comment on that? No, I don ' t think so . I don't think the cabin repressurized or overpressurized when we were trying to vent it. Since you were repres surizing it and venting it at the same time, I think the vent valve actually overcame the repressurization,which is a good thing if you're trying to vent it, and it is not a good thing if you're trying to keep it from venting. Going back a little farther to my other state ment, in case that vent valve sticks open
50 White McDivitt White McDivitt White and you are not suited,I don't think you're goi ng to have time to get suited . I t takes me too long to put those gloves on. Okay, the cabin air inlet valve worked fine . We vented the cabin with it when we went EVA. It apparently worked all right when we used it down on the water. I rave no further com ment on that. Neither do I. It seemed to work fine . The cabin air recirculation valve worked as it was supposed to . As advertised . Okay , that primary o system gets another 2 black star. I think this is the area that I want to know the answer to , for sure . I want to know whether that was deliberately set down into the range of the gage to solve the complaint on Gemini 3. I think that if this was the case, this is a prime example of poor engineering. As far as monitoring the system though, as long as their reading was down be low 960 the system worked pretty well. I felt fairly confident that the pressure wae -
51 McDivitt White McDivitt White That ' s right . The way that the thing was set up , we could sure monitor it because we knew it was going to vent without being on the gage . I think they compromised the whole system so we could monitor it . As a matter of fact, we monitored it very thoroughly and spent about 100 times as much time on t his SJs t em as we should have . John Young ' s been complaining about this point, and I think that it ' s a very poor thing. They ought to dig up the money and put a gage in there that will do the job . Very strong point . The quantity measuring system,I thought, was all right. I thought it was pretty good . I thought it was excellent as a matter of fact . It was a very readable gage ,. It had tremendous scal e on it, but, shoot, you could read the thing to a percent . I don't know why it was a:ny more readable than the other ones, but I thought it was pretty good. The flow rates--I don't have a:ny particular comment on that . I thought the flow rate on N4sl- f.1Dfl~T1Aw
52 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt .. that repress valve into my suit was satisfactory to keep me in a pressurized state and keep me venti lated enough under normal operations . Under tough operations though, the flow rate's too low and you really heat up. Yes, I think since it was an open loop system, you had to keep from dumping all the oxygen overboard, and had to go high enough to keep it from dying from the heat. I think it was a compromise system. I thought it was well set up, I have no com plaints there . Primary o 2 temperature--I didn't have any comment on that. No, neither did I. The manual heater--I think that you used the manual heater twice during EVA . Twice during EVA for about five to six minutes each time . It responded all right , but it didn't go overboard, It got the temperature right back up there, and I shut the thing off again. I\!0 ~~FIDE~iilA L
White McDivitt White M cDivitt White McDivitt White 53 • We were able to turn the automatic part of it off quite early in the flight, particularly since this was the problem we were having. We were getting- - That was something I wondered about . You know , the t hing is marked , and we were always instructed that when the thing got down below 38 percent we didn ' t need the heaters any more . We shut the heaters off at 42 percent . Right . 0bviously,the guy that told us to shut the heaters off at 40 percent knew what he was talking about because we never needed them again . I think, again , I am very suspicious of McDonnell on the fix on that gage, and on setting that pressure on 970 , and I'm going to get to the bottom of it . Yes , but I think, though,that the pressure would have still built up even if we had the relief set at 1050 or so. It would have still built up . It might have built up and stabili zed, •
54 McDivitt White McDivitt White M cDivitt White 1'1cDivitt White because it ' s a cryogenic system and it could have stabilized out around 1000 or 1050. But on the other hand it could have continued to build right on up . Su.re it could . But I sort of suspect that the--well, I don't know. It's different from this other problem where we were told that the thing didn't require heaters below 38 percent , and we found out that it really didn ' t require 'them below 42 percent . We turned them off at 42 percent . Right . The secondary o system--I thought those performed 2 admirably. In_fact, they had more oxygen in them than I thought they could hold. Jim ' s was up to around 5500 pounds shortly after launch . It re mained up there and drizzled out about 100 pounds throughout the flight . Actually they increased by 100 psi each right after launch . Right at the first mode of flight . Then they drizzled back down and stayed at 5400, I think, right on down through the flight . The lowest
55 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White mine got was about 5250 maybe . Did you notice by chance what they were at land ing? No, I didn ' t check them. Neither did I. That was the last thing I had on my mind , to tell the truth. I thought the quantity measuring was fine . It was a little questionable, that we might have overpressurized on your system, but I guess they had plenty of margin in that respect . The secondary o flow rates were satisf actory as far 2 as I was concerned. I think so . I was amazed that secondary o flow 2 was such that I really didn ' t get too hot in i t . Yes, I was not as uncomfortable as I had been at other times. You know, after awhile· you hit yourself in the head so long that it finally stops hurting. It ' s like that big heavy suit, after awhile you begin to feel good . I know the average guy on the street probably wouldn't like the flow rate, but it didn't seem to be too bad. It wasn ' t too objectionable .
56 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White I think we jumped into something else . We were in secondary o system and we weren ' t on flow 2 rate. The only time we had the flow rate on that was during reentry. The flow rate there was sat isfactory . The pressure obviously was satisfac tory, but we didn't check it at the end . The control--r.de put an extra detent on that control. I think the control was a positive one and we were able to keep it in the detents where we wanted it . I had no p~oblem there. Right, I think that the way it's rigged up now is excellent. We designed it . It had better be, ha., ha! Right . Okay, the CO partial pressure. The gage 2 has been discussed prior to this time.It stayed down satisfactorily. Yes, it never got off zero. Okay, the coolant- the radiator operation config - uration--I don't have the times in front of me right now that we went onto the radiator, but I think it was about 40 minutes. 40 minutes. We went on the radiator about 40 minutes and we
McDivitt White never had to come off it again . We didn ' t get any abnormal operation of the radiator at any time . One time they called up to me and mentioned some thing about the radiator and the coolant loop and I didn ' t get any clarification . I lost contact at that time , and I thought just maybe that I had a failure of some type in my primary cooling system . So just for caution sake I turned on the secondary coolant pump and waited till I got con tact with them again. They asked me why I had the secondary pump on, and I said , "I thought maybe I had a problem in the primary system ." They asked me why I thought that and I said , "I thought they were telling me something about it when I lost contact with them. I did it just to be sure ." But that was the only time that I thought we even might have had a problem in it , and I turned it off . We used double coolant loop early in the mission,and after we turned the secondary system off we did not use it a.gain until the teentry. Prior to the reentry , we turned it on . That's right . That coolant system real ly worked. Okay , here is one at which we'll get at them- -
58 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White the water management system. I think you have a few thousand words you'd like to say about launch. I think you actually already hit on most of them, anyhow . Man, I sure do. The l'brmal mode , Drink Mode, and Flush Mode . We got the water management thing kind of goofed up. Let's just take the drinking thing first. The drinking nozzle was attached to the management panel by a hose and the hose looked like it was made out of rotten rubber . The first time I tried to drink out of it , I stuck the thing into my mouth- - The first bad moment of the f l ight . --I pushed the button in and no water came out , ~d I almost had a heart attack. I said to Ed , "Ed, this is going to be the shortest four day flight in history. " Ha, ha! Jim said, "Guess what? · The water doesn ' t work." Ha, j{.a ! But you ' d already had a drink out of it , though , hadn ' t you? No , I hadn ' t . Oh , hadn ' t you? You handed it to me.59 eeJmrDEMffM McDivitt White McDivitt Oh, so I handed it over to him and then he took a drink out of it and didn ' t have any problem at all . What happened was the hose was wound in the helix . It came out to the gun in a straight line . When I drank out of it on my side this thing always crimped like it was an old rotten piece of rubber that had been bent over in that position many times before. It looked like something that came out of a 1890 steamboat or something, instead of a- - It looks like your old oxygen mask hose. That's right. It looks like my old rotten oxygen mask hose . So I think that we ought to get at least a decent piece of hose in there. The next thing is the water gun that you drink from. You push the button in and a little spigot would come out and the wat er would start running out of it . This worked great. You could always get the wa ter to come out when you didn 't have your hose bent. It got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse . As far as returning it towards the end of the flight , I almost drowned a couple of times because I ' d get that thing out and I couldn't
60 White McDivitt @ONFl0Et'4Tl=At get it back in. I finally ended up actually using two hands to operate the water gun so that I could get the button back out. The button definitely did get more friction in it as the flight progressed. It seemed like it was all scored up and it kept getting worse and worse and worse as the flight went on. This could have been a major disaster too. If we had that gun squirting water inside the spacecraft , you'd have had water all over the place. I'll be the first to say that we made a real effort to keep the water out of the space craft. We wanted to get four days out of the flight. I felt one of the major probierns would be the humidity in the spacecraft . As it turned out, it wasn't a problem. We didn't know it right off the bat and we were really concerned about the water. The last thing I wanted to do was to have an open water nozzle running into the spacecraft . So I think that takes care of that . I think the whole water management panel ought to be clarified before we fly GT-5. We were arguing about what position the waste .Mmagement Switch was going to be in during the countdown to launch. I think this i d w@f'fFto• Ef'IT trA L
White McDivitt White McDivitt 61 certainly not the time to be deciding what the heck the position these switches were going to be in. We were always briefed that this thing would be in OFF. We were going through the switch positions and they'd ask me to check in the count at. about T-45 minutes or so. And I couldn ' t see that one . You couldn ' t see that one and you asked me to look down at it . I saw the thing was in EVAPORATOR, so I question the STC. He checked around and they had a big flap about what position it was supposed to be in. Pretty soon we got a call back and he said if I could get unstrapped and reach the thing, I ought to turn it over to OVERBOARD. • We thought it should have been in OFF. They had it in EVAPOR ATOR so we finally decided we ought to go to OVER BOARD to keep the thing venting. I was already strapped in the spacecraft . I undid my shoulder harness and reached around in the spacecraft and flipped a little valve over to OVERBOARD where it should be and then got strapped. You sure they didn ' t have you put it OFF? No, we went to OVERBOARD .
62 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt I remember they argued. I thought they had it on EVAPORATOR first. It went from EVAPORATOR- - That seems like the least likely of any position to put it in . That ' s right. We went from EVAPORATOR over to OVERBOARD. So I think a comment that I ' d like to make right now about the whole water management panel is that it's a simple thing. It's got three !mobs and each !mob ' s only got three or four positions . We had the ECS engineers at McDonnell give us a briefing on this simple water management panel. We had about seven guys there with seven different versions of how it was de signed, how it operated, and what the different positions we were supposed to be in. They got us so screwed up that when we left ther e we didn ' t have any idea in the world whatit was supposed to do. I think those designers didn ' t either. They didn ' t either and it was pretty obvious that they didn ' t . We went through a lot of discussion with that water management panel. Finally I think
that the four of us got it pretty well squared away. Then just before launch we found out down at the Cape that because they had gotten those switches in the wrong position we pumped 32 pounds of water out of the adapter , used up all the pressurant for the water system, and pumped all the water into the lithium hydroxide canj.,3ter. If it hadn't been for one last minute check in the data, we would have lost the lithium hydrox ide canister full of water and nothing to drink with. So we would have had about an hour flight, if we had gone that long. I think that before we fly another flight we ought to have all the people at McDonnell and NASA, who are · respons-ible for this thing get it squared away and figure out just where the heck they want these switch posi tions.and get them there. If there are a lot of switch positions on that panel that aren't useful anymore, we should just go ahead and block them off. We decided between the four of us that there were--I don't even know what they call those switches- - White Condensate Valve and Water Valve. ..
McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt --and the Water Valve should be put in NORMAL NORMAL.and left there. That was ~xa.ctly what we did and we knew how to work the waste management valve. We didn't screw it up, but I ' m not sure that if with a little trying, we couldn't have . We never had to use the Evaporator Fill Mode . The Flush Mode,or the waste ·management portion of the thing,had a couple of different positions . In the normal OVERBOARD position and in using the Preheat and Flush switch over on the side , we managed to dump a large number of urine dumps through this. We dumped both our launch- day urine bags which were full. I probably urinated eight or ten times and you probably about five or six t i mes. About five times . About five times . So we had a lot of dumps through this thing. At 92 hours it stopped work ing . Ed had filled up the bellows pretty well just before this. I was the man in charge of dumping urines, it seemed like . The Urine Dumper!!! I was the only one who could reach the knobs and swit ches . It ~ nerally went down in spurts. ~8-Mf' I Dt=P,.ff I rA L
I 65 About haliwny through the dump , it started slowing down . Then it just went in very slowly the last two or three inches . Then I urinated in the thing and had a bellows full of a mixture of air and urine . It started dumping . It looked like it went down about halfway and then it stopped . I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it wasn't the air going out of it. It w.ent very slowly for ju.st a short time and then it stopped completely . Nothing else would go out of it . S~ turned off the Flush Switch and I went from OVERBOARD to EVAPORATOR,and it flushed through the evaporator . We had one more urine dump through the evaporator and this worked all right . Well, I ' m sure glad that we had those two ways of work ing it . All the way through the flight after I ' d dumped the urine through this thing, I kept say ing 1 :w-ell , McDonnell finally designed this thing so it works after about 30 or 40 attempts and redesigns :' But I guess I was over-optimistic be cause it did drop out just before the flight . It finally got to work for 88 hours . We didn't use the E~aporator Film Mode . Okay, Ed, why don't
66 White McDivitt White McDivitt Whit e McDivitt Whi te McDivitt White you take over. I extended my wrath . I just had a feeling you wanted to say something about that, Jim. ~, ha! After having messed around with that thing for 96 hours trying to make it work . I think you expressed my feeling too . Did I leave anything out? No , no . I had the same feelings . I thought you might have had them a little stronger since you were the one who discovered the water gun was not working. I ' m really serious about that simple panel being able to screw up the whole flight. If we don ' t get that thing figured out we ought to stop fly ing space missions . One of the worst moments of the prelaunch down there was when I found out they had that two gallons of water in the system somewhere and didn ' t know where it was. That's right . The humidity sensor--I thought if the readings are right, it worked very well and pr oved the point that the humidity in the spacecraft is
67 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt relatively low•, and that the water problem is not quite the problem we had it cracked up to be . I ' ll make a comment on the sponge material on the s ide of the spacecraft at this point ,since we ' re talking about humidity . I didn ' t think the sponge material was a very good idea to begin with but once it was in there and we flew with it, I think it was- - It was a real bad mistake! Ha, h9. ! No, I thought it was all right in there . The only thing wrong with it was what they had it treated with for fire - proofing. I thought that part of it was unpardonable . There is no excuse whatso ever for having those ammonia vapors and the hy drogen sulfate ~or whatever those other things were that we had permeating around the spacecraft. We smelled bad enough, but it was no contest when it came to comparing ourselves with the spacecraft . It smelled worse . If there was any moisture it grabbed it all. I don't really think there w as any moisture for it to grab . I don 1 t think so either, Ed. I kept feeling that
68 White 8 , 5 Communicati ons White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt r1ecr, thing and it was dry as could be . There was no moisture that I could notice . 'lhe sponge stuff on the side wasn ' t objectionable to me but the odor that obviously came from it was very , very objectionable . The readings we obtained I thought, were easy to take. The stow age of the unit was not a problem. It was easily stowed in the spacecraft while we were using it . Okay, I have a few comments on the communications which we ought to go on to . We ' ll take them in sequence . Okay, why don ' t you go along I'll express my com ments . I think the interphones worked pretty wel l . I noticed one thing, though, as we progressed along. lf'he volume requirement on both my side and on Jim ' s side needed to be increased all the time to get - No , Ed . I launched with all my volumes full up . Is that right? Anyhow in my interphone , I pro gressively raised it as the f l ight went on . Yes , I started off with mine almost all the w ay up . On the UHF it was absolutel y all the way up , C04 4~t!li1t6 L
69 White McDivitt White McDivitt White and I flew with it almost the whole flight . I don't think it was all the way up. The one thing though--I think the interphone operation and quality were quite good . Yes, I thought so too . We were ready to communicate back and forth. It was just the way I would liked to have done it . I thought it was very good. The UH performance at the countdown was satisfactory and just after we got into orbit we felt that we had a bit of a communication loss. We switched to UHF No. 2. Later during the flight we used both UHF sets and didn't have any difference in performance from either one . During the recovery you were using the UHF primarily. I think you had as much com munication as you could expect. That ' s right. I think so too. I do think, though , that we had a very bad UHF situation in the first eight or nine orbits. It was really lousy. As a matter of fact, I was getting concerned that maybe we were going to have to land because we were going to run out of communications . You were actually working more on this problem b
70 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt than I was. You were communicating during the FNA work and also after I went to sleep. I heard you working on the Communications Check and that's when you went to the reentry antenna. That's right, when we ran through these checks, it finally became apparent to everyone that the reentry antenna was doing a better job than the adapter .antenna. And then later on, I switched back to the adapter antenna for some reason which I can't remember right now. We ran a couple of more checks and it seemed to be- - I know what we did. We ran an HF check , Jim, and we switched back to the a~apter so we could use the HF antenna back there . We got just as good U1IF transmissions at this time as we did on the r.eentry a.ntenna . When they checked them out again, they said they still thought the stub antenna was better. So, we went back to :reentry antenna. We used r .eentry just about 95 percent of the flight. That's right. In the last 55 orbits it was great. In the first eight it was lousy. I was really
71 White McJ)ivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White concerned about having to come down because we didn't have any radios . One thing that I'd like to say is, I would give a good gold star to the controllers down there. I thought their voice procedures were excellent and their methods for giving us information were all good . I had no comment , whatsoever, other than I thought it was all very good . That's right. I had no objection . I thought there was no time in the flight in which we got a cluttered voice from anybody . Yes, I think that is pretty good when you have that many people working the loop. I think so too . Okay, the voice tape recorder--let me vent my wrath on this one. Get ' em Ed, get 'em! Right . This is another thing that should be fixed before the next flight. I think we're going to end up being very, very sorry. We're going to end up losing valuable data from time to time . This will be due to no reason other than a voice tape recorder which is poO'r on all accounts.
72 EiOt •rt"Ef ◄ lt/.L: McDivitt White We ' ve already lost some very va l uable data from this flight. We could have taped t he entire EVA and brought those communications back down. As it was, we couldn ' t tape them becaus e we had to put the thing in UHF so that we coul d transmit to the ground . We los t all of t he bless ed stuff going to the ground anyway. There are certain systems in here that I think are very poorly designed . I think t his is about the poorest of them all . It ' s l ocated in such a position that you can not see the opeation light when it is on. The light is in an area where you normally would put things . Things get put on top of it so that if you look down there, you can't see the light . The light is such a small insignificant thing when it comes on. Unless you conscious l y bend your head down and l ook down below your right elbow, you can not see whet her the light is on or not. The switch is set so t hat you have to go in either RECORD , Ul!F , HF, or INTERCOM and you can not be in RECORD while you're on UHF or INTERCOM. This is a very unsatisfa c t ory method of having a tape recorder. The tape r ecorder
73 MoDivitt W hite should be set up so that it can record conversa tions on normal UHF , HF , and INTERCOM type opera tions . As Jim pointed out , in our flight alone I think we l ost sets of valuab l e information. During launch we weren ' t able to tape anything onboard . We weren't able to tape the work during EVA . We could have taped some of the work during t he rendezvous part of the flight , I don ' t be lieve we taped i t though . The w~y it's set up you wouldn't l eave i t on i n t hat manner . We both had requirements to communicate over UHF . This was our normal mode of operation . If we have a tape recorder , it shoul d have a separate switch . If t here is an hour limitation on the tape, there should be a light that oomes on and is easily visi ble on the front somewhere. That's right . It ought to go right on the VCC . That's right . That ' s really where the light be longs . I think that it woul d be desirable and important to have a voice t ape of what ' s going on throughout the flight . I wouldn't have any ob jection to having a tape recorder with the capa bility of recording more than the one hour at a CO t4fl"Et tTI.Q:t
74 McDivitt White McDivitt White time that we have now. I'd like to see us record ing a great deal of the flight . It'd be nice to have a switch to turn it off from time to time if you did want to discuss something that you didn ' t want to go on tape . I don't think we ought to put the whole flight on tape . If we flew a week-long flight, it would take a week to go through the tape. You wouldn't want long periods of nothing on there . I think the way we wanted to operate it this time would have been all right, if we could have just opera ted it that way. There were certain periods where we put a tape on and ra.n it all the way through. Well, that was the tape that covered a certain experiment or something. On our D-9 Experiment, we used it. Yes , that's where we used a whole tape on it . Then there were periods that were questionable when you were s l eeping and I wasn I t doing anything, or I was sleeping and you weren't doing anything. If you carried adequate tapes, and you had adequate warning when the thi ng went on and off, you would not have the same situation we had on the D-9
75 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White Experiment . You could have the tape stop in the middle of the experiment and be lying on your back looking out with the sextant. You haven't got any idea in the world the tape's run out on you . Right. I think that it's a ve-ry, vezy unsatisfactory sys tem . It ranks right up along with the top ones, and we ' ve already hit on some of them already. The digital command system I · thought worked very well. I thought the light in there gave U$ a good indication of several things. It gave us an indication of when the station was about to come on and communicate with us. We used this as a clue to turn on our UHF to warm our transmitter up so we would be ready when the transmission came up. I think updates from the ground came up in a ve-ry orderly fashion. I don't have any objec tion about that or any further comments . Do you? Ed, I thought it was very good. Handled in a very good manner. I think so. The only update that I have an objection to is
76 <i8MftDl! McDivitt White McDivitt t hat they updated our t ime reference system and had it inaccurately updated by a second . Yes, I think there is a big fla p about that . I 'd like to find out about that , too . The r eal time-transmitter , delayed- time transmitter, stand by transmitter-- they seemed like they all worked pretty well . We had no use for the standby transmit t er and we used the rea l - time and delayed time transmitter throughout t he flight . You don ' t have any comments on this, do you? I 've got one comment . When we came over Guaymas after our computer went out , and we ' d already fouled the thing up , I know , they said they wanted us to come right- side-up for a critical tape dump . So I did , and I got a message from the ground say i ng , "Put your Tape Playback to CONTI NUOUS ." So I put the Tape Playback Switch to CONTINUOUS . Pretty soon they called up and said , "Do you have your TM switch to REAL-TI ME and DELAYED-TIME?" I said, "No, I don't have. You 're going to have to put it down there." They didn ' t bother telling me that t hey didn ' t have any command capability w hatsoever . I went ahead and put the Tape Play back to CONTINUOUS , which means that you're dumping
77 all that tape. If you don ' t have the ~eal- time delayed-time transmitters on, you're just dump - ing it into noth!e!lg. You're erasing. So we got some pretty inadequate communications there. They should have said, "We don't have any command capability. Will you please place your tape recorder and your TM switches so we can receive it?" We knew how to work the thing. It ' s just that the instructions we got conflicted with the normal procedures. Consequently we dumped all this tape that really was critical. I'm not sure how much of it they got on the ground. I'm not even sure if they ever got any of it on the ground • . because we got some not only inadequate but really erroneous instructions. White Okay, communications---we covered them in coordin ation with the ground a little earlier. I think that the flight controllers handled our flight in a very good manner. I think that when they had something to say, they said it , and when they knew that we wanted to talk to them, they'd talk to us. When they didn't have something to say, it was kept in a good manner. I thought it was a very profes -
78 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt Yes, I thought that they were to be commended . As a matter of fact, when we have our world-wide network debriefing or whatever the heck we ' re going to have I really intend to applaud them loud and long . I thought the teamwork between the spacecraft and the communicators on the ground was outstand ing. It was really good . No adverse comment on anytime during the f l ight . Shoot, if you wanted to talk to them they were more than happy to talk to you . A lot of times they ' d come on and say, "This is Gu.aymas . We have your TM solid . We don't have anything for you . If you have anything for us, we 'll be standing by." And that would be it . They were really good , I thought. We've about covered procedures . Right, I think we've hit that too. Okay, the .., communication controls and switches--voice control center--I've always been pretty happy with that . One other thing I want to comment on is the voice control Center. If we had carried that idiotic
White McDivitt White 79 contraption that McDonnell had designed to keep the moisture out of that thing , we would have had one more hunk of junk in the spacecraft with us. It would have been a completely ·useless thing because of the nwnber of times that we switched switches on that VCC . Heck , we switched switches on the VCC more than all the other switches on the spacecraft put together. I think if we would have had to pull off that big piece of plastic every minute, it would have gone on the floor and stayed there. That's right. That was a very poor fix to try to solve a bad design. Okay, why don't you talk about that sleep config uration? Okay, with the sleep configuration , we lmew right away we had bought a weenie . The first time I tried to go to sleep, we tried to t urn everything off. We tried turning all my volumes down to zero. We turned to PUSH.JIIO.JI'ALK only, and I could still sit there and hear it about a one by one level. It was just enough so I could hear audibly what w as going on and under stand if I paid attention
80 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt to it . If you really listened, you could hear. That's right . If you were very close to going to sleep and something went on that was interesting , you could hear just enough to wake you up and pull your interest to it. It made sleeping rather difficult . We didn ' t want to disconnect ourselves from the system altogether. We ' d like to have a way to actually tum the volume all the way down and provide the astronaut · that ' s awake the capability of controlling the voice c~ntrol ccnter ' R volume so that he can turn the sleeping astronaut ' s volume up and talk to him anytime . That ' s right . I think what we really need in there is an ON- OFF switch for each half of the vcc. So you can effectively cut him off and turn him back on . That ' s right. You just reach over there and you break t he communications with a simple ON-OFF switch. Then if you ' ve got to get to it in a hurry , you just f l i p the thing back on and then
81 White McDivitt White McDivitt White talk to him. I don't know w here on the VCC you ' d mount it. I think they can solve that problem pretty well. It might not be in that manner but I think they can solve it so you've got it definitely on or off. That's right. T.hey need a simple way of disconnect ing the man from the c©mmunicat i ons center wi thout disconnecting his- - I'd say that this was a very unsatisfactory con dition. When we finally went to get some rest, we disconnected the communications cord at the hel met. I think this is an extremely unsatisfactory mode. If we should go pressurized at any time and have to pressurize our suits , w e 'd just lose communications between each other. This would be a very, very unsatisfactory situation. I believe that this should be corrected prior to the next flight. The .Jieacon Control, Adapter and l:\eentry- no comment, Those were all right. Yes, that was excellent. The TM control transmitter and antenna--I don't '. have any comments on them. McDivitt No, they were pretty well designed, I thought. - • · '5Q ►+F •9~~.W.,1,--+
82 White That ' s right . Okay , the electrical system- - 8 . 6 Electrical System White Okay, t he systems monitoring. I thought it was satisfactory . We went through and monitored the systems every time for the GO/NO GO checks, and quit e a few times along the line in addition to this. So I thought the method of monitoring was satisfactory. I don't believe we really had any way of monitoring the electrical power remaining. McDivitt Yes, that ' s a draw back, and we all know it, I guess . White Right . That ' s an unsatisfactory conditionmd I don ' t know what we're going to do about it. I think it's too much of a job to try to think that you ' re going to sit in there and calculate all the things you have on,and try to keep an onboard plot of what electrical power you have remaining . McDivitt Yes , I think this is a ground function . I don't think that we can realistically do it onboard the spacecraft . White I don't believe we got any indication of how our electrical power was going from the ground,except
McDivitt White McDivitt White 83 for one time when they called us up and told us we wer e 190 amp- hour s , I think it was 190 amp hours , over- - That was after we turned the computer off. I w anted to find out w hy we turned the computer off and if we were really short on electrical power . Then they told me we were 160 amp-hours over the 200 amp-hours cushion. I almost went throught the overhead . I think I'd like to have had a little more infor mat i on from the ground on the status of our elec trical system. The mai n batteries--I have a com ment on them. They started out with a charge of about 24 volts and progressively decreased to the point where I was a hair concerned about them. They progressed down to the 22 . 5 reading and began to shade lower than that near the end of the mission . I was using the parallax to be sure I had a satisfactory reading on t he gages each time . I noticed they decr eased down to a minimum of 22 . 5. Maybe it got to 22 but it was getting near t he end of the m ission. Ha , ha ! Maybe 22 .49 . Just the way I 'd lean my head I could get the
McDivitt iii> blBO.E~IJA:~ 7 reading the way I wanted it. Ha, ha! The squib batteries--our electrical briefing I thought, · wa.s very good. Everything behaved just the way they told me . The squib batteries star ted out pretty high, around 27 or 28 volts , and they progressively decreased in voltage as we went through the mission . The main batteries--every time I checked them they always checked out at about 9 • as far as the amps were concerned . The adapter batteries--I was glad we'd had the brief ing on them because I realized that knees on the adapter batteries were in operation during the launch when we got a high reading on the left stack ammeter up around 27 or 28 amps, and we had a reading of around,I believe,14 amps on the right one. I didn't alarm Jim with this information because it was still below my cut-off point of about 30 amps or so. I felt that it was due to the knees in the adapter batteries causing unequal loadings of the main batteries with respect to the adapter batteries. Hold it . I want to make some comments about the electrical system and the power as we used it .
85 When we powered down , we turned of.f the a . c. power, t he QA.MS power, t he ACME": biag power, the rate gyros, the horizon scanner, the IMU, the computer, both FDI ' s , and the attitude indicator lights. We operated with as little in the way of cockpit lighting as we possibly could. It got less and less and less as the flight progressed. In earlier orbits we had a l l the lights on in the cockpit- the over, the middle light , and the two side lights . Then £or the night time passes, as the flight progressed, we got around to using the red lights . We finally got around to making the night-side passes generally with one r ed light on or one white light on, as we got more confidence in the spacecraft . I think we save quite a bit o{ power that way. They were surprised that we were 160 amp-hours ahead , and I don ' t think that we got that way by accident. White I ' ve got a comment to make on that. We were both watching the loadings and I could read them a littl e better over there. We started out operat ing arourd 14, maybe a l i ttle better . The reading on the com bi ned amp-hours s l owly decreased down86 McDivitt White McDivitt and near the end of the mission, we were down to 12 or 13 amp-hours on unpowered down configuration. That was as low as I saw it go, down around 12 . Another thing that we did was that when we wer en't actually planning on transmitting on one of the radios, we were always putting the mode control switch to INTERCOM, which would then cut the trans mitter off the line. You could actually see the ammeter go down a little bit. So I think that by really powering down the spacecraft and getting all the non-essential items off the line , we helped ourselves a lot. We got this 160 amp- hour cushion because we really worked at it, not because it just happened like that. This takes a little diligence. Yes , not because it was a miscalculation on the guys who were planning the flight, but just the fact that we really worked at keeping the lights off , keeping the radios off, and keeping those little bitty things down. You know, you only have to save two amps per hour . We ran on a single suit fan almost the entire flight, except when Ed was getting warm when he was sleeping we ha d to
87 White McDivitt 8 . 7 Com puter McDivitt White McDivitt White go to two suit fans. Right. When it got so uncomfortable that I couldn't sleep, we would go over. We really did n't do that too much . No , we didn't . We made a real effort to keep the electrical load down. I think that it sort of showed up there towards the end of the mission when we really had enough spare power to run the IGS through the last day--uselessly of course , but at leas t we ran it. In the launch we had the computer in ASCENT . F.d was reading out the errors during launch. I read ou~ the rates which didn ' t require an;y information from the computer. I was readi~out the lack of errors most of the time. Lack of errors, right. Why don't you discuss the error status. I think we discussed it earlier and I'll just go briefly through it. We didn't have any error s that I feel would be worth repeating during Stage I. At guidance initiate we got a ful}-scale-down indi cation. This indication I had been told
88 McDivitt fairly routine, and it appeared routine ' to me too as it began to steer into zero and steered right on into zero . As we approached iSEXJO the error started to increase a little bit and in creased out to a little less than a degree in pitch-down on the error needle . Aside from that, we didn ' t have ,,as far as I can see, any other error that was worth talking about during launch. Okay, at SECO + 20 the IVI ' s counted up as we separated,rolled around, and did all the maneuvers we were supposed to. The IVI's acted as they should . When I got turned around and was faced toward the spacecraft,I was in a hurry to get all these things done . I started thrusting and I went from Ascent to Catch-Up, and then hit the Start Comp button.~ I lost a couple of feet/second here , but this was sort of insignificant at the time. The IVI's counted up in the Catch-Up Mode and they operated properly throuehout the rest of the chase phase of the mission. We were getting the kind of information that we needed right there early in the flight . Ed had 52 punched in and it read out at 30 feet/second, I think he said earlier .
89 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt Yes , I picked that up later on because I wasn't even concerned with it since we had a good orbit. Once we had a good orbit that kind of information wasn't that important. Do you want the IVI readings at this time? Yes, you might just as well read them out. The IVI readings at the time we decided to read them --at zero, zero, zero on the attitude indi cator~- 20 forward, right 11, down 5. The attitudes weren't really what they should have been, because we had a good insertion and we had to go right then and we had to get turned around and get at that booster. I didn't fool around with getting the spacecraft at.exactly the right attitude to read out the IVI's. I thought that was of a :~;:i.demic interest . It would be great for post-flight analysis but it w asn ' t going to help the flight at all. So I didn ' t do justice to those things. I'm sure that we can go back and resurrect this thing to find out exactly what it was. It wasn't very meaningful at the time . The orbit maneuvers consisted of really just chasing the booster around and reading up the IVI ' s as they came out. We received all our updates difi)~~FIDE~~llAuw -
90 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt properly. We got the computer on and got it loaded . The DCS updates were going in and they were gett Lng V fJ dfication on the ground. One time I remember we didn't g6t the DCS light . As a matter of fact, they sent the load up again and we sti.l.l iid.n ' t get the DCS light. They verified on the ground that it was going in . Well, the funny thing 'we.S when the computer wasn ' t on we got a DCS light. The DCS lights come on when they get set up for the TX and send out a :r.ealbtime command,too. Well, mRybe the TX when they sent up-· They kept telling us that they got a good load in it and I had no light. I really didn ' t quite bel ieve them . Neither did I. As a matter- of fact, we had it verified at the next station. Okay. And that ' s where the onboard computer thing ends . I might go through what happened to the thing . W e were over the .States and h!;',,d the onboard computer on for getting a new load in it. I got just about over Florida . He said, okay, I could turn the
White McDivitt 91 tffiFIDEr-4TIAL computer off. I turned the switches off and nothing happened . The comp l i ght stayed on and I don ' t even think the ·malfunction light came on , did it? No, it didn't. So I said, "Well, that 's interesting that the darn thing doesn't go off. " So we flicked the IGS power of~ and back on quickl y and told them on the grotmd that it didn't look l ike I could get the computer to go off and stay off. I think you told them you thought you had a failure in the switch . Yes, I told them it looded to me like I probably had a failure i n the ON-OFF Switch or the ON- OFF switchiqsfunction. And they said okay . So I said, "What do you want me to do here?" I knew we could a l ways t urn it off by t urning the IGS off, but I wasn ' t too keen on that , So they said, "Stand by. We' re going to have the experts check it. " So we flew on out of communication with them. I think they talked to me over Bermuda too, but nothing of much importance. They said to stand by they were still checking it. Then we got ove.c Tananarive and I got this message to turn the GQt ◄ FIDE~~TIAk
92 switch to the ON position but to turn tie a . 0. power to ACME,which was going to power down the computer whether we wanted it to or not . It was a voice relay station but we weren't getting the voine relayed. We were just getting a message sent up from somebody on the g~ound. I ' m quite sure we didn't have any controllers at Tananarive . I don't r eally know who was talking to me . Probably SOUlf-! COM TECH , So • not being able to discuss the thi.ng with them and not knowing what the status of my total electrical p,wer was at the tim., , I went ahead and t·..1.r.ned them off. The comp light or the malfunction light came on and then it sort got dim H,nd wen-f: 1)ut. Then I sort of figured that •s the end of the ACPU. So we put the thing back on over Carnarvon and back off again and it woul dn't come on. It was dead,of course . So that's the life story of the computer. Then we played a lot of games afterward trying to ml'l.kc~ .. a dead m an come back to lifA. I have nothing else on the computer. I sure wished I'd have had it though. f'~t 1F1DfJM+IAit
93 8.8 Crew Station McDivitt White McDivitt Controls and displays- . -okay, I' 11 talk about that. The s,equential Telelights all operated properly,--came on in the proper colors, and punched off and everythi.ng . The event timer operated properly. The IVI operated properly. The flight director indicator operated properly. I would like to discuss the GLV fuel and oxidizer pressure gages here for a minute . We got about a $25 million vehicle,! think,that depends almost entirely on a launch. We've got an onboard manual ietection system ,or something like that . Malfunction detection system. Malfunction detection system . An integral part of the malfunction detection system, are the fuel and oxidizer pressure gages for both the first and second stages . This is one of the abort criteria I On the scal e of these gages down below the glass is a beautiful, beantiful set of lines and numbers and hash marks ,tha.t are wrong. They updated the GLV information and found out that these things were in error by quite a bit. No~ to take and fix these gages would have taken a couple thousand bucks. I don't know exactly how much or how
94 long, but it would have taken a few dollars. In stead we decided it would be simpler and cheaper and a lot quicker to go ahead and paste some paper decals over the top of the glass . The parallax with these things is horrendous . The decal s were pasted on over t he top of the glass in such a manner that they completely obscure the inside-the- glass readings.They also obscure the center needles which are not only the clue to what the taz1k pressures are but a clue to whether you have any APS power, which is also critical . When you cut these things back so that you can see the inside needles , you see the inside gage too . I think this nickel-dime fix to ·our multi...·!. million doll ar vehicle is ridiculous. I think that we ought to get those inside gages painted the way that they ' re supposed to be painted. I think we ought to end this Mickey Mouse gage routine right now and get going on GT-5 ' s fuel and oxidizer gages for both stages . It's ridicu lous the way they are right now. The a .l timeter worked as advertised. I mentioned that it went down and back up again at around 100,000 feet .
95 White McDivitt White McDivitt The rate of aescent seemed to be all right. The accelerometer was okay. The switches and circuit breaker panels--! had no comment. We knocked a couple of switches and circuit breakers off dur ing the course of the flight. We always caught them and got them back on quickly , or maybe we didn't get them back on quickly. We got them back on quickly enough because nobody ever said much to us about it. They commented one time . Two times,I think, they asked us if we turned some thing on or off. I remember that . One w as over on my side. Was one the A pump on the s econdary loop or the E pump on the secondary loop,or did you turn that on? No. I think one of them was up there, and I for get how we got it on. Maybe we just bumped it. Yes, there was another one over on your right-hand side and there were a couple of them in the center circuit breaker ~ panel. One time I know I bumped one on the left hand side circuit breaker panel. I thought it was the-electronic timer. It was one right above ~ ►~FlDWTlAIJ
96 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt that. I almost had a heart attack when I saw that thing go down because it would have messed up the whole time reference system . I thought the switches and circuit breaker panels were very good . I have no complaint about it. I think that's a well designed cockpit. The mirrors were fine and the swizzle stick was a real life saver . I can't reach the circuit breakers and switches over on the right-hand side unless I use the swizzle stick. I had to do a lot of switching when Ed was sleeping. This swizzle stick was the real answer. I 've been always telling you to get some long arms . H~, ha! I didn ' t use the swizzle stick very much . Yes, but you don't have to reach over and get those switches all on the left-hand side . I found the swizzle stick was quite useful for unstowing items out, of the center stowage box. That ' s right . It was really good there. I used that every time when I unstowed. It ' s a good piece of equipment . Okay , lighting- do .you want to ~ ~ ting, Ed? GiQ.f>.~tfit~
97 White Okay, I think that the lighting to me was sur prisingly good. I think that at one time there was a press to put two white lights on either side on the instrument panel. I think the lights on the instrument panel should remain just as they are. I think we used the red light much more than we used the white light. There was quite a bit of time when you had to do a lot of out-the window operation at night and you wanted to have some reference inside. The red light doesn't seem to destroy your night ~eference at all. So I think the instrument lights, the two on either side above the panel, are satisfactory. I also thought the del etion of the red light in the cabin light and the substitution of a bright white light was certainly good. There were several times when I wanted to get a reading on something right away and I didn't want to fool around with dim lighting. I would switch on the big bright light and I was almost always able to get good readings. Now when the sun was really bright in you face, there was a period of time in which your eyes had to adjust to the instrument panel before you .e@t'4FIDEMTIAL
98 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White could make the readings . I think you could put spot lights in there and not get by that prob lem. That's exactly what I was going to say . Lights aren't going to solve that problem . No, it's just plain bright outside. When you look back in, even though you have your lights on, it's fairly dark inside . I personally wasn ' t troubled by this very many times during the flight . Were you , Jim? No, I wasn ' t. I didn't feel that was too bad . S~ actually, I felt that the lighting , although not abundant , was adequate. I think the actual light ing of the instruments would certainly be nicer if we had individual instruments lit up. Oh, ene thing - several times I would like to have had a flash Eght in there, something where I could direct a real beam of light. The little side light& I thought, were close to being useless . I didn' t use my little side light, the auxiliary light , very much at all. As a matter of fact , I didn ' t either . Very seldom . I think that if we're going to have •Gl>J~LOiMIWs.
99 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt a little auxiliary light like thatl it ought to be a light- - It ought to be a big auxiliary light ! Ba, Pa! a directed beam. This goes right back to something that we forgot to point out in water management. I think we ought to point it out right now loud and clear. I think that we have to have a system in which we can gage the water outflow. I think the medical people feel fairly strong about this also. I know that I restrained from drinking because I didn't want to drink all the water out of there prior to the end of the four days. I got a feeling Jim was doing the same thing. That's right. I was doing exactly the same thing. I didn't drink abundantly at any time during the flight except perhaps right before the r3entry. I felt I was taking quite a bit of moisture with my reconstituted food. I felt that if I overdid it t he first part of the fligh~, we wouldn't get through the last part, because water is so critical. That's right. We've got a number of expendp.~les like OAMS, and we've got a couple of gages for
100 White McDivitt White t ◄ p=rr,aql¥A l the propellants . We ' ve got the EGS oxygen . We ' ve got quantity gages for that . We ' ve got electrical power and we ' ve got .ways of measuring that from the ammeter . We've got food and we can a l ways count that . But when we get down to water, w hich is just as critical as all these other things in flyir.g_ long duration missions, t here ' s not a single way in the world we can measure how much we've gotten or how muchi . we ' ve drunk . I think it ' s imperative that we get some method of measuring this t hing before we try to fly another long du ration flight. The white light on the little utility light was not satisfactory. We tried to look to see if we could find out what we had in the cabin bottle- Water tank . And that wasn ' t satisfactory. I think we ought , , to have some t ype of a metering system which would enable us to actually determine the water that we 've utilized and in some w ay koow that we ' re getting it out of t he adapter . I don ' t know . We need to look into the whole water metering system, which is non- existent, and see ic!o~{Bt some kind of system. FNilAt101 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White You lmow even if we can ' t get something that they can pipe into the spacecraft, at the very least we ought to TM the pressura.nt pressure down to the ~ound and back up again , or something, and get , some sort of calibration curve- - So that we'd lmow what we have remaining in the a .dapter. We could at least call the people down at the ground and say, "How much water do we have left?" That ' s right. And I think we ought to be able to tell what our bottle has inside of it in the spacecraft . Yes, I 1:h:ink they're really two separate things . I think first of all you've got to know the total water that you've got left and the rate that it's going down. I think the second thing that Ed's pointing out is that we don't even have a:n:y way of telling what the water supply is in the spacecraft. The first clue that you get that you're out of water is you just run out of water. The lighting on the water management panel I think is just about non-existent. You can see it in the daytime. If you know the position of the
102 McDivitt White switches and lmow where they're supposed to be, you can make sure they ' re located properly and on the proper indication, but I can't read anything down in that area at night. The lighting is very poor in that area. One thing that I'd like to comment on here a little bit is that ~ amber light that I insisted that they put on the Preheat-Flush switch over back of the water management panel . I felt it came in real handy. Two times during the course of the flight I left the Preheat switch on after I flushed it for short periods of time to make sure we didn't have any ice left in the lines . I did it on every occasion, but two times the thing that called my attention to the fact that I still had the thing on , was the fact I could see that orange light-amber light-shining up be tween the food box and the front of the spacecraft . I could tell that I had another light on in the back. And so I think the left panel, center panel , right panel, pedestal, and console are not lit abundantly, but are lit what I ' d call adequately and perhaps
McDivitt White a little marginal in some cases . I had no diffi culty in reading the des i gnations on the switch breaker panels. I think they were lighted ade quately also. I'm not going to say they're lighted well , because I don ' t think the lighting is real good in the spacecraft. The water management panel isn ' t lighted properl y . I ' m not sure we reall y have to have it l i ghted too well . The utility lights, I t hink,as they are now.,are very close to being useless . It's like taking a match and trying to use it to find your way around . It doesn ' t provide enough light . From time to time I would have liked to have had a light which had a little stronger output of light available,~ so that I coul d-- I several times wanted to look behind my seat for things at night and I ' d like to look down into the area in the water management panel light. Yes , I think probably the wattage on those bulbs should go up an order of magnitude to make them effective. You use it so seldom that it wouldn ' t be a big power use. You ' d only use it when you needed it ,
104 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt It wouldn't be something you ' d use very often. I'll tell you what it all is,though. When you want it, you want something that you can see . You just can ' t see with those things at all . I don ' t particularly understand what the interior and exterior lights mean . Do you? I think the exterior lighting is probably the lighting that could probably be used for docking . We didn't have any exterior lights. I thought the intensity control of the lights was an absolute necessity and I think it was satis factory. I think the fingertip lights are quite useful , and were commented on already. They should have the Lexan covers, and we've also commented that they should be located between the finger tip and the first joint. The onboard data--now here we come to a very useful piece of equipment. Ha , ha! I believe I made a considerate effort three times to update that thing, and I never got up with it any one of those times . We had three positions on our flight plan strip. We had launch,the first five minutes-- ·t'he next time I tried to get it was 23 hours. The next
105 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White position was 88. :Ha, ha ' And neither time did I catch up really where we were . I turned and turned and turned and then got distracted into something else . Quite frankly , the only things I, ever saw in that flight plan roller were the 23- hour and the 88 - hour times and I never even read what it said . I didn't quite agree with- - 84 it was, I'm sorry. It wasn ' t 88, it was 84 . And Ed wrote something on here. He wrote my parachute-deploy time . I wrote your times during l'.eentry on there . It would have been much more useful if there hadn ' t been anything on it at all. Yes , we put a few times up there- - I couldn't read those things, which were the only numbers that I really was interested in at all . 40CK 2+ 38 • Ghute 12+ 33 . The only two that I thought you really needed were those two. I put them on there. I diat t thoroughly believe Gus when he said you ought to take the thing out, throw it away, and leave a hole in the instrument panel . But I ' m inclined to agree with him r ight
106 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White Now. You ought to take it out, throw it away , and leave a hole in the instrument panel . But honestly, what I do think ought to go up t here , is a good digital clock readout . I don ' t think an analog clock in that position would do you any good though. They both have a high degree of parallax . Yes, the parallax would make it usel ess . I think if it goes in there it ought to be digital . Yes, a one- second clock. I ' m not really sure that we're going to get a digital clock in because of the complexity and the weight and all that jazz. Let ' s talk about the clocks right now , Jim. Okay, let ' s talk about the clocks . I 'll hit mine and then you hit yours and then there should be a conclusion that we could come to . Very good . I think the clock on my side is unsatisfactory. I wouldn ' t recommend flying it on another flight . It's difficult to read . There are two hands going aroun~ keeping track of minute~ and some- t ~ ou read the wro~ minute hand. The one Q ~,FtDEf>ffl~~ -
McDivitt White McDivitt 107 that ' s keeping your hack-¼t's easy to mistake for your minute hand. The way the face is marked it ' s difficult to read the minutes out . The hours interfere with each other. The whole readability of the clock is unsatisfactory and the readability of the hands is unsatisfactory. SQ I think the clock is out in all counts as far as I ' m concerned. I kept watching Jim's clock over there and I think I could get a better Greenwich Mean Time off of his clock than I could on mine on my side of the instrument panel. Hey, let me comment on mine . I thought the reada bility of t hat Accutron 24-hour clock was excellent. The accuracy of it was lousy. It lost four or or f ive seconds every day or more . I reset it about every 24 hours. My Omega wrist wat ch that I had set on GMT never lost a second, except I forgot to wind it one day, and it ran down . It stopped. Ha, ha! I was guilty of the same thing. But the Accutron clock on my side of the instru ment panel, that they put on as sort of an afterthought, was indeed a fine clock as far as
108 ~ee, ◄ rrAL White McDivitt White readability. It didn ' t have any chronometer func tion to it at all . It had strictly a second, minute , and hour hand on it. It told you GMI' and it didn't tell you anything else. It told you GMI' in a way you could read it . You could read out the minutes, you could read out the hours, and you could read out the seconds. I really didn't have any trouble with it at all . It had a nice thin second hand which I find to ~e much more useful than those great big blunt t hings with huge arrows on the end of them. I hat e to lose the chronometer feature on that right-hand side, but I do think that the readability of this thing ,as far as the GMI' is concerned, is so much superior to that other clock that it isn ' t even comparable. I'm not sure that the chronometer function on that side is really too important . • Don' t you? No, I would be perfectly happy to go ahead and take that ,out and put a good clock on there in Greenwi ch Mean Time. Now I 've got some further comments on- -
McDivitt W hite 109 CO f\J FIDEf\lTlAL I guess what you end up with is two clocks that aren ' t any good . Either one of them aren ' t any good . You ' d rather end up with one clock that was good. Yes , the way it ' s combined together right now , it ' s really not too good. I hacked your OAMS burn on my watch . I work with two clocks on my left arm and it worked out r eal well for me. I had elapsed time on one and I had Greenwich Mean Time on the other . I used the elapsed timer as the one on which I made my hacks . So I feel we got adequate backup. If one poops out , you can use the other one to make your time on. So, I think we should have a good clock to keep track of the time in the spacecraft on the instrument panel . Now , I'd like to get back on the clocks again. I think that elapsed time is the only kind of time that we ought to have in the spacecraft . I think that we ought to have a good method of keeping track of elapsed time. I think probably a ten-hour clock that keeps track of each ten-hour incement that you pasa to a high degree of accu racy, is the kind of clock that we need. I don't
110 0Gb liUailJJlAL McDivitt know what we're going to do about wrist watches. Maybe they'll design us a ten- hour wrist watch that we can wear. I don't see any reason why they can't . They can design twelve-hour ones just as easily. We're going to go to this in Apollo. We should face up to it and go ahead and spend the money to get ourselves a proper t iming piece of equipment and get our ranges and stuff operating on elapsed time. In long flights this is the kind of thing that ' s going to be of interest . It was confusing to me, to tell you the truth , to operate on Greenwich Mean Time and elapsed time through- out the flight. I was constantly adding and sub tracting. They'd call us up Greenwich Mean Times and I'd want to convert them to what I was using on my flight plan. I found this a gr eat incon venience. I concur with what Ed said. I ran the whole flight plan using elapsed time except for the times where they called a specific GMT time to perform a function . I did it off of a twelve- hour face wrist watch. I added up all my twelve -hour incements and came to whatever I wanted. If I
111 White McDivitt White McDivitt had something like 83 hours and 15 minutes , I had to figure out that that was six times around the clock and another 11 hours and another 15 minutes . Obviously,not the best way in the world to do it , but the only way that was practical from the standpoint of the flight plan . Well, to tell you the truth , Jim, I feel strong enough about that elapsed time that I would be happy to go with that type of a system of timing, and just go ahead on elapsed t i me all the way and use twelve-hour incements. They would call up your time and elapsed time and use your own clock to keep track of it . I felt it was simple enough also to do it in this manner . But I feel that this is ini'erior to having a good elapsed timer and ten- hour digital incements. I tell you I hate to see us get involved in some!.. thing where you've gpt a clock thats so difficult to read,where you've got to add up twelves and- Now you're on the other side of the fence now! No, I think that we ought to do things like retro - fire time a.~d that' s ort of thing in a standard time that you can use-:.. something like GMT.
112 g?t 1~18 Et fFt,-,L White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivi tt White McDivitt Whi te M cDivitt Well, you really need- -elapsed time. If we had elapsed time- - If we had a good elapsed timer onboard the space craft, I would say that there ' s no doubt about it . Elapsed time. I think we ought to start working on it right now . Elapsed time is the way we should go . I don ' t t hink that with the timing systems we 've got available for the Gemini that we want to go to elapsed time for the whole mission . Trying to get our data back from this f l ight is going to be a horrible mess because of those two timing systems . I know it . I agree. Before we lai.mched , we knew that we wanted to run it in elapsed time , and there wasn ' t any doub't about it . I think maybe if we make the point str ong enough maybe they ' l l get busy on it . You ' re right . l,,J,e'll get going on it . Okay , why don ' t you take the checklist cards , Jim? The checklist cards . We had two complete sets of car ds that were broken up into t wo groups . We Qt@ tffl4f11D8JWA L
113 C9f<JFIIDE~~IJAl had the launch, insertion, M:>de II and M)de III aborts, EVA, the suit check and all the things that we were going to use in the first five orbits of the flight on one set of cards. We had another set of cards from Pre-Retro Checklist down to the post landing and emergency egress . The cards included all the plots that were needed to do all the retrofire and to make corrections to take care of all the non- nominal things that might happen to us during the retrofire . We also had in this group of cards a card that we used to con tain the final retro information such as with OAMS or without OAMS burns , time to reverse bank, and all the other things that we had. It was a format , something that cou1d be easily held in our hands and was actually used during the launch, during insertion, and during reentry . We actually had these cards out so we could check them off. White I thought the only thing we would have out during these t wo critical busy periods of time were these two easy- to-hold , easy-to-operate, hand-held card checklists. The rest of the stuff was all stowed away . c:@ ► H•I1.>6hlil4'.L
114 McDivitt White McDivitt McDivitt White McDivitt We got every checklist that was required to make the spacecraft run on these two sets of cards, which together were about 3/4 of an i nch thick . I feel that we had a real workab l e solution to the problem. These things were the same size as those carried on GT- 3 . They were much more ex panded than what GT- 3 •had. We had the whole how-to-operate the spacecraft routine on these cards. The preparation and availability of them-- is this from a training standpoint . That i s later in the brief. Well , anyway, we actually received our cards at about 8:00 the night before the launch . That ' s the thing that I was hollering about the loudest not to have happen and it happened . understand why it happened, but- - We had so many changes in the flight plan and nobody was working on turning this stuff out . Our time was so filled with over- all t rai ning and the change in flight plan that we just didn ' t have time to go--, We did not have time to go through the checklist over and over. When we did 00-lstEtDEtJIJAL I
115 White McDivitt White McDivitt go through them it took too long to get the thing back to us . Dick Benson came down to the Cape and did an absolute marvelous job, I think , in getting these things turned out . I think he did, too . I think we all owe him a real vote of confidence. That's right. He did an outstanding job . I think the biggest confidence builder that you had, Jim , was when we started getting.these books . That ' s right. Shoot, I was worried about us get ting ready for the flight because I didn ' t think we would be able to get all this stuff together. 'Finally he showed up and really went through it9 but it doesn ' t change the fact that these check list cards and data books didn ' t arrive until 8: 00 the night before the flight . We had a few changes that had to be made . I guess I went to bed about 9: 30 . Dick Benson and Martin Miller were still in our conference room making changes to our books. So a lot of t hese things we didn ' t see until we flipped them out in flight . I think our data books, as we had them laid out, couldn ' t have been better. Well, I shouldn't say that;
116 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt there is always room for improvement . Yes, I think we could organize them a little better for utility and use . We had so many changes in so,..many things that got put in at the end. It got so that they were put in in a bit of a helter-skelter manner, but certainly they were easy to find . Well, I don ' t know. I was really q_uite pleased with the outcome. I think that the general ar rangement of one data book and two-- .whabever we ought to call those other books- - What did we call those other books? Two Experiments and Spacecraft Procedures and Flight Plan - 3ouks- - Two procedures and one data . Yes , two procedures books and one data book . One thing I would have changed -- I would have expanded the flight plan and made maybe two or three times as many pages as we did . We could have written a l l the notes right in it and had enough room to make it intelligible. Because it turns out , tha:t!s where we really kept all of our notes . Yes . Right on the flight plan. • 8t-tftfl~E ►•ffi l-A L ♦
117 White McDivitt White McDivit t White McDivitt White McDivitt White About the way they had it initially was pretty good. Maybe that ' s a little more than we need, but- - No, I don't think it is, Ed. I think that is the way it should be. This is a whole hour on one page . Really? Yes . So later on, you see, they went from one hour dovm to six hours on a page . Maybe if they cut that in half and made two or three hours on a page--this is probably about the- - Two hours on a page for our flight would have made 50 single sheets or 25 double pages . That would not have been bad . That probably would have been just about the · right length . We'd have gotten a lot more out of our notes, I think, because we found ourselves scribbling in places where it was pretty hard to determine where you were . The requirement to mak~ ·changes i-n the bo0k after the flight goes· on is ab5o;tut-ely nil . So , I thi nk
118 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt that rings should be replaced with something that doesn't come undone . My rings came undone sev eral times during the flight and luckily only one at a time came undone. It would have been a real mess if a:ny of these books would have come apar~ because it would have destroyed numerical sequence. So , I think something other than rings ought to be used . . I tell you one thing I found.- -that size boo.k and that concept that we had, I think , was really good . That was just the right size. It ' s just the right size. Their sheets are big enough where you can write a.lot on them . They ' re easy to handle . They ' re small enough so they ' re easy to handle . They ' re easy to stow . They fit into the flight suit. When we launched, I had both flight sets of data cards in my right lower pocket and the big data book and my procedures book in my left- hand lower pocket. I had all the checklists right on my spacesuit.. I had one procedure book and both my cards. And both your cards . So that between. the two of ~PIDE~4TIA1
119 Whit e McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt us we had all the data books right on the flight sui~ which was just right where we wanted them. Another thing we did - -we hand carried this equip ment down to the spacecraft to be sure it was there on l aunch . The maps , overlays, and star charts we should lump all together along with all the other junk that we carried in the data case . Let's start with the star charts. That's easy. I thought the star chart was satisfactory. I think you used the one with less stars on it than I had . Yes . I used my own one that J fly with all the time and I was quite happy with it . I think t l.is is exactly what you need and I don't believe you need to overla~ two times around, but that wasn't for the chart . Yes, and really the flight chart, the one that was actually designed for the spacecraft, was de signed ,30 that this swiveling out the window dis play fit on it . It was a certain size to take care of that and had a lot of dead space out on the
120 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt C~'4fFIDE~~TIAl edges . I would have rather seen the stars ex panded more so that we could tell it. We used two polar plots of stars that were put out for the Apollo thing that we picked up on our training. We actually f l ew with one of the training things. I took one out of my brief case. Those weren't put out by Apollo. Those were put out at Oll<r request.. Remember? We asked for a- - Yes, but I thought they came from the Apollo office . No, they came from our own Flight Crew S uppart . I know we requested them , but I thought that's where they dug them up. No, they got them from- - Okay. See, what they did is they added on all the Apollo navigation stars . They came from our own boys in FCSD. Those polar charts are really the cat ' s meow. All those charts are pretty good . So I thought the star charts sure gave us all the information we needed. The maps and overlays- - I think we really ought to cover the maps and over lays by the experiments. The map with the sliding
121 White McDivitt White McDivitt overlay of the orbits, I thought was a real good tool. Very easy, yes . Yery easy to use and I am sure glad we came up with that . I think also carrying pre-plotted orbits on the · maps was also useful and stayed pretty- - That ' s right . Right at the last second we decided to take four maps that were glued back to back ao we had two sheets . They were on a sticky- back which made them reasonably thick and durable . One of them had no orbits on it , one had one to 22 , another one had 22 to 44, and another one bad 44 to 66 . You could look through there and you could get a quick reference of where you were going to be at a certain time . The times did get off, but you were only off a little bit .
122 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White M cDivitt You can keep track of how far you're off. You knew about where you ' re going to be . As Ed sa.ys,as the time went on you could tell a.bout where you ' re going to be just by knowing the cor rection . It didn't change much . So, we found these to be pretty useful . We didn't really get to start using them until the second day . I didn ' t know you had them in there . We took them out, I guess, one time when you were sleeping just for the heck of it and, my gosh, they started working pretty well. I used them almost exclusively once we got them out. Yes . We had a l ot of other information onboard and I don't know whether we should go into all that stuff now? Oh , yes , I took schematics of all the systems right out of the GOH. I didn ' t ever have to use them.,but I thought it was worthwhile having them along. Everybody was getting so screwed up on the water management panel and I took my notes on the water management panel with me . I had a ce~~Fl0.ENJJAL
• corsiFJOEffflAL 123 couple of drawings. McDivitt I had what happened when I put all those valves in a lot different positions. You know when you compare something like that digital computer with the water management panel you certainly think the computer would be more difficult to operate . But after the million conflicting descriptions we had on the water management panel,I think we all agree that it was the worst in the spacecraft. 8 . 8 Stowage White Well, I guess I was the chief stower and unstower. McDivitt All I did was take the food out . White I thought the stowage in and out of the center stowage box was probably the easiest place to get in and out of . The boxes were easy to slide in and out and the stuff was easy to put in and out . I felt that the right-hand wing box was tough to get in and out of. Getting in to get the bags full of equipment took a little bit of time. When I got to actually stowing the refuse back in the right 'hand box, it was easy enough for me just to reach over my left shoulder and put the items in without even turning around . It was
124 McDivitt White McDivitt pretty easy to use as a trash can. The stowage of the items of equipment in the footwell, to me , was not objectionable at all during launch and reentry. The ventilation module which was stowed on the left side of the right footwell was well out of my way during these times and offered no impairment to me whatsoever. Something that was a bit of a surprise to me was all t he equipment we had in there, that we were not able to jetti son after EVA , I knew we were in for a bit of a problem with so much equipment. I think the stow age of the miscellaneous pieces of equipment underneath your legs back up in the heel in back of the stirrup area is . pretty good s torage for almost all of the loose items during flight. Jim and I had the a r ea just chucked full. This was not any big su£prise. Remember how we were talking about how we were going to put all that stuff up? We were going to put a big refuse bag in there . We decided that the most likely place to put these big items would be back underneath the seat be cause we weren 't going to keep our legs back
125 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White White there. We never did get them back there. There was no possibility to put them back there once we filled it up . Yes, but even if we wanted to, I don't think there was any big desire to put them back there. It would have been nice to stretch but that's just about all . That would have been from time to time. That's right . I found that actually the thing that I appreciated the most was having a lower seat so I could actu ally stretch my legs out forward than actually behind and bending my knees. Yes, I was more interested in straight"ening my legs out than bending them back more . I couldn ' t have done that if they hadn ' t corrected that seat. I was able to get in and use the stow age in the refuse box on my side fairly easily. This is the rubber covered box. Jim said his wasn ' t quite as easy to get into . I had to get into a certain position to get back there, but it sure surprised me. I thought it would be just about useless.
126 McDivitt White White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt Well, I got things out of it . I got a defecation bag out one time and I got another little bag out . I don't know what else I had back there . The right hand box with the clamp l ock was easy to get in and out of . I stored things from time to time in there . Yes, I found that the most useful storage area that I had was the right-hand little velcro cov ered container right down by my right knee . I kept all the slides for the cameras and the mis cellaneous little pieces of equipment in it . I felt that was a very useful container. Is that the one with the canvas cover on it? Yes, I really used that one . Yes, that was pretty nice. The periscope container I didn't use much at all . I really didn't need to use it. I kept the blood pressure adapter in it throughout the whole flight. The left-h8Jld aft food box actually had food in it. It was pretty difficult to get the first piece out . It was a long hard struggle, but I finally got one piece out. Once I got one piece out~the rest of it was a real snap. They had the cbN~?fA!t
White McDivitt things taped together. I l eft the door open the whole flight after we once unstowed it. I would leave a meal floating out so that when I wanted to get a meal I would reach up and grab the meal that was floating loose. I would pul l the tape out until I got a hold of the tape so I could force another meal out of the box . Then I woul d cut the first meal off and we'd eat it. I managed to get all the food out of the box ~ithout getting out of my seat. The left-hand side box had the film stowed in it and it was easily accessible. I think the most useful stowage place that I had in the spacecraft was the little Volkswagen-type bag that we had made up and bolted on the center pedestal . Oh , that was a jewel . We kept our checklists, maps , data books , and procedure books in it. When we went to sleep and had a change of command and we wanted to get to one of the pieces of equipment that the other gu:y had, we almost invariably stuck it in that little pouch . I really thi.nk the most useful i8t~Fi8~
128 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt McDivitt thing that we had put on that spacecraft were those little pouches. Yes, I think the pouch could even be made a little bit bigger. I think it could, too. Then it could receive a little bigger item and perhaps have a little more volume that it could expand out to., I think that it was a very useful item. We used that as storage area more than any other. That's right. I used the long khaki refuse bag on the side for various things, but the· main thing I use it f or , once_we got the flight going,was a refuse ca... I would put all my refuse in there until I got a full container of it. Then I would package it up and put it back in the right . 1.a.nd box. I thought it was very useful . . I used it for all kinds of things. I stored your Mae West in it, and I had some of the camera equipment in it when we were doing EVA . When I got all the good pieces fished out of it, I finally started putting trash in it.
129 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt We both have an interesting item on this . Well , I emptied mine out all the way , but I think you enter ed with it full of trash . I reentered with that bag full of trash and it didn't tear off . It was in pretty good shape . It was light-weight trash . Papers and things like that . I have a comment on the other little trash bag , I never used it . Neither did I . I would get them out and I did not even know where they were . Yes , I think it ' s just too small . Yes , it ' s just too small and I think that Volks wagen pouch can be improved upon . I think both right and left canvas storage bags we~e very adequate and should be continued . I think i t's satisfactory just the way it is . They could make the -Velcro strips on it a little longer 8Jld the Velcro strips attached to the spacecraft a little longer so that it didn ' t have the big curls on the edge . It tended to curl i n and make an opening. I never could get the thing '2
130 c l osed. 8 .8 Belts White The bel t s worked satisfactorily. McDivitt Yes , mine wor ked very good . 8.8 Harness McDivitt Harness . Okay . White The harnes s was satisfactory . 8 .8 Life Vests McDivitt Life vests. Very good. White Very good . McDivivitt I might comment on those l i fe vests. I never took my life vest off my r estraint harness the whole time. It wasn't i n the way at all and I was amazed that I didn't pop them. I always pop them in the simulations . White I was waiting for you to pop one. But I was sur prised with the ease I could t ake t hem of f and put them on weightless. Ther e 's just no compari son at a l l. That's an easy task. 8.8 Waste Disposal Syst em White I thought the defecati on bags worked as well as anything we had. Ther e isn't anything you're going t o do to make it go to the bottom of the
131 McDivitt White McDivitt bag when you use it . I think you should be familiar with how to close the bag . I only used one bag and I think you were a two - bag man. I was a two-bag man. The stuff didn't float out of the bag or anything. I would permit t he thing to remain open while I used the paper. I actually used the pa.per as kind of a charging n.echanism to push t he stuff on down in the bag. Y)u 1mow like loading the cannon . Then I sealed it up on top . There was a tendency for the fecal material to be up on the sticky part , which m5de tle closing not quite as nice as I would like i ' to be , but I was able to close it up all right I broke t wo of the disinfectant bags and I c it the bags . There were two different kinds of dis mfectantJ , One of them came in a bag inside a bag and the other just came in a bag . was a little suspicious of that one , so I cut it first and I think you did that , too . I did that to a couple of mine . I still think that those ba5s break too har d. I hate to have to cut those things before I sti ck them in there . I cut one and the darned thing floated back out again and I didn't notice it . I had the bag just C8MFIDE~~TI.Asl I
132 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White C~MFIDE~~TIAb about sealed up when I noticed this thing float ing around inthe spacecraft. I had to push it back down in there . When I cut it, I got the stuff on me and a little bit around . The two that I broke , that were contained inside the plastic bag, seemed to work all r i ght . On the whole I was satisfactorily pleased with the defecation bags. I felt also that the liquid was easy to work into it. I think that ' s a satisfactory system. You really have that knack of kneeing . One thing, it is just like oleomargarine was - - . Ha, ha! A little different in coloL Ha, ha! One thing t hat I want to comment on was the toilet paper with the darn wax job. I did not think the toilet paper was satisfactory. It had a waxy back so that it was like the back side of a Sears Roebuck Catalog. That was not the side you were supposed to use. I know it but the other side had such a small amount of absorbency. This is why you always used so darn m uch paper J im McDivit~ Ha , ha!
133 McDivitt White McDi vitt White McDivitt White I found that the tissues that we car ried in the little containers were very satisfact ory for the purpose . I think they can leave the paper out of those bags and provide us with adequate tissues. Whil e we ' re talking about these tissues , let ' s go into the container . That 's right . The container . Yes, the container failed . Both of them failed in a similar manner . We had tissues just loose . They were tucked in around the spacecraft . The zippers that went around these tissue bag holders ripped out completely. Actually they just separated- almost immediately, as soon as we took them out of the bag. And both in a similar manner right off the bat . So we had a bunch of tissues that were not con tained in anything. I think the containers were ver:y good containers . The method of dispensing would be fine , but they a l l fell out the side . That ' s the way I used mine for the rest of the time . I used those tissues for all kinds of things . I cleaned my window with them . I cleaned the camera lenses with them . I
134 sal McDivitt White M cDi vitt White 8 , 9 Bio-Medical M cDivitt 4'· €»~f.. 1 19 E ~~TI AL ' cleaned my visor with them. I got my vis or so full of salt spray. Remember when I got that -salt spray all over them during the ENA and my visor was dir,ty?_ I cleaned everything all up . I substituted it for t he toilet paper in the defecation bags . I think this is another thing I am certainly glad we requested . We started out by requesting lense t i ssues, and as it ended up thi s is what we got . We wanted one little bag and ended up with two big bags ,and I think we could have used another one. I used every bit of mine . I think I could have used them more properl y if I had a good dispenser system . I ' d grab too many. Those big towels weren ' t too bad either . They ' re great for sopping up the urine and stuff . Yes , they were great urine mops. If we had had a big spill of some kind t hat's what you'd want to use , because you could use i t, it would dry out, and you could use it again. We have already discussed this in great detail with the doctor s so I think we can go over it briefly . The Medical Data Pass Type 1 w as not an inconvenience . It got the data down to the
135 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White doctors quickly. I think it made them happy . It wasn't a big drag on us. Medical Data Pass Type 2 was only about half of the Type 1. It wasn ' t bad and the doctors got some use out of that. The food evaluation was discussed with the medics so we can just summarize . I think we should put a big gold star on the food . I think it was one of the most important parts of the mission. That ' s right . It was really good . Both morale wise and just keeping your strength up . It was a good picker-upper when you felt lousy . The chow tasted good . The thing I didn't like about it --I think it gave me a touch of the GI ' s . I think it tended to loosen you up a little bit . I think, now as I look back,I would prefer to have maybe two of the items in one of those plastic containers and two hard items . Gee , I thought t he way they were mixed up was prett y good . Sometimes though you'd have four rehydrat ed and nothing crunchy . One time I had one that was all
136 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt crunchies just about. It had one drink in it. Every bag that I had, except one, that had any form of an orange drink in it, leaked. Mine started leaking, too , as soon as you mentioned it. I only had one other bag that leaked or maybe two other bags that leaked . I think that the rate of leakage was just i.macceptable. I think those bags are going to have to be fixed. No toast. We didn't open up the toast. Well, I ate that one thing of cinnamon toast . I ate the cinnamon toast because you discovered that it had a coating on it and it didn ' t crumble so much. I guess there was only the one cinnamon toast . Overall, I thought the food was good and there wasn ' t too much of it. That peanut stuff also kind of crumbled. Yes . I think we ought to include more meats. I think the bacon was outst1J.11ding. Oh, that bacon was absolutely great. f C.Qt~.f10EMTIAL
137 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White I could have had that everyday. Ed doesn't even like bacon . I could have had that kind of bacon . That was kind of a smoked bacon . It really was. good . When I ate it, I got to thinking that I don ' t understand why we don't have more meats in the smoked capacity . That's what I was thinking--smoked beef and smoked barbecue . Yes, that's very good tasting,and it ' s salty . It makes you drink wate~ and drink water is what you should do. But I think we ought to look into some of this . Another comment, too , is that Jim had thrown the sausage out prior to this time and the sausage that I got was a completely different breed of eat . It was in one of those water bags . I never did get a:ny shrimp. Boy, I bet it was in that last day's meal . The sausage was pretty good. There was one thing that I didn't eat,and that was one chicken bite because it coated my mouth . I actual ly ate two or three of them .
138 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt The only thing I didn't eat was the bacon and egg bites, either. I think if I had my druthers, I'd take bacon. One of the bigges t problems on the whole flight was the lack of sleep. I don't really feel that I got more than six hours of good sleep or even six hours of medium sleep in the whole 100 hours we were up there. I think if I estimated my sleep time I · might estimate more. I got that one five hours , That was good. Fil had one real good one,and there were a couple of them where I didn' t wiggle around for about five hours,but never did I sleep more than two hours . You weren't soundly asleep. I just sat there and I rested. I had one one-hour period right there at the end that was pretty good sleep ,a.nd I had another good two-hour period. That mike was one of the reasons we were getting poor rest. I think there were two reasons. One was the radio was feeding into our headsets all the time during the first half of the flight. The second half
139 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt of the flight. we had the darned OAMS thrusters going so much-- BANt-, BANG , BANG , BANG , BANG! I was just too hot some of the time . Yes . Early in the flight the ammonia fumes kept me awake . The first time I tried to go to sleep they kept me awake . I don't even lmow if they kept me awake . I really noticed it then . I think we really need a s leep period longer than the four-hour s l eep period. First of all we always fooled around and never really got the sleep that we wanted . If we had gotten a four-hour sleep period everytime it was scheduled, we would have been in great shape . I think we ought to schedule a longer one on the order of six hours . Ed and I talked about this earlier . What I suggested is that we schedule four six-hour sleep periods ,if there aren't a lot of experiments that have to be done together . Where two of these sleep periods come together, you can make that a dual awake time so that the people could be up. As a matter of fac~ you could modify it in such a way that if you
140 White McDivitt White want ed two people to be up at the same time you could really have three periods during the day . You could take two of these six-hour sleep periods and really make them sacred so that nothing could touch them. Then you could just take those other two six hour sleep periods, and maybe chop periods off each end of the thing~in such a manner that you ' d be able to get one good sleep period and some rest periods in between. I think during a six-hour sleep period you ought to plan to be in a drifting flight and not do any experiments. really think there ought to be one long sleep period with no radios and no thrusters firing. Then you've got a real chance. You might be able to put i t in Horizon Scan . Well, even then it goes, THUMP, THUMP , THUMP , every once in a while, you know. I think you could almost do this by ear . If it was bothering the gu:y, you shouldn't do it. In my opinion I think we're pretty close to the same thing. I had originally told Chuck I thought that the four-hour sleep period wasn't satisfactory. We should have one period of six hours of sleep, I
141 McDivitt White McDivitt with another rest period scheduled in there some time of several hours . This would be satisfactory . I felt we were really productive when we were both up . I would like to see periods of time in the day where each of the guys are up at the same time , and doing actual experiments and work . When you are working together · like that, it seems you are complimenting each other,and I think you get more productive observations . Some of the experiments require two guys. D-6 is going to require two guys~ D - 9 requires two guys , and to adequately do it to get the pictures we want,you just need two guys up . Let me modify that position of mine even further . If you scheduled a six-three and then the other guy with a six-three that would leave you six hours up together everyday . I think that might be adequate . You should also always try to schedule your eating periods so you aren, t" eating during this up time . You should schedule your eating when the other guy is sleeping. Right.
142 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt Go ahead and eat when you just get up and the other guy is asleep. Eat just before you go to sleep, and don ' t eat simultaneously. Eat while the other guy is sleeping. I think you should spend all the time, while you are up together, working on productive experimentation. Yes. I think you should keep these two six-hour periods inviolate and then make the other ones really flexible where you could move those sleep ing periods around. If you got tired you could go on and take four hours for sleeping. If you needed it, you would go on and take longer. If you only needed one or two hours, you could go ahead and take that. I didn't feel as strongly as you about being tired. You said I was tired. You commented on it a number of times during the flight and also you looked like you were tired . Several times I missed a rest period. I think we got fouled up a couple of times on it. I did get tired before I took that five hour rest. I knew I was tired. You had that one really good sleep right around
143 85 hours or so that really seemed to pick you up . White It helped me a lot. When I came out of it , I really felt groggy until I had had a f ew minutes to wake up . I think this pick~d me up consider ably and probably this gave me a l ittl e gain on you as far as the rest of the flight goes . McDivitt That ' s right . During the time you were sleeping, I fell asleep . I saved one night cycle out a ~d went to s l eep . Ha , ha ! CO l'!t'fit)fNffAl
144 "(ij) MFt0f t◄ l lAr" 9.0 OPERATIONAL CHECKS 9.1 Apollo Landmark Identification (D-6) McDivitt White The equipment we carried onboard the space - craft really didn't apply exactly to D-6 . We didn't have a Questar lens . The 200 mm lens that we carried did not have the periscope mounting for it. It did not have any way you could aim it with a telescope , so the only aiming device that we had onboard the spacecraft was the gunsight mounted in the left hand window. The cameras that we used for this experiment were the 16 mm movie camera with.:5 mm telephoto lens on it and the fixed mounted 35 mm Contarex with the 200 mm lAns . The fixed mounted Contarex was in the right-hand window, and the 16 mm camera was in the left-hand window. It was kind of interesting since we were in free drift, and they told us to go ahead and run a tracking task. But the first one that I ran was Apollo Run No . 1, which was over the junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile in the middle of the delta of the Nile River. C: e IQffl'JfNf f ;,M
145 White This was i dent i fication and acquiring it and seeing how well the charts that yo.;. had equipped you to identify specifically the landmark in consideration. The first one I had was the junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile , and more specifically it was a little island in therA,and it w as the northernmost tip on the island. I r ealized as we came around that I was going to be in pretty good shape in this free drift to be able to see the targets. As we came aro'.llld , I looked out in the general di rection that I had been instructed from the ground , and the firs t thing that I noted was the major Ni l e coming down to the i~tersection. I was able to follow it pretty clearly down to the intersection as we got r oughly 20 or 25 df~grees from the vertical . I was able to pick up the little island in the junction of the White and Nile River , and I was able to follow i t all the way through as we passed over . As we got to the 90 degree point overhead , it was quite easy to track with rny eye . I wasn't actually tracking it . It was northeast
146 I McDi vitt White M cDivHt of my track 92 miles , so it was really q· -.1ite far awey even w hen I was at the 90 degree point. reported that I thought this was a very good landmark. It was very easy to see , and I felt if I had a higher power telescope I could have tracked it quite adequately. I classed this landmark as being satisfactory, and I classified the charts that I had used to identify it for me as being quite satisfactory . Incidentally, I believe that this , of all th ➔ landmarks we had , was probabl y the easiest one of them all to locate , being right out in the middle of the desert , pointed out by two rivers converging f rom a major river . It was a very good landmark. Okey . You ran some more -- just Apoll o l and marks. It wasn ' t really a tracking task problem. Didn ' t you run o~e off of Puerto Rice\ too., or -was t his the onl y l andmark that we really ran? This was the only real Apollo Landmark I ran . I r an some:1 D- 6 Landmarks . O kay . Fine . I think the next one that we r an was a ~order pass on El Paso . O r di d you run on Te1 - Aviv before that? ~@MFIOEt'<JTIAL
147 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White I'm not sure exactly the sequence in there . Okay. I think before that ,though, I did run a series on D-6 Targets 11 , 12, 13, and 18 . Ok1:1.y. Why don ' t you go ahead - - Shall I discuss those? Yes . Okay. 11 was Adagier Morocco , 12 was Wheelis , 13 was Alexandria, and 18 was Dhyran. They gave me all these four targ~ts a-id I realized right awa3 that I couldn ' t possibly handle this many of them and do it adequately. This was the first time we'd been givei1 t; ,1.) go- ahead for some tracking on which we could use OAMS. I elected to "J.Se ,pulse as a fuel conservation method . I selected to try Wheelis and Alexa.nd:riu:· since I thought that I could locate them quite easily and that they were sufficiently far apart to track adequately . As we came up on Wheelis {I'd been stationed there prior to this timei I k~ew pretty well exactly where it was . As it turned out , there were sc.n,.. high clouds over Wheelis , and I wasn't able to observe it . No . 13-- I picked up Alexandria and took manual IOEtiTIAL148 McDivitt pictures with the 200 mm ~ontarex . Since I was actually ta~ing the pictures, I had to divert my at;tention a little bit to the camera, so I didn I t actually 1ook down, and, I didn I t actually see the airport . But I had seen it prior to that time, and I di d see it many times afterwa-rds as we passed over . Th<' recommendation that I made from this was that the targets should be fa. ~ enough apart to allow adequate set-up, to go from one ta-rget to another . I thought the updates ware good and the general location of them with respect to my orbits was good . And the next one is El Paso Int;ernational , Jim. Okay. This was the fi:-8t tracking task that "1e were going to do with the telescope , the 16 mm m:>vie cam1;!ra. , and the fixed 200 m:n l ens on the Contarex. W e sta=t;;d o,1t with a time of closest approach and a time we should have been able to see the target . The only kind of identification assist that we had at this time was a piece cut out of a WAC Chart , that showed El Paso International~and the world chart with a gigantic scale on it . This made it a little bit difficult from an acquisition standpoi~t . cet•Fto[ ► 4TIA.L -
149 But later on we f ound that these same t wo types of information- -the world map and the small WAC Char t --were a.dequo.t e for other types of targets. The WAC Chart showed of course the range of mountains just west of El Paso and the White Sands and the Rio Grande River . We came across Southern California, and I could see the Salton Sea. I didn ' t track them , but I looked out the front and I could see the mountains of New Mexico and Arizona. .And I saw a bunch of white places down below us , any o~e of which co~ld iave been the White Sands . I f I could have really picked out the White Sands by themselves. and unf ortunately they were off the WAC Chart · that I had , I think the contact would have been good enough for me too pick up El Paso . As it was , the only features I had that would have been of great importance were the river , which was the Rio Grande River-:--'3.rld at that point was not very noteworthy-- and the mountain range , ._ which from the al titude of arou..~d 90 miles or more couldn ' t be picked up . I think that this type of a topographical or geographical feature , like a valley or a mountain ,,is not adequate
150 Ei0HFIBE~TIAL for this kind of task. You need a contrast in color as you get from the White Sands to the surrounding d,9sert . The best of all is a water land interface or border. As we came across the United States, I think we picked up El Paso just as we were over i t , but we weren ' t pointed down at the town. We were still pointed well out in advance . The only clue that we were over El Paso was that I could see the Gulf Coast . I knew that w hen I saw the Gulf Coast we were probably too far al ong to pick up El Paso . Rather than just scrub the run , we went ahead and made a run on a pair of sand spits with a channel between them in the vicinity of Corpus Christi . We picked up a target well in advance , and as I started tr-JLag t o line up on the target , I found out that the gunsight had a light intensity and the gunsight was inadequate for a daytim e tracking task; because as you pointed the sight down and had a background of clouds , you just absolutely could not see the sight . I didn ' t have any idea in thA world where it was p,-, i.nting. When you put it on the dark land, it seemed to be adequate , but I think we ......., '
149 But later on we found that the se same two types of information- -the world map and the small WAC Chart--were adeque:r.e for other types of targets . The WAC Chart showed of course the range of mountains just west of El Paso and the White Sands and the Rio Grande River . W e came across Southern California, and I could see the Salton Sea. I didn ' t track them , but I looked out the front and I could see the mountains of New Mexico and Arizona. .And I saw a bunch of white places down below us, any one of which co~ld ~ave been the White Sands . I f I could have really picked out the White Sands by themselves, and unfortunately they were o!'f the WAC Chart • that I had , I think the contact would have been good enough for me too pick up El Paso . As it was , the only features I had that would have been of great importance were the river , w'nich was the Rio Grande River-:-9lld at that point was not very noteworthy-- and the mountain range , \ which from the altitude of arou..~d 90 miles or more couldn ' t be picked up . I think that this type of a topographical or geographical feature , like a valley or a mountain ,,is not adequate
150 for this kind of task . You need a contrast in color as you get from the White Sands to the surrounding d~sert . The best of all is a water land interface or border. As we came across the United States , I think we picked up El Paso just as we were over i.t , but we weren't pointed down at the town. We were still pointed well out in advance . The only clue t hat we were o·,er El Paso was that I could see the Gulf Coast. I lmew that when I saw the Gulf Coast we were probably too far along to pick up El Paso. Rather than just scrub the run, we went ahead :::ind made a run on a pair of sand spits with a channel between them in the vicinity of Corpus Christi. We picked up a target w ell in advance, and as I started t:q.L:lg to line up on the target, I found out that the g-~nsight had a light intensity and the gunsight was inadequate for a daytime tracking task; because as you pointed the sight down and h9.d a backgroan.d of clouds, you just absolutely could not see the sight . I didn ' t have any i dea in the world where it was p,-·i.nting, When you put it on the dark land, it seemed to be adequate, but I think we @8t W t0et. s1I. IAJ:
151 I can increase the intensity of the gunsight by q·..1ite a bit . During the night time you can turn it down and t he brightness is just abo-1t what you need . We made this ru~ on this pair of sand spits , and t he t racking t ask was q,.j t,~ easy . Now , I just happened to pick something that was obvious t o me and tracked on this and picked it up ;"11ile we got on at abo~ lt 30 degrees, u.nt il I got to the vertical ,. and then I tcacked it out to about 45 degrees past the vectical. This was-a' t a real tracking task, in that I didn ' t select a target before I got there . But, just stuck with whatever target I happened t o be pointing at and ran the tracking task . I think we learned something from this pass in that we want to be very careful about picking out targets in the mi ddle of an area where there aren ' t any good water- lmd borders ; there aren' t any good contrasting colors . There wasn ' t a really prominent feature that I could start from, that worked down to the city and eventually to the airport . So , I think that on this parti cular pass , although we didn ' t get any pictures of our intended ta~get , we learned quite a bit CC!t'(f.fii&E ►4"E h,e
152 White McDivitt White McDivitt White from it . I don't believe I ha.ire any other comment on that pass. Do yoa? No . I was quite surprised w hen we missed El Paso . Remember we thoaght , "Boy, this is one we I re g01ng • t o nai · 1 . fl Anrl the f unny part of all this is that we had both flown in a~d out of El Paso International Airport no less than a hundred times . We w,~re pretty well assured of where we ware going and what it looked like . But we didn ' t find it early eno-:.1gh . We progressed too far before I r eal l y saw the toi,m , s.nd E wen then I didn ' t see the airfield , because I w asn ' t sure I was over the right tovn U!1.til I was over it . And then ,it was too late to lo:->k q,t the airfield . I think that the point that you ' re making is going to be well brought up in what I'm going to say next . Okay. Why don ' t yo'.1 - - you made the next pass, I think, on Tel -Aviv. The next pass was Run No. 6, Target 15. The information I got was adequate to lJcate i t. It turned out that this target had the essentials t hat Ji;n was l ooking for and mentioned on his last
pass I had a nice body of water . Th8 D ead Sea was a good l~cation, and actually the city itself was located at the end of the Mediterranean, so I felt that landmark-wise I had a pretty good tar get to track. I came in and the first target I picked up was Jaffa, and I was on it so well t hat I decided to go ahe n.d and track Jaffa. At f irst I had thought it was Tel- Aviv, and 1.1. few seconds later I relized tha-'; it wa.s the city 10 o:r. 20 mileo north of 'l'el- Aviv. The reaso:i. I picked it up so easily is because there was a little spi ~ of l i :i.nd t~1at jutted out into the water and it sat right in this little natural basin . I looked down and I saw Jaffa and I a0tually saw the 1ittl,~ round cir,:ul : 1.r• airport in Jaffa , I also saw Tel- Aviv , and I saw the airport that I was really looking for, but I decided I 'd go aheaci. and track Jaff a and tak~ a few pictures of Jaffa as we went over. You ha1re to real i ze that I wasn ' t using a gunsight on my side , and I was also con t~olling the sp(v:.. ,,-~raft and firing the camera at the same time• So the tracking i.:;; probabl y a little rougher than it would. be f rom the left-h,md side . en IW't0f· MT1~~
154 But I did get a good indication of the cap9.bili.ty to tt'ack a target anci to pick a target up , and I think tha~ I was quite surprised 4t the ease at which you could track . I also concurt'ed with Ji:n 1 s conclusion that a goo,l prominent landmar.k primer, preferabl;f a body of W9.ter somewhere to nail do·,m your target, is the most desirablA f eature . I also feel that an important thing that the next crew going up could do would be to spend a lot of t.ime on jnst pla.Ln map study fr the 30 degrees north to 30 degrees sou.th, and try to p·L • ::k up the prominent f ,~:1t:.2res to permit them to become quickly adjusted to what they can see and what they can I t see d·own below. I think that a 1-i.;;tle concentrated map study prior to the flight woulci help a lot with the D- 6. Also a concentrated study on the targets themselves wo·..lld be quite beneficial . This is s~rmething that we really never got to do. The original 243 ~argets were too voluminous even to ~onsider time to atudy each one, and when we got the final 19 targets, it was pretty late in the flight to be working on ::xi exp-::riment that wasn ' t even on our flight. Even C1"Jt~FIDEl>~ TIA 1 ~
155 McDi·.ri t t with the limited knowledge t~at we had of the targ0·I; ·.3 I felt that acquisiti.on and tracking of the targf,b'1 w· , ::J a lot ,,>::i,:,:j_ .~r than I had tho-.i.ght it was going to be . I guess thats I all. The next target that we had was Ywna Tnternatinna1 Airpo:d . Here again we had a tar.get that ·,1::i.::; not a very prol'.linent lal'ld.nri.rk . The time of closest apprJach and acquisitio· :1 time and the aiming 1.1ngles were adequate . It gave m,1 a good idea of what I should be looking f,:n- a,..'1d 1 ,hen I should be looking. I used the same maps again ; I used the cutout of a WAC Chart plus a great big world c~'lart . 'I1here was qui t0 a discontinuity in the s0ul ~ of these two maps , but I I m not really sure that we co·..1ldn I t have done t:'le job wlth just those two . I think tnat what we probably needed was a world map that showed a little more detail and a WAC Chart that showed a little bit more area. What we prob 0 1bly coul::l. ha"e used most of all was a phot,:>grap1', rif ~~'le ar =1a . As I came in across the Califoraia coast. I )icked np the Salton Sea and El Centro , just below the Sal ton Sea, and then I mew that, Yuma was on the Colorado (!l@)NflDEl'JTLll
156 River, which should ::>e a few miles to the east of the Salton Sea. There was a nice big bend in the ColoraJr> River . Unfortunately , the Colorado , although it is a reasonably good sized body of water - ..i'€ just plain do(-)Sn ' t show up that w-all. It was a little difficult to see , but I finallJ pi~ked it up . I saw the bend in the river. The river doesn ' t actually go through the town of YumA., so I started looking for Yuma, and I d:id w:1nder aro~d a little bit before I finallJ found the town. Then I was unable to find the airfield within the tow~1 . When I was just a::>out d . '..::ectly over the a.i.rfi8ld , I picked it up. Here is where I think the photog::-aph wo~ ;ld have been a lot of help , because the m H .p t.h:it I had just showed a yellow bl,)b indicating the city with a circle to indic ~ .te where the airfield ws.13 . It sho,1ed the airfield to be to the s,>t! ~h :Jf the town . What I was looking at was a 1 ,rge group of buildings , the to,..,.,, :_ i.;self . Then as I went to the south , I saw even more buildings and I wasn ' t sure whether the airfield was south of tha: built-up area. As it turned arco~~FIDE~TIAt
157 White McDivitt White out , it was south of the main built-up area that actuall y had another large group of buil dings south of it . I did pick up the airport itself at just about 5 degrees before the nadir , and I tracked over to the target, probably just at the nadir and just shortly past . I had the 16 mm movie camera going with the telescopic lens on it . I had t he gunsight on bright . I used Pul se Control Mode . I got right on the target and I managed to fly the spacecraft in such a manner that the gunsight never deviated from the target by more than a half a degree , I feel, if it deviated that much. I think it was considerably less than that . But there wasn ' t any great difficulty in the tracking task , and I managed to control in all three axes and hold the target just about wher e I wanted it . Here again we had a problem with the contrasting target; the water-land mass was quite some distance away. In this case, how f ar is it from El Centro to Yuma? I don I t know, Jim. 150 miles? Yes .
158 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt It was a reasonable distance, probably something on the order of 150 miles or m~be only 100 miles, but the problem was that between Yuma and El Centro there weren ' t any identifing masses that led you toward Yuma. And I had not up till this time looked down to try to find where the Yuma airport was,because we ' d been saving fuel . So , this was the first time that I'd seen Yuma airfield from orbit . As I get into the next target, I think you'll see what I'm leading up to . Having a first look at a target like this, be i ng able to identify the city , but then essentially wasting time before I found the airfield within the city, I think, cost some valauable time and consequently cost some good pictures; because the best picture is going to be that picture which is taken exactly over the airfield . That wouldn ' t happen again though , would it? No , You ' d probabl y have it pretty wel l nailed . No , it woul dn ' t . So ,the next target I had was Cairo -- Cairo Int ernational Airport . Now , we'd been over Cairo quite a few times before (MJ(1tf' F10'8'1Tli\ l
this , and I had l ooked down to find Cairo. I think we had had an Apollo Landmark or D- 6 type of thing ,where we were supposed to loolc down and just acquire the target, but not actually track it or take any pictures. When we did come by, we coul d actually look down and find the city of Cairo the first time we came by. Later I found the Cairo Airfiel d , and Ed and I were discussing Cairo Airfield and Alexandria Airfield. We both had one in sight . When I picked up the Cairo Airfield(I was told to pick up the Cairo Airfield),it had all the ingredients that I think is necessary. I had seen it beforE . I knew where it was with respect to the local landmark. The local l andm arks were the Mediterranean on one side , the Red Sea on the other side , the Suez Canal connecting these two l arge bodies of water , and a river leading f rom near the Suez Canal over toward the city and the airfiel d . Then. knowing the position of the airfield with respect to these landmarks ,since I 1 d al ready seen it , I came in over North Af rica along the Mediterranean Coast with no pl atf orm on, just in Pulse Mode, no
160 attitude reference , found the Mediterranean on my left , pointed the spacecraft on ahead , determined the direction I was going, picked up the Red Sea, picked up the Suez Canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and followed the river in. I started this quite a distance out . I knew just about where the airfield was , but it wasn't coming into view. Finally,at about 20 degrees before the vertical the airfield finally came into view. I tracked on the airfield about 10 degrees before the nadir . I was tracking the area in which I believed the airfield to be , so that I had already had the pitch rate set up that I required of my spacecraft . As I got on the target I still had to track in multiple axes , but I already had t he rates built up , and I tracked f rom about 10 to 20 degrees before the nadir to 45 degrees past. I think this will probably be the best tracking exper i m ent that I did. Later on, I had another one . Later on I had another tracking task against Basra in Iraw on the Pers i an G ulf. Here again,we had the ingredients that were necessary to pick up the target . W e had a l arge eel fF 1 tBE~~TIAL
161 C f3JS(FIOE~J body of water , a river leading up to a lake, and then the airfield sticking out in a very prominent way. Now I ' d never seen the Basra Airfield before ·I t r ied to take thi s picture . But the landmarks near it were sufficient so that finding the locat i on of it was not difficult. There wer en ' t any towns around . It was pretty obvious from the bodies of water where I should look for the airfield~and I picked it up also 20 degrees before I got to the nadir and was on it by the time I got to the nadir. I tracked it from there out to about 45 degrees past . Once again I had a reasonably good t r acking task. I t hink that on the tracking tasks on Yuma, Cairo, and Basr a, I m anaged to keep the target within the center half- degree cirl e of the sight . I used the 16 mm movie camera with the 75 mm telephoto l ens on each one of these cases . Did you have any other targets , Ed? White No . McDivitt I don' t believe you di d . I think the big thing here is that you ' ve got to be able to have a landmark that stands out long before you get to the target . You have to have a lot of contrast .
162 White McDivi t t White McDivitt Or some real technique or type of familiarity with the target . I think if you were really familiar with the area you might pick up things that we don't pick up now , but we could with a little more map study and study over above . That 's right. I think t hat the first thing, though , that you need to help you find the target is a really contrasting thing. Now the next thing is that you've got to be familiar with the target, as Ed said. Now if you have never been there on t he ground and don't know what it looks like from there, I think what you need are a few passes over the target to study it from the air, and look for it from the air,and try to pinpoint in your mind the local terrai n features and local contrasting features that will help lead you to the airfield . Because , it looks to me like it ' s easiest to find a target when you're exactly over it . Boy , you ' re right . There ' s a point when you pass over the top where everything really is clear . The big thing is either a lot of target study on
COt~F~DE~fflA l_ the ground or a previous pass across the target so that when you go across it, you not only lmow the general area thRt you're supposed to point into, but the exact spot where that target is and some identifying f eatures that wil l lead you to this target. So with the initial things like a lot of contrast to get you in the area and then a lot of detail gathered either from target study or from a previous pass across the target,I think that you could go ahead and find it . Once on the target the tracking task in the Pulse Mode is not difficult at all . I think you can track within just tenths of degree s of the target without too much difficulty whatsoever, in multiple axes . And I found that without having the platform up every., tracking task I did was in multiple axes , and although you're going through some very peculiar maneuvers, it ' s very instinctive to track up and down, left and right, using the gunsight,without any regard to what your attitude with respect to the local horizontal is. In air- to-ground gunnery you sometimes find that you ' ve got to pick your attitudes up from the -CO~~FIDf~~
~DEt~TIAL ~ ground. They sort of tend to be a constraint on what you can do, but that ' s not the case in this kind of a task . White The t hiug that really amazed me, Jim>is the first time I saw an airfield from up there . First time I saw one, I saw it directly from overhead. I was amazed at the clarity I could see of f ield . Although,of course,I saw no airplanes sitting on it , I fel t t hat I was seeing down to a resolution of 50 f eet or better with my own eye when there was a contrast of some type available to me . In general, I thought the clarity of things that you saw was far better than it is from just flying at 40 000 feet. Things are mu9h smaller . bu+ they ·a.re much clearer to me . Also,,at night things are much clearer. And over one town we passed in Australia the lights were very , very clear down there to me . I think that with some type of an optical aid we can see a great deal . I think that with cameras with higher power and more capability ,we can take pictures of a lot more down below. I think t hat the only picture I 1 ve seen so far that I thought would be nice
165 from a tourist standpoint is the one I took of t he Cape , which everybody seems so excited about right now. That ' s one that was taken with the sun on the window and at roughly a 30-degree angl·e down from the hori zontal , which indicates you're shooting through a lot more atmosphere than necessary. The clarity was quite surprising, even to me . You can count t he launch pads and see sizes of buil dings . Because of the oblique angle , you can actually measure the sizes of t hese bui ldings . I think we ' ve got a tremendous amount of photographic potential from in space . I think that Jim and I ment i oned a little bit earler that t he area capacity inside the spacecraft limits the capability to carry a good size telescope or a very big piece of camera equipment . I think that coupled with t he EVA capabilit y t hat we have , we can carry some equipment back in the adapter- -some nice sizable cameras and telescopes--and build mounts on the outside of the spacecraft . We can go EVA , pick these pieces of equipment up , bring t hem out , and mount them on the sides of the spacecraft so t hat we can take a series of
166 McDivitt pictures and use really good, big, higher- powered telescopes for observations. If we do mount them out there , of course, we should mount themsomewhere so that if we had a failure of some kind and had to come right in, or weren't able to open up the hatch again , we could separate them by some type of pyro. But I think that is the one way we can combine our EVA operations wi th the desire to bring up big pieces of equipment and operate them with our spacecraft . I agree. I think that the possibilities of viewing things on the ground from space are practically unlimited, and I was quite surprised at the ease with which you can control the spacecraft and take pictures and I was surprised at pictures you get . We ' ve got an awful lot of work t hat we can do in this area. I think the technique of acquiring these individual targets needs a lot of work. I feel that the best way to do it, if you're going to be limited to one pass over the site, is to use a photograph of it made from some previous time. I feel that the need for a large landmark nearby, especially a water landmark, is pretty great . I thought
167 White Mc-Divitt that the information that we got from the ground · of what time we would be over the target and what time it would be 30 degrees below the horizontal were excellent pieces of information, It certainly contributed a lot to finding the target , I .think there ' s an awful lot of work that we can do in this particular area. You have anything else , there , Ell? No . Oh, this is one thing that I have been bubbling about the l ast week or so , wanting to tell somebody, and haven't been able to tell anybody . I couldn't,of course,tell it in the press conference. I really didn ' t want to talk too much about it at the meeting we had before with everybody, but I think this is one area in which a trememdous amount of capability exists,and I think we ' d be very foolish if we don ' t work further to exploit it, I concur.
168 9.2 Apollo Yaw Orientation White McDivitt White McDivitt Okay, I 'll probably go into this a little bit, and then we can go over the data on it. This was a fairly simple test. All we did was start at a zero zero reference and establish rates of 3 degrees/ second simultaneously in all axes. We had a sec ondary objective, to see when we established these rates and put them in three axes simultaneously if we got a scanner i gnor light. And I 'll clear that one up real y quick . We put them in at t wo different times and neither time di d we get a scanner ignore light . We di d this at night the first time , didn't we? That was really the only time we did it. Jus t the night one. That's right . That's right. We did i t once at night . I estab lished the rates in t hree axes and allowed them to bui l d up for about 30 seconds . Then , I told Jim to go ahead and take control of the spacecraft , and using visual references to move to a retrofire at titude . I did this in Pulse Mode, I believe , because we were trying to save fuel. I think I did it in Direct, but I did not do it in Rate Command . I did it in Direct . The first thi ng I did was t ry to find t he horizon so I would have some reference point to fifffD Er>,TIA'lr
169 start from. This was quite easy. I just had to wait for the spacecraft to move so that I could see the horizon in any position, and t hen I went for it . The yaw reference, though , wasn ' t present when I got to the horizon, so I ended up level on the horizon upside-down, but without a yaw reference. I pitched on down well below the horizon so that I could look down at the ground. Watching the clouds go by, or whatever was down below me , I could pick up the direction of my motion . So , I rolled around such that I was pointing down at the ground , probably 45 degrees plus or minus 20 degrees . I rolled aroumd until my head came up, and all I had to do then was pitch back to the horizon to get to the 30 degree nose-down attitude for retrofire. This took 2 minutes and 20 seconds . Now I did this trying to save fuel. I could have done it much quicker if fuel wasn ' t a constraint . Also, I think I learned something f r om this in that I m ade a mistake by going first to the horizon. I should have pitched down until I was pointed straight down to the ground, picked up my yaw as quickly as I could in this
170 White McDivitt position , rolled around so that I could just pitch straight up , and end up at the horizon blunt end- forward, heads up,and wings leveJ. I think I could ' ve gotten it down to about a minute a.nd 20 seconds. I felt that I wasted a minute doing this . You were taking it slow. Okay, now, 1 1 11 go through t he Apollo Yaw Orientation debriefing here . The contro l mode, as we said , was Direct when Ed put me into the condition. I used the Direct Mode , I believe . I damped out the rate without any difficulty at all . The orientation, I ' ve already gone through . What I should have done was to go nose-down . What I did do was that I came to the horizon first , tried to find a yaw reference and couldn ' t, then went down to the ground. I should have gone straight down to the ground . The time , as I mentioned , took 2 minutes and 20 seconds. I f eel that I could have done it in a minute and 20 seconds. We did not get the scanner ignore light due to acceleration , but we did get the scanner ignore light when we finally
171 got to a position where we were outside the attitude constraint of the scanners. White There were a couple of things . As far as the initial rates were concerned, they were 3 1/2 degrees/second roll - right, 3 degreed pitch-down/ second, and 2 degrees yaw- right/second . The final orientation that Jim came to was such that his pitch was on, his roll was on, and his yaw was off by 18 degrees. We found early in the flight that a yaw reference at night on the stars, particularly on a dark night , was very difficult. McDivitt Yes . I still thought that the quickest yaw re ference was to go to the ground . White As far as the day check , we decided that the night was by far the tougher case, adn it didn't seem to be too diff icult. So , we thought that since the day was so easy we wouldn't even go ahead and do it. The orientation by day was a quite easy t ~,ing. 9. 3 One Attitude 1'hruster Failure Check McDivitt Okay. We'll just go right through the debriefing here . It was not difficult to establish the rate as long as we had the roll jets in the other axes . We could damp out the
172 rates . W e used the Direct Control Mode . It ' s just pretty straightforward . It ' s identical to the simulator . W e didn ' t learn anything new from this check except tha t the s imulator was indeed correct . Do you have anything to add ? White No . Tha t it was pretty straightforward . 9.4 Horizon Scanner Track Check McDivitt Hori zon Scanner Track Check is next . The horizon scanner ignore light came on as expected except t he attitude band ~hrough which the horizon scanner operated was considerably broader than we had e xpected . The scanner ignore light went off again at the proper attitud8 , considering the f ac t that the scanner ignore circui t keeps the scanner ignore light on 7 seconds after the scanner has relocked . So , we always had the scanner ignore light go out at a different attitude than w here it came on because of the fixed rates w e were using. We went through the zero bank angle,pitch-up and pitch- down . W e went through the zero pitch,bank-left and bank r ight . W e then got to the r0E - ..,ith pi tch,i.ng . Here , I only banked to t he right and pitched up and down . I didn ' t bank t o the left and pitch- up
173 and down . We did the pitch with rolling, and here I pitched up and rolled left and right, but we did not do the pitch-down , rolling left and right because of a fuel limitation and a time limitation . We had another experiment that had to be done . We had to get the platform off and we had a limited amount of time to accomplish this . I sort of felt that the check was very well accomplished at this time , The data is in the data book . I saw no need to waste time doing the other two maneuvers , especially since we were so limited on time and fuel , Did you have any thing to add to that, Ed? White No . I think that the remark that the data is in the book is adequate . 9, 5 Horizon Scanner Check McDivitt The first one is the sun . I think the best wasy to do it is to have Ed read out the comments that we wrote in the data book as we did this . We started with the blunt- end into the sun. White We started blunt- end into the sun and we got · the scanner ignor e light momentaril y as the sun
174 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt hit the scanner head . It went right out again. It went out in 7 seconds like it was supposed to? Hight . It was just a momentary light and 7 seconds later it was off again. Going back around to the 180.degree position , we didn ' t get the scanner l ight again. Again in here, we got a scanner ignore light when we were faced right into the sun with the nose , and it w ent out again and came on once more,and then stayed out . So , sequentially, we started with the blunt- end in to the sun and started a yaw to the left . As soon as we came around into the sun we got the scanner ignore light , and it went out a short time later. We came around right into the sun, and at this time the scanner ignore light came on , went out, and came back on again . Is that correct? Yes , and then finally stayed out . And stayed out . Then we yawed back around till 1-,e were blunt -end to the sun again, and yawed back into the sun ,and back around blunt- end to the sun again , and we did not get any more
White McDivitt White McDivitt McDiv:i:tt 175 scanner ignore lights . The next step is the Hoon Scanner Check. We did this with the moonset and , Ed , you might add the time that we did the Sun Scanner Check. The Sun Scanner Check was at Greenwich Mean Time of 11 : 50 , We ' 11 have to correlate that lat er·. I think that we were supposed to be in the blunt- end to the sun configuration at 11 : 54 and star+-· ~b c-.re, but I 'm not really sure about tha t . Okay, the moon check was performed just about like t he sun check. We started blunt- end to the moon and made t wo cycles . Blunt- end t o small-end and back to blunt- end , and small-end back to blunt end . Ed , go ahead and read the data. Okay. On the moonset , we started with the moon quite high , so we had a good moon. W e started at 12 : 17 . We had no scanner ignore lights for the first 180 degrees and,actually,throughout the next cycle w e had no llll'llocks or any lights for two cycles . So this was completely normal. The Thrusters Check No. ; --we turned the spacecraft , since the thruster f iring wouldn't influence the orbit except to change it
176 White M cDivitt White McDivitt OO~~FIDEt-4TIAL slightly, and we w ent ahead and fired t he forward - firing t hrusters for 1 second . W e didn ' t get any change in our scanner ignore light configuration . It was out and it stayed out during the entire thruster check. So I guess that it operated all right . W e 'll summarize all of our scanner comments at thi s time . You want me to read some of these? Yes. Why don ' t you read off some of the comments you have in there . They ' re in your writing. You might read the first page and I ' ll read the second, since they I re in mine . W e w ent to Horizon Scan Mode of control for about the last day of flight , and left it in that mode just about until we retrofired . I 'd like to read out s ome of the comments that I made here as w e lost the scanner, when we got the scanner ignore light . At 16 : 03 Greenwich Time , or atout 72 hours elapsed time , I turned on the Horizon Scan Mod e in about a 27degree nose down attitude with a pitch up rate of about 2 degrees/ second . The Hori zon Scanner Mode added pulses GO~~FIDE~~TIAt
177 to the pitch up rate and increased my r a tes to something considerably above that , but then as we came up into the Horizon Scanner Mode dead.band , it started pulsing rapidly and ki l led off this rather l arge pitch rate and held the spacecraft right in this attitude . S~ we had a very good acquisition of the mode from a somewhat undesirable condi t ion . At the first sunset the scanners were pointed right at the sun but did not break lock. We did not get any scanner ignore lights at this time . Later on, at 17 : 04, about an hour later at sunrise , the scanner ignore l ight came on with the space craft pointed in such a manner that the small end of the spacecraft was pointed about 45 degrees to the right of a line drawn directly between the spacecraft and the sun. So tha t., essential ly, the sun was shining on the horizon scanners at about a 45- degrell angl e . The scanner ignore lights stayed on for 10 or 15 seconds, and then went out . There were no false pulses from the jets at all . At 7: 55, just at sunse t , again in about the same position, I was 45 degrees to the right of a l ine drawn between the spacecraft and J..Gt.qf:IDEt~JIAL
178 the sun . The scanner broke lock. We started pulsing down for two or three pulses , then stopped , but the scanner ignore light stayed on longer than 7 seconds and then it went out . W e pulsed up one or two times to start recovering from these initial two or three pulses that started us down , and then the l i ght came on again . It was only off for about 2 or 3 seconds, just a very short time . We were at about 30 degrees pitch down at this tim e . We then started pulsing pit ch-down rapidly with the scanner ignore light on. We pitched down and did a 360-degree maneuver in pitch; we started just about horizontal, pitched down till we were looking at the ground , continued pitching down with respect to the spacecraft until we were horizontal , upside down, now faceing the opposite direction than we ' d started , and continued pitching down with r espect to the spacecraft . The small end ended up stra ight up and we continued pitching down again until we started coming back back down to the horizon. did not at any time during this maneuver attempt to control the spacecraft . The pitch- down I
White 179 thrusters continued to fire throughout t he maneuver at interval s like there was indeed a signal coming from the Horizon Scan Mode . As the spacecraft started back down toward the horizon , I thought sure that the horizon scanner would catch the horizon , because a t this time the sun was no longer right on the horizon. However , we developed a slight amount of roll during the l ast 120 to 150 degrees of pitch, and as we went down through the horizon , we were out of limits in roll and Horizon Scan did not pick up the horizon. I then took over the spacecraft and maneuvered back to a position from which the Horizon Scan M ode could r eacquire and -put it in t his condit ion . It s t ayed locked on . Ed has a few notes here . We ' ll have him read his . About the only notes that I ma.de on .the scanner was tha t at sunset and sunrise it had a tendency to break lock. I have a note her€ that at 22: 22, at sunset with the sun right on the scanner, i . e . 90 degrees to the spacecraft , the scanner broke lock three different times . At 22 : 58 , a t sunrise , the scanner put in spurious inputs but was abl e t o control and didn ' t lose lock.
180 McDivitt McDivitt Sunrise seemed to be the time at which t he scanner had the largest tendency to br eak lock , and if it didn ' t break lock, it would at l east put in spuri ous inputs which were obviously not required other than due to the confusion factor that the sunrise was causing on the scanner. Again, I have one at 11 : 58 , at sunrise , the scanner 60 degrees to the sun , broke lock once and pul sed quite a few t imes extr aneously , but caught itself and continued to track . I think on the whole that the scanner worked real well . So do I . As a matter of fact , I bel ieve in the last 20 or 24 hours, however long we had the Horizon Scan Mode on , that we only real l y lost control of the spacecraft that one time, w here w e did the pitching maneuver I've already discussed . I think in every other instance , although it pulsed needlessly two or three times at sunset if the scanner was pointed toward the sun, it never really lost lock and it certainly never l ost control . The light would come on every now and then , but it would --. But , I don ' t thi nk that the light came on more than three or four times in t hose l as t 24 hours . C8NFtDE~~TIAl
181 White No. They sure didn't McDivitt And even though t he light wasn't on, it seemed like we would get an extraneous puls e every once in awhile at sunrise or sunset . But I thought that the Horizon Scan Mode worked very well. It certainly proved to me that it was an excellent attitude-hold mode, or pilot-rel ief mode . 9 .6 HF Transmission Reception Check McDivitt I think that I 'd like to start out with No. 3 in this case . We received an update to start and stop our checks and had no difficulty doing this . I think that the transmission and recep tion , No. 1 and No . 2 under this major heading, are covered in our data book and I 'd like to have Fd summarize them at this time. White We ran a one day and one night-long test on it in which we attempted to have all stations contact us. The data in the book . I think the data will point out that the HF is a rather unsatisfactory mode of reception. It was difficult for us to evaluate our transmission that ' l l have to be done from the data from the stations. But as far as reception was
182 60~~FIDE~~TIAL concerned, we got a little bit during the night and just about nothing during the day . W e ran also a sunrise and sunset check and we made the long counts as indicated, and listened for any return on all our HF tests from Thule and Elmendorf . We could hear Elmendorf qalling us , but they were at one time barely readable , and most of the time you could hear somebody trying to call, but they were very broken and difficult to read . M ore detailed data is in the Flight D ata Book. 9. 7 Orbit Navigation Check McDivitt Following the format in the debrief ing guide, I think that the maps and overlays that we had were excellent . I f elt that the concept was a very good concept. It gave us a good check on where we were throughout the flight as far as accurate times went. We used a t times the other track charts tha t were printed before the flight . W e found that these were off some fair amount , although they furnished good information also . O nce w e had the time error that w e could apply to times listed on t he map , we found that we were able to use t hese quite well also. I think t hat the map and t he overlays tha t we used in our
Orbit Navigation Checks was a very good scheme . The control mode we used was Pulse, and the timing was just the GMT timing we had in the spacecraft. I ' d like to have Ed discuss a little of the technique now. White Actually we had a form in our book that we had made up to make these tests, but I think it became apparent to both of us as we came along that this is a fairly simple thing to do . If you want to just try to update your map without having an update from the ground, it was quite simple to point the spacecraft straight down to the earth and get a point which you could recognize on the ground., and actually plot this right out on your orbit map. I think we could probably make checks in this manner and update our map almost as well as we could by having a longitude and time called up from the ground . I ' d like to make a comment right now that I thought the little map that we had with the orbit plot on it was very useful, but it was weak in one respect ; I was always wanting more detail on what I was seeing doWlll there . We,fortunately,carried a map with about two to
184 McDivitt White three times the detail of the section cut out of a Mercator Chart , which I found very useful . By prop erly folding a map , I think I would prefer to have a map of even higher detail with me. It didn't seem to me to be a drawback to have a large map in the cockpit, as long as you kept it gelded down in the proper manner. Do you have any comments on that? Well , I agree with lli . I thought that this was a relatively simple task. I felt it w ould have been m uch easier to do if we had the platform up so we could point the spacecraft down using inertial ref erence and using the platform, but it wasn't diffi cult to do it just visually. It only took a short time to plot up a couple of points and run back and determine your own ascending node . You kn.ow, another thing that I found very interesting was when they called up plot points and they' d give you 30 degrees right , down 45 degrees . Even without the platform, those meant a lot to me . I could visualize very easily where I was going, whether I was small- end-forward or blunt end forward. I could visualize quite well, without a platform , 30 degrees down and yaw 30 degrees over, looking for a point . It seemed I could check points nearly as well wi th COt'4FIDE~~TIAL
185 co~~FIDEl'JTIAL or without the platform. It wasn't hard to orient. McDivitt I think that's probably true . I do think that this is a good scheme . I ' d like t o see us continue it on future spacecraft . White Yes. I ' d t ake it again if I had 11\Y druthers . What do you fe el about a bigger map? McDivitt I think for this kind of thing , this Crbit Navi gation C.1eck, the map and the over.1ay we hud were about the right size , but when we got around to looking for things on the ground , I t hought the maps and charts we had were pretty inadequate . I ' d like to see us get something with more detail on i t , just the way Ed says , and I think we will cover this in better detail when we get over to the Apollo Landmark thing. 9. 8 Relative Humidity Test McDivitt Another operational check that I 1 d like to discuss at this time is the Relative Humidity Test tha t we did during the flight . All data is in the data book, but the t hing t hat I ' d like to say most of all is that the relative humidity was consider ably l ess than anyone had ever expected . The cabin temperature was less than anyone had ever expected, and although we were instructed to CO~~FIDE~~TIAL
measure the cabin wall temperature with a thermistor tha t was on the end of our r elative humidity gage , I found that this was pretty difficult to do since they ' d covered the entire inside of the spacecraft with the sponge rubber.. We couldn't find a good place where there was just bare metal . I took some measurements on t he inside of the left- hand side food box. I took one or t wo readings off of the metal frame that went around the window. Those are the only t wo places I was r eally able to contact spacecraft metal. Do you have anything else tha t you want to add to that , Ed? White No, t he data is pretty well lai d out in the data book . I don ' t think there is anything else . It did surprise me, and it was a very pleasant sur prise because I was interested in taking my gloves off and putting my visor up. .I sure did as soon as I found out i t wasn ' t ·going to get wet. 9, 9 Zodiacal Light Check McDivitt I ' d like to have Ed describe this . White Okay. W e did this one on the fourth day at 22:42 Zebra , and i t was one on which procedures were called up, What they wanted to do was find out if the thrusters firing could cause any inter -
187 ference on some z odiacal l ight photography that was planned on later flights. The first test was to pitch straight down toward the earth, open the shutter on the Contarex camera ind actuate the pitch- up with the shutter open. Then we'd take another picture and actuall y open the shutter again and activate the pitch-down thrusters, to see if these two thrusters would cause some type of light interf erence to the photography. On the pitch-down part of the phase, we waited till the moon had set, and as we were pointed down toward the earth, we came upon an area fa±rly ~i ear of clouds. But,unfortunately,there were a few soattered lights from homes or cities down bel ow us , which might have caused some interference. I don ' t think so . They were very , very scattered . The pitch-down test was satisfactory. The next one was the one in which we were actually level with the horizon. Again , Jim opened the shutter, I actuated a pitch- up, and closed the shutter. He opened it again , I actuated a pitch-down thruster , - ·• .j. and he closed the shutter. It was a pretty simple test . We took four pictures.
188 ~◄ FIDEt'~TIAL 10.1 Countdown McDivitt White 10.2 Powered Flight McDivitt 10.0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS During the countdown the visual sighting I had was a multitude of wasps sitting on the Rand R section and crawling all over the windows. Aside from that , the sky was clear and I didn ' t see anything else except the gantry going up and down . That ' s about it . It appeared to me the wasps were somewhat confused. They felt that the RCS nozzle was a very large beehive for them. The first topic is lift-aff . At lift-off I was looking at the instruments and didn 1 t -see a thing. I think Ed 1 s got something here. White From the lifk-!£--I cou1d actually feel when we lifted off - - the vibrations decreased a great dea1 McDivitt White What about visual sightings? 1 1 11 get to that. As we started to move, I felt I could see the relative motion. We had a clear blue sky above us; there werentt any clouds , but I could see the motion in the sky. I could also, as soon as the roll program started , EO~~FIDE~~TIAt
• 189 McDivitt White McDivitt definitely see the rotation of the booster and spacecraft combination. As we continued on up, I was watching within the spacecraft and outside, also. I could see the pitch program initiated . I could hear Jim call it out, and I could actually see it on my instruments and also see it out the window. BECO's the next topic. Why don't you go through that . I think I just looked out one time to see the horizon for just a second . Why don ' t you go through the rest of those there and read them off? Okay, at BECO I was looking in also . I was waiting for the staging and I had my attention inside , and I didn ' t see the big sheet ·of • flame that John and Gus described coming from around the separation of the first stage. So, there wasn't anything other than the. normal feel ing of the separation. As far as :'visual aight ingt- were concerned, I didn ' t see anything else at staging. As we started to nose over, I saw the horizon coming up and I called that out to Jim. I think that might have been ~hen I looked out, I but Im not really sure I could see anything at COt-4FIDE~ ◄ TIAL
190 White McDivitt White White McDivitt White the time. I had to say something. It is quite an impressive view when you 're up there --the very the first time you look out and you see it. I looked out and all I could see was the horizon and the blue down below us. You probably couldn't, because as I think of it now, we were on the side . I could see the horizon and you couldn't. All you could see was the sky. Right . So I could see a little of both. I could see the clouds , the water , and the whole smear. The first time I saw that out the window I called that out to Jim, and it was quite an exciting view. Engine No. 2 ignition-- I didn't see anything that had to do with lighting the second engine off. The horizon view, I just discussed . At SECO, there was a lot of debris going by. That was at spacecraft sep, wasn't it , rather than SEGO? You 1 ',re right. You ' re absolutely right. At SEGO, I didn't see anything other than that the acceleration profile went down to zero. At COl'JrlDE~~TlAL
191' McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt 10,3 Orbital Flight White spacecraft separation I think Jim and I both noticed a lot of stuff coming by the spacecraft. Right . Just plain debris was all it was . Just pieces of whi te junk came by. Probably little bitty pieces of the adapter there. In fact , when I got out and looked later on at the spacecraft separation plane , there were pieces of the same kind of white stuff still back there attached jaggedly to the adapter section. Fairing jettison - - I couldn't see that . Did you see anything on the fairing jettison? When I jettisoned the fairings , I saw the I horizon scanner fairing go whipping off, but I couldn't l ! ok at it and the nose fairing both. S~ I only saw the one go, but there were some more pieces flying all over the place , and they went just as soon as I punched the .Fairing Jettison Bitton. Boy! We've been talking about these things for t he last ten days . The f irst one is geographical.
McDivitt White EO~~FIDEl>-JT.IA L . .. Yes. Geographical. We could see wakes of ships. We could see roads. We could see towns . Although I never saw any individual houses , I could see an industrial area with what looked like oil tanks and a few other things . We could see canals very well. We could see the Suez canal very well from the air. I don't think I ever saw an individual ship. I never saw any individual cars or airplanes, but you could see runways very well. But the thing that you could see best of all were long lines. I'm sure that if you had a road that was 50 f eet wide , or however wide you make roads, and it was long, you could see it . Whereas, if you had the same thing and it was just a square down there,I doubt very seriously that you could see it unless you were looking for it,specifically. I think perhaps also there is the contrast between the colors . The things that I saw with very high clarity were runways. As you looked d~un at the runways you caught a high contrast between the green or the brown, or whatever the color that it was laid out in. You could see it very clearly. I was impressed by how clear you could
J 193 McDivitt White McDivitt White see things . They were small; there ' s no question that things don ' t get any bigger when you ' re looking down at them, but in my opinion things were much clearer. I could see with a higher detail than I could when I fly over in a normal airplane,as far as the object itself being clearly defined. I also noticed this at night when I looked down on it . In the clear stretches the city lights were much finer defined than the lights are in a city when you're flying over at 40 000 feet. Things are small but have a much higher definition. I think it would be interesting to find out in-mu- photographs the degree of resolution that you have. I feel that the resolution , if you have the proper contrast, would go down to 50 feet or below. Yes . I ' d agree with you there . Geographically, there were just so many things that we could see. I think that we took pictures of most of the things that we thought would be interesting. I ' m dying to look at those pictures. Me , too! I agree with Jim that if you look at a city, particularly if you look a t a city in a desert ~ ~~◄ FJD.E~JTIAL --...,...__
194 McDivitt White McDivitt area where the houses are brown and the surrounding terrain is bro~m, everything' s kind of small and it all blends together. Unless there was some type of contrast between them , it ' s pretty darned hard to pick up a city right out in the middle of the desert. We had trouble when we came to El Paso in finding it, and Cairo blended right in with -- blended right in with everything. You could see the air}!urt at Cairo--I ' m not sure if I ever did really see the city. I think I could . When I was looking in that area at Jaffa, as soon as I saw that airfield out there and was concentrating on looking at it , I saw more detail. Yes. The thing of it all is that ,geographically , you have to have a real large feature to be able to see it very far out in front of you , like the Red Sea. Now when I was trying to find Cairo one 1;ime, I looked out I was having trouble finding the Red Sea. Pretty soon I found the Red Sea about 30 degrees below the horizon or maybe a little more. As I got closer, of course , the Red Sea stood out very well. As we get closer iK FIDE~~TlAL
195 White McDivitt White McDivitt White and closer and closer, these things really star t standing out, but when you ' re looking from up around 125 or 150 miles , and you're out 60 degrees , you ' re a long way from your target . It ' s just that you can ' t see that far through all that atmosphere, I guess . I think one more comment on the geographical is that I think we ' re r eall y going to see some things down there when we get some type of magnification. Yes , a telescope is what you really need. If you can get some kind of telescope to help , I think we can really see something. I wonder if there isn ' t some way that, while we know we can't carry some things inside the spacecraft , we can work with something outside the spacecraft- - camera equipment or some kind of optical equipment. that we might be able to have mounted on the out side . We can store it somewhere and mount it on the outside after we get up there --mount a te l escope right through , with the eyepiece on the inside . Boy that would be great ! Wouldn't it? And then when it comes time to come in, you just punch the thing off and forget about it . But
196 McDivitt while you ' re up there you ' ve got this thing with the long eyepiece. I think we can do this with EVA. Stow the thing back in the adapter , go back and get it mounted up , get back in, and you ' ve got yourself just about as long a telescope as you ' d want to put up there. Same way with cameras . I think you can take cameras up . We can take some of these big cameras that we ' ve been wanting to use.. We can have a sighting device so that we can mount this thing on the outside of the spacecraft after we get up there , and then point it with a pointing device at the ground and get some of these pictures that we ' ve been wanting to take . I think we've got some possibilities there. Okay. Celestial . I think in the nighttime you can see the stars without any difficulty. In the daytime you just can ' t see the stars if there ' s any sunlight w hatsoever on the window, or if the nose of the spacecraft is in the sunlight, or if the horizon is in the sunl ight , or if some of the earth is in the window. I think all these things tend to limit your night vision. They create c_Q ~~FID£:hlIIAL
197 White McDivitt an optical barrier , practically, between you and the stars . The difference between the day sky up in orbit and the day sky here is, as far as we were concerned, was practically nil, because those just weren ' t any stars visible. It didn't have anything to do with the atmosphere; it just had to do with t he optics of our window and the nose being shiny. We couldn't see any more stars in orbit than we could here in the daylight, but it wasn' t because of the atmosphere up there. It was just because we had that coating on the window tha t reflected the sunlight,and because the nose reflected sunlight into the windows , and t he same thing with the horizon or the ground . When it was lit up, it reflected light into the windows. Actually, you had to get that window in total darkness almost before you were able to see anything. Pull the shades. Pull the shades . And then when you did that , you were able to see some stars. On a few occasions when I got the spacecraft into this particular attitude, I was able to see some stars in the
198 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt daylight. How about you, Ed? Were you able to see any stars? Yes. I called them out a few times. You did have to maneuver just , as carefully- - That ' s right . You had to be just exactly in the right spot. Let ' s go into the magnitude of the stars . We had set ourselves with the Corona Australis as a kind of calibrator for us , and this was composed primarily of fifth order stars. That was very clear, and I could see without a:ny difficulty stars of lower m agnitude than that. I could see , without question , stars to the seventh m agnitude . And that ' s exactly the same magnitude I would guess . You could probably see th~m down to a magnitude of seven. Now, another thing , though , was that the sky wasn ' t any more f ull of stars to me there than it is when I ' m flying at about 40 000 feet on a real da r k night . No, as a matter of f act , it didn't really seem to be as full of stars . co~~FIDE~ffiAL
199 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White No. On the night when we were flying with that eclipse of the moon , I saw more stars than I ' ve ever seen in the sky. Yes, and as a matter of fact, I wouldn ' t doubt that we could go out here and fly tonight and see seventh order stars. I bet we could see lower than that . That ' s right . What I ' m leading up to say is that I don ' t think we could see as many stars i n orbit as we could flying around in an airplane at 40 or 45 000 feet . That ' s exactly my conclusion a.J:so . You could see down to the seventh order stars. Yes , and I think the reason for this is the coating on the windows, don't you? I think so. I felt like there was just a little shield of what I was really seeing. If we ' d just gotten that coating off , we'd have been in great shape . I also noticed a tremendous difference if I turned those lights off in the cockpit . It was just like turning those stars on on the outside , and I don ' t think we should take those red lights out . C¼MftDE~~TIAb
200 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White €Ot'4FIDE~~TIAL No. I don't think so either. You know , the thing that did look brighter to me was that planet right over by the sun . When the sun set, that planet would really stand out. I noticed another thing on the planete, I didn't notice--which one is in Leo now? I don ' t know. It ' s Mars. Mars is around Leo now, and it didn ' t look as orange . To me it looked roughly the same color as Venus did, and remember I remarked on that up there, which is a very interesting thing now . I presumed that the color should stay the same. I didn't notice any difference between it up there and here on the gTOund. It didn't have to me the characteristic orange color that it has when I look at it from down here . It looks more like a regular old- - A regular old star , huh? No, it looked likr the planets, and remember I remarked on that. I think you did, now that you mention it. And we probably went on doing somethi.ng else and forgot about it. Let ' s talk about the air glow. co~,FIDE ►~TIAY
201 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt Why don ' t I discuss t hat thing that I saw those two times at night . Yes , I saw it too , so you weren ' t seeing things . This phenomenon occurred in the dark and I think it \./a.S near Austra.l.ia ., each t.iine, but I 1 m not really sure. We ' ve got it recorded on the voice tape,so we can go back to the voice tape and see where it was. They were just paral l el r unning lines of lights radiating from the earth up toward us but at a distance away, and i t sort of looked like a curtain. All of these lights rays seemed to be sor t of parallel t o each other. They looked a lot like the Aurora Borealis, except that they were down below us and they were coming up toward us . The first one we saw was considerably brighter than t he second one and i t was sort of wiggly. It probably had five or six curves in it, at least, and I thought it w ent like this a couple of times, and was bent up around like this . How about in the air glow layer? Was it in the air glow layer? No. I don't think it was in the air glow layer. It looked like it was down underneath -- it looked like it Cilt-lFIDEt;JIAL .
202 White McDivitt McDivitt W hite was right over land and was considerably closer to us than the horizon was . It was, maybe, half- way between us and the horizon. I got the impression that it was a lot closer to us and it was definitely not in the airglow layer. Both times I had this impression . It l ooked like it was coming up out of some clouds . I could see the clouds down on the ground, and I had the impression that this was coming out of them , but it only got to an altitude of maybe half of ours. That would be up to 50 or 60 miles . This is the impression I got . I took some pictures of it too, didn't I? I had the feeling that the first time you took it you had the wrong setting. You had about 250· at an f11. I don't know what you did the second time. I don't remember, either. This thing was in motion, too . It wasn ' t a stationary thing. It continued to move the way the lights on neon signs do. It was wiggling back and forth . When it came around over toward my side it was .,to me, closer to the horizon, and it looked more <!tlP-ifFIDE ►~TtAt ~
McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt 203 .CO~~FIDE~~TIAL like it -was below and in the air glow. It looked like it was in the air glow to you? When I saw it, it definitely wasn't in the air glow. It was a lot closer to me. Of course, it started on your side and you talked about it for 3" • or 4 minutes or so. Then as we drifted around, it went over, I guess, to my side. It was irregular shaped and it was out toward the air glow layer. Well, the second time it was a lot less bright. Are we going to talk about the air glow layer now? Okay. We' re going to talk about the air glow layer, but it comes under "horizon". Let's talk about that under "horizon". Okay . Do we have any other celestial observations? The fire flies that we had around the spacecraft con tinua.lly--Sometimes you'd be able to look out and only see one, and you couldn't see them too well at all at times. You could see them in the daylight occa sionally, but I don't think you could ever see them at night. But the place where you could really see them was at sunrise and sundown, because here you had a black background of the sky a.nd you had the GQ~~ElDE ► -~TIAL • -'.1
204 GOl>~FIDE~~TIAL White McDivitt White McDivitt sun shining on them . They picked the sun up . They picked the sun up and reflected the rays . They r eflec t ed t hem just as bright as stars, I thought . Didn ' t they ! Well, you know the thing that was most interesting to me was the time I called you and said the sky was full of stars , and you said it wasn't , the sky. We were pointing down at the earth. That was my first exposure to having your window in t he daylight and mine in the dark . At this time we had a l l the fuel particles from the fuel from the boosters spewing out all over, and my whole view out t he win dow was j ust completely full of these reflecting particles . They looked kind of like one of the s t ar fi elds we had past off on us as star fields . It looked kind of like a star field, but it looked kind of unreal , too . That's exactly what it was . One of the prettiest things was when. we had a urine dump at eunset,because we just had mil lions and millions and millions of these fireflies or part icles outside . When you put them all out like that with the sun shining on them,as we 'd mentioned earlier · with the black background, it just l ooked marvelous. As a matter of fact, we took some movies of them· ,. E..-0 1 RFIDE~~TIAE
205 White McDivitt White McDivitt White and I think we might have taken some stills , but I'm not sure . I hope it came out. Yes , it was r eally spectacular ! So we could just about make our own stars when we wanted to . Is that all on celestial? That ' s all I can think of , Jim. I couldn't see the zodiacal lights . I couldn't see the r~genschein and I could not see the burst of zodj acal lights that you get just as the sun sets. Go ahead , Ed . Okay. I saw one during the las t few sunrises . I watched the sun very carefully. trom the time it first started to come up till it finally popped up , I was looking all the time for that shoot of light that 's supposed to come up just before the sun pops up . Well , I could never see that . All I could see w as the glow as it cam e up and a very rapid ris e as the sun did come up . There 's something that I did see that was quit e interes ting t o m e . Several minutes before the sun came up there would be a shaft of light that would shoot up , and I watched it on two
206 cer~FI McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt different occasions. It was during your last sleep. I was taking a few final movies and I was watching for this very phenomenan. It was the first time I saw it . It would be a little shaft of white illumination and it was a long time be fore the sun came up. I don't know whether that's what they were seeing before or not . But when the sun itself actually came up, I didn't get much of a big ball of light--just some big, bright lights coming up from behind the earth . That's all I was getting. I didn't see this other thing. I saw quite a few shooting stars. Oh, yes. They seemed to fall and burn up considerably below our altitude. They looked a half or a third as high as we were when they were actually being consumed and being burned up. I never saw one above us , did you? No . Okay cloud coverage- - There was a lot of it. There was lots of it. There were a lot of times when there wasn't any. I don't guess there's much we can sal about this . co~~IDE~~TJAL _J
207 White McDivitt I think we took some good pictures of the clouds. Yes. Well, throughout the four days we had cloud coverage over things we wanted to take pictures of. Other times we didn't have any at all. It was a variable thing, and w.e just got a lot of good cloud pictures, I hope. Horizons. Well, at night there was a definite dark horizon, which I assume is the earth 's horizon. And then there ' s a dim band, and then above that there's a br ight band that is much narrower than the dim band, and above that it is clear, and then nothing. I guess there are really three horizons. There's the top of what I think is the earth. There's a top of the dim band, and then there ' s a top of the bright band. In the daylight you don't see these dim and bright bands. I t's just a gradual decreasing in intensity of light. It starts out with a very light blue at the horizon and just gradually goes out to the dark blue, and it finally just goes t o black. Right at sundown,if you're pointing 90 degrees to wher e the sun is, you can see t he light blue of the day sky coming
208 McDivitt White GQ ► • fiJDEN l - JA k ~ down. lt' s much, much higher than the air glow that you see at night . If you're looking over at the daylight side, it looks l i ke the light tl..:ie , goes up probably three times as high as the air glow does. What do you think about that? Let me go into my impressions of the air glow in the evening. I saw the same thing you did, of course , and it looked like to me that the dark part was roughly t wo or three times as thick as the lighter air glow layer below it. We were both impressed with the phenomenon of the apparent rise in the air glow as you go from the daylight to the dark, and as soon as you get out in full daylight, the earth 's layer is all gone. But as you transition between the daylight and the dark, you see the layer start out and narrow down to what you see as you get into the dark side as the air glow layer . And when you initially get into the dark area, the air glow seems to disappear for a moment, and then the air glow layer pops out when you get into full dark, , very clearly.
209 McDi vitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White I agree. Okay. Do you have anything else? That horizon isn't very good on the daylight side, either. No, the horizon isn't very good on the daylight side. The horizon's not very good anywhere, really. We ' ll go more into that on D-9. You could see the lights of the attitude thrusters, and it didn't seem to make any difference which ones you were firing at night. They weren't blinding by any stretch of the imagination. They looked like lightening maybe. Little flashes · . The attitude thrusters lit up the sky a little but not a great amount. They weren't blinding either. Not much to say about that. Okay. I want you to discuss '· adapter separation that you saw . Okay . On the adapter separation, Jim and I agreed to separate the electric and the OAMS, and then pause between the adapter separation so that we could dwell a little bit on the separation and absorb as much as we could about it. When it did separate, we got a very clean feeling of separation between the t wo and a very definite feeling that the adapter and the spacecraft had separated . There wasn ' t much question in my mind. Was there much in yours, Jim? ~ ..i-O~~FIDE~fftAt ••
210 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White CQ~ ◄ FIDEt~TIAL No, not at all. There were a few pieces that came around from it, but not as much as there was at spacecraft separ ation after insertion . Did you see anything? No . I didn ' t see anything off the adapter . All right . The equipment adapter. I just saw it off of the retro adapter. Why don't you go to retrofire then? Okay. Do you have anything else on the adapter s epar ation? No , I don't think so. I was impressed with the cleanness in the feel , and I didn ' t even want to look around . I just happened to be looking over at Jim ' s window at that time , and , as I said, I could see pieces go around , and I could especially see pieces to this side. What I saw looked like a mount with two round things on it . I had been briefed on this thing by John Young and he said it looked like two pump packages . So, I said it looked l i ke two pump packages , too . Looked like just what I expected it to . And there was lots of debris around it as it whistled.
211 McDivitt White McDivitt White off to the side , and then it went out of my view. Okay. On retrofire there weren't any sightings to observe . Did you see anything outside, F.d? Did you see any flames or anything like '. that? No, I didn't. I don't think there was much there. The retro pack jettison- -we didn't see it jettison, but shortly after that we had rolled upside down and we were flying in, and I saw the retro adapter floating around on the left side. It had turned around so that it was small end-forward rather than blunt-end-forward. You could see the whip antenna sticking out the side, the four retrorockets, cross-beams, and the plumbing around the edges . It was quite a sight. It drifted out behind us until it got out a couple or 300 feet. It started glowing a little on the leading edge. It started fading farther and farther behind us as we reentered. It finally went from a dull glow to a bright one, and finally you could see the leading edge of it eroding away. Finally, it vre.s just a ball of flame back there. I thought that was quite a sight, too. It kind of set the modus for our reentry, of observing
212 McDivitt White McDivitt White very interesting things all the way down , including ourselves . We didn't observe anything in particular that happened at 400 000 feet. The ionization· was where we really started picking up the fire. I think we kind of timed that with what you were talking about the retro adapter up there . You said , "Hey , look at it starting to burn.: 11 , and about that time we were starting to throw a sheath around us to . That 's right. It looked l ike to me that it went from pink to orange and then went out to a reddish-orange, and then in the mids t of the reddish-orange you could see little tongues of green occasionally. It was quite pretty. I think another thing about it too is that there wasn't as much of it as I thought there would be . I can 't say that I was disappointed in not seeing more fire, but when I first heard about John ·Glenn's reentry, I envisioned more fire coming out . In this case you might call it just a sheath. That's right . There wasn' t a big blaze ,by a McDivitt C0~51FIDE~JIAL
213 White 10 .4 Reentry McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt long shot. It was almost like a veil of silk. There w as no flame . Well , in -:reentry we r olled . We didn't have any trouble in seeing the· horizon as we went around, but we were rolling all the way down . We did see ourselves crossing the ground, since wE'.l were heads-up a fair amount . We could look out and could see anything we wanted to see. saw the Gulf Coast , and then out across Florida. A little bit of dizziness was associated' with the rolling reentry as far as the visual- - Yes . It wasn't really dizziness . It was just t he fac t that you could tell that you were going around in a circle at a relatively high rate . It didn't bother us. It's just t hat you could feel it . The spacecraft didn't oscillate very much during reentry. Anything else there , Ed? No. When we deployed the dr ogue, it really made the ride interesting. I couldn't see the drogue very well . Ed could see it probably better than GO"' FI DEf'~TIAb... I
214 McDivitt White McDivitt I could . At this time I didn't !mow where the sun was. We oscillated back and forth on the drogue probably as much as plus or minus 40 degrees. I never did see the drogue dereef. I couldn't see up to the top to see if it was reefed or not . I don ' t think there's much else about what we could see on the drogue. Can you think of anything? I could see it up there whipping back and forth , and I was sure hoping that it was going to hold on and not pull the front end of the spacecraft off, the way we were oscillating. At Rand R -separate I saw parts of stuff out in front . My window was pretty well clouded over, and I couldn ' t see that well . I did see something separate , and I did see the chute start off. It wen t all t he way up. At main chute deploy I saw it come out in a reefed condition, I checked the chute and I didn ' t see any panels missing. I checked t he little circle in t he middle in the parachute , and it seemed to be in fine shape. I was expecting that we had a good chute . It
215 White McDivitt White McDivitt finally just dereefed and we had an excellent chute. It popped out and came back in . About a quarter of it along the edge folded back in and then popped back out again and we had a beautiful chute. Do you have anything else on the main chute? No. I couldn't see it until it started to de reef. From the dereef on, I could see the chute and was very happy to see it. During our descent to landing I could see the Rand R can with both the drogue and the ~ilot chutes attached to it. ,floating off to one side. After we landed, I noticed that there was steam coming out of the RCS thrusters. This steam didn't last very long. I could see the sea dye marker in the water. I could see the parachute in the water . I think you also ought to indicate that the windows steamed up quite a bit. I could see out a little better than you. You couldn't even see '50 •• feet out in front of you on your side. No, I sure couldn't. • There was a hole down
216 at the bottom of the window that I could see through. F.d wasn't having too much trouble seeing through his. It was real nice to see the heli copter and the sw immer. White Both the windows were pretty foggy, though . EO~~FIDE~~flAI!"
217 EO ►~FI DEISJ TIA L 11 • 0 EXPERIMENTS 11.1 Two-Color Earth--L.imb Photography (MSC-10) White McDivitt White McDivitt White This is one in which we had our first example of poor flight planning. They scheduled our MSC-10 experiment so that it actually confl i cted with some Horizon Scan Tests that we had to make. And since our Horizon Scan tests were being made in conjunction with the platform, which was only going to be up for a limited period of time , we had to interfere on the tail end of MSC-10 to go ahead and start working on the Horizon Scanner Check. Anyhow, we went ahead on the MSC-10,starting at 11:04, and went through eight series of pictures. This was the time that we had trouble with the event indicator. Didn't we have ten series? I t hought we had ten . I 've only got ei ght indicated here. Oh, yes, wait a minute; it says 10 1/2 runs. I only have eight recorded here, and a final one ·being run at 11 : 57 , We should have 9 1/2 runs. Yes. We should have 9 1/2 runs, and only nine were
218 GO~~ FIDE~~ TfAL McDivitt White McDivitt White required. We should have it all . On the firs t three runs the event indicator wasn't used, be cause I was having trouble with the Hasselblad shutter working properly in conjunction with the event indicator . About 11 : 19, I got the event indicator working all right, and the rest of them were run pretty well. The early runs were taken pretty much in night conditions . I doubt if much will come out on that one . The .next one, at 11:09 ,was taken with the sun right on the horizon , right into the camera, so I doubt if that one will be too much more than a big washed-out mess . The rest of them were all taken with the horizon in the proper position and utilizing the ring sight. The last part of the experiment was interrupted by the Horizon Scanner Tests . In other words, we didn't get to the sunset . I think actually the sunset would have been one more series of pictures . I would think so . Okay. I guess that's all for MSC-10 . Okay . Do you have any comments on that?
219 cQ ~~ Fl DDtTIAt McDivitt No, I don't have any comments. I think we logged the time and the weather along the route, such as it was, and we got all that into the book. 11. 2 ~!ic Terrain and Weather Photography (S-5 and S-6) McDivitt White McDivitt White I think we had a lot of unusual and significant subject matter, and it's all in the pictures. We had one camera that wouldn't wind the film too easily, but other equipment operated fine. We didn't get the data reviewed properly--too late. And we used the voice recorder as often as we could record. I don't believe we have all of this S-5 and S-6 photography recorded. I think ss we go over them, tho"Ugh; .the ones we didn't record will be pretty obvious . Yee, I think that those two experiments are really in the photographs. The Hasselblad camera operated fine except we had one magazine that didn't wind up too well, but it never did jam up completely. I guess that sort of covers it. Wouldn't you say, Ed? I would too. All the data that we got for it is recorded in our data book. Let's see Simple Navigation with the Sextant. Ha.! D-9. 11.3 Simple Navigation with the Sextant McDivitt I ~ we might as well cover it. .-, ~~fJOa~TIAb
220 White McDivitt White McDivitt White Well , in the Air Force portion of it , we can start right off by saying that the stars they wanted Ui to run the operation on--I think , Series No . 4- - No , that was the last one . They gave us Series 1 to start wi.th. --which was the daylight . The daylight operations didn't prove feasible at all . We couldn ' t see the stars and if we could have , we didn ' t have a good horizon to r un them on . So it became apparent to us that that run was los t right in the beginning,when we first came out of the darkness and lost all the s t ars . We also got t he big picture t hat t he sext ant was not going to be too easy to use . It was going to be impossible to use without using some fuel , and it was going to be dam hard to use when we used just pulses of fuel . We needed some kind of stabiliza tion . At least I thought so . We might say that the lightbulb in the cormter readout for the angle was burned out . That burned out within t wo seconds a fter we got up there , I think .
McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt 221 COt'4FfDEt~TIAL { Did it ever light? First time I turned it on it lit and it went "flit" , and then the light just went bzzz-bzzz. I didn't know it ever lit. It lit and then the light went out. Okay. So we lost the lightbulb in the angle readout, which made all the rest of the measure ments very difficult. And the Air Force portion in daylight was completely unusable. You couldn't see the stars and the horizon at any time. In the night portion,we initially had great large angles between the stars and the horizon, and we found that about 25 degrees was the maximum star-horizon angle that we could handle. Would you concur with that, lli.? Sure do. As we mentioned when we were talking about the horizon and the air glow. We really had three horizons. We had the true earth horizon. We had the top of the dim air glow layer, and we had the top of the bright air glow layer. I think that I always used the top of the bright air glow layer, except where I specifically called out in our222 White McDivitt White notes. Ed tended to use different types of horizons, dependent upon the type of filter he had on. Why don't you discuss that a little bit~ I tended to feel that the bottom of the bright air glow layer gave me a little finer defined horizon for a no-filter operation . When I put the blue filter on, though, I didn ' t have much horizon at all. When I put the green filter on, it gave me, as far as the top of the air glow is concerned, a better horizon to measure to. I thought that the horizon was certainly not a very defined point to measure to, and I think accuracy would be lost in trying to measure to a horizon like this . It 's just pl ain hard to take a fuzzy old horizon and try to make an accurate measure to it . That 's exactly the kind of horizon that you've got at night . I concur. There must have been at least a couple of minutes of fuzziness in that horizon , and I don't think that you would ever expect to measure to the horizon within a couple of minutes. Do you? No. You'd have to calibrate yourself down pretty COt~FIDE~~TIAL
McDivitt White 223 GO t'4 FI t, Et'4TI close to measure. You know it would be just pure luck if you kept measuring properly to it. Yes, the thing of it all is that even if Ed got himself calibrated so that he would always measure the same angle between the star and the horizor--it wouldn't be consistent between One person and another. I'm not really sure how you would ever go about measuring to this horizon with any accuracy at all unless you had some way that you could-instead of attenuating the light build it up in some way and then filter out one particular line that happened to be an extremely sharp line . The horizon I like to measure to best was the top of t he dense air glow layer with no filter. The next horizon I liked was the top of the dense air glow layer with the green filter. I liked least of all the blue filter , because it just completely eliminated the horizon . Yes, I don ' t think the difference between. the clear and the green was enough to argue over a preference between . I thought maybe I had a clearer one in the green, but I tended to take far more measurements with the clear one, so • CetctflDE~~TIAL- .s..~
224 McDivitt White perhaps they are so closely matched that it really didn't make too much,.- difference . Yes, I did most of mine with the clear one. For the runs in the Air Force portion , I found out that the stars had too big of an angle between the star and the horizon. To actually follow the format, for the runs as given , turned out to be too difficult . We did make runs on stars and horizons if we took the time on it and took the measurements . It seemed like the angle was fairly well limited between 20 and 25 degrees. This was due to the limited maneuver capability impos ed upon us and the lack of having enough window space . If you get behind the sextant, behind the window, and try to make a measurement, you might be able to theoretically measure something out to 50 to 60 degrees . Theoretically , this may be possible, but you must can ' t get yourself up above the console circuit breaker panel or down into the foot well area, which would be required to m ake measure ments of this magnitude. There were definite
McDivitt 225 Cet-«:IDE~~TIAL~ limitations on hitting the side of the spacecraft and trying to make a sighting and losing the object out of the upper window as you cranked the periscope down to bring the star down to the horizon. In trying to accomplish the Air Force portion of the experiment, we found ourselves completely unable to do the daylight star-horizon measurement. So, to get some insight into the operational use of the sextant, we took a great number of star to horizon measurements at night. They are in the book in quite a bit of detail. As we mentioned earlier, the helmet was an impediment to use with the sextant, so on occasion we had to take the helmet off. The greatest angle that we ca~ld normally get was about 25 degrees between the horizon and the stars, but on occasion we got up to 30 degrees. This meant a certain alinement of the spacecraft was necessary so that you could get the largest piece of glass between the star and the horizon and still get the
226 sextant in there . We found out that to do the star to horizon measurement, you had to be right - side-up. If you tried to do it upside down , the filter blanked out the star and not the horizon . I think that there are a great number of measurements in here, but I do feel that the Air Force portion of the D- 9 Experiment was more qualitative than quantita tive . Maybe I ought to talk about the Apollo portion. We made one Apollo run where we used two stars . I held the spacecraft fixed to within about plus or minus 2 degrees, and Eld took a great number of measurements . Ed made a great number of measurements between two stars . And we got our 30 runs on one pair of star s that were quite close together . Then we started out with about another 20 sight ings on another pair of stars that were further apart . White They. were all in Scorpi . I think they were about 12 degrees on the first one and about 22 degrees on the second one . There were Antares and S 0 orpi i n the second s er ies , and it was
227 McDivitt White McDivitt Scorpi and the third star up in Scorpio in the fi first series. Again , we found that the angle that we had selected to operate between was too large, and we ran our first group of stars in about 12 1/2 degrees, and for the second pair we tried to pick stars that were farther apart so t hat we could get a better feel for l arger angles. This pair of stars was a little over 21 degrees apart. We were too optimistic about the angle between stars that we could see by looking through the spacecraft window. What do you think about the voice r ecorder usage during this experiment, F.d.? I don't know why we had to do i t . No, we actually hand-recorde most of t he infor mation here . The one t hing that certainly delayed the experiment was the loss of the lightbulb within the readout. We changed the batteries and bulbs from the cross-hairs and never could get
228 i 0t~FIDE~~TIAL :J White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt this particular light to come b~ck on. Did you ev8r flgure out why we needed to hand r ecord all these things-why we had to record them on the recorder--the times and all that jazz? No, we h~d to r ecord the angles some place and we h.ad to correlate it to a time . Well, it says to prepare sextant and photo-event indicator for meas,.1rem<'!•1ts . What do t hey mean by photo- event indicator? The photo-event indicator was to get the exact time . Remember , when you were doing star to horizon measur~me~ts you had to have- - No , but this is just for the star. I don't understand the photo-cvant indicator. I think that just clobbers up our data. That ' s right. Yes, that Wlisn't applicable at all. It didn't make any difference wha~ time it w as at all . In fact, when I made a second run on this while you were asleep one time, I didn't put the photo event indicator on. No , there wasn't any need to put the pho~o-event indicatoc- on this.
229 11 , 4 Electr ostatie Char ge (MSC-1) M cDivitt I think what we could say here is that we turned MSC-1 on and off when it said in the flight plan and when directed by the people on the ground. 11 , 5 Proton- Electron Spectrometer and Tri- Axis Flus-Gate Magnetometer (MSC- 2 and MSC-3 ) McDivitt We turned off MSC-2 and -3 according to real time flight planning from the ground and when ever the fligh t plan in t he air called for it. White We had one time when I ran a double small-end forward set of runs through the Anomaly. The f i rst time , I fel t that the heading had not been accurate enough for the small-end-forward requirement. We were doing it without the platform on the stars , and the first time through I wasn ' t satisfied with it . S~ I called down to the ground and told them that I w asn ' t satisfied with the run and that I ' d make a repeat run the next time. This I did , and I left the equipment on throughout both runs and for an hour after that. So, we effectively have two small-end rtms through the South Atlanti c Anomaly.
230 COt~FIDE~~TIAL McDivitt White McDivitt 11 , 6 Radiation (D-8) McDivitt White McDivitt Okay. We didn ' t have any operational problems with it . Did we use the voice recorder with it? Yes , I guess we did . It should all be recorded on the voice recorder. If not , we've got backup times in the book. Our voice recorder was our prime means , and our book was just a backup. Right . I think one time you were sleeping, and you didn ' t get it that pass, but you got it the second pass , didn't you? Well , we got them logged when we did it . They can go back and get it . Right . Ther e were no operational problems. We did use-the voice recorder to record the infor mation. 11.7 Inflight Exerciser (M -3 ) McDivitt White McDivitt We didn't have any stowage problems with it besides those is associated with all the other equipment. 'rhe outside thin rubber layer broke on the exerciser about the end of the f irst day. Yes . I've got a comment or two. · Go ahead , Ed , CO I>~ FI DE~~TIAb
231 White McDivitt White I had the feeling that my capacity and my desire to do strenuous physical exercise decreased during the flight. Actually,it kind of decreased to a point and stayed at that point for the whole flight. Shortly after I got up there , I really didn't have any big desire to do a great deal of physical exercise. I did do the exercises as indicated, and I did about eight extra series of exercises with the exerciser, but I noticed a definite lack of interest in doing heavy physical exercise. I concur with what Ed said, although I'm not really sure this came about because of the small amount of sleep that we bad or just .:w -a.n effect of the zero- g thing. I did use the M-3 exerciser to do other exercises. I used it to exercise my arms , not oql.y in the manner that was de.mon@trated but by holding on to one end and pul ling the other end with the other band. I used it to exercise my legs also. I did a few other exercises , just with the exerciser. I yanked around a little bit on it, as Jim indicated. But , I also did some exercises in which I pressed pretty bard up against the G€>- MFIDE~~TIAL 1 ~
232 COt'iiflDE~~flAL front end of the spacecraft; I tried to tense my legs and tense my stomach and arms , and I tried to exercise in this condition . I probably did that a lot more than I did anything with the exerciser. 11 . 8 Inflight Phonocardiogram (M-4) McDivitt To the best of my knowledge we didn't have any equipment problems. About the end of the second day my sensors started itching a little. I don't know if it was my phonocardiogram or my other sensors . 11 . 9 Extravehicular Activity McDivitt Extravehicular activities have been covered in great detail earlier in the debriefing, I don't think we have to go over that again. 11, 1 OMiscellaneous McDivitt In the external observations I did observe three satellites , but I think that these were covered in detail earlier, and I don't believe we need to go over that again here. White I think that we'll comment again (we've commented on this point before) that the tape recorder is the most important piece of equipment that we have onboard the spacecraft to record our ob- COf',FIDeNTIAL
McDivitt 233 servations , times , and other information concern ing the experiments . I think the one we have onboard with the light located down underneath the pilot's right elbow is entirely unsatisfactory. I feel t hat we lost some information on our flight due to the light 9oming on and not being observed. We were going ahead with information for the tape, but were losing it in this manner. I think we ought to correct this deficiency prior to the next flight. I concur heartily.
234 CO f'J F. IDEf'J +IA L 12.0 PRE- MISSION PLANNING 12 . 1 filssion Plan (Trajectory) McDivitt 12.2 Flight Plan McDivitt It is pretty difficult to debrief this pre-:-mission planning because we had so many pre-mission plans that we couldn't keep track of them all. I think that we started too late on the mission planning for GT-4 , because everyone was concent:r:ating on GT-3 . Then in the two and a half months that we had to do the mission plans , we changed it about three or four times , drastically. We nqt only changed the trajectory, but we changed the altitudes of insertion; a t one time we were shooting for a 87 - 145 orbit and then a 87-161, and then we changed it from 90 degree launch azimuth to a 72 deg:cee launch azimuth. We changed how we were going to handle the decay of the orbit . All in all, I think our mission plan changed just too often . Same with the flight plan. We kept changing it around and changing it around and changing it around. It was r eally unfortunate . U p until about ten days before the flight we were really prepared for about two different flights, and finally we got COt>~FFDEt-~TIAl
White McDivitt 235 the flight plan nailed down. I think our r.light, though, was somewhat different than other flights in that we did have some real major changes about two and a half months prior to the flight . Con sequently, we had to expect these things . So,I think I'd be the first to admit that I lived with these changes, because I had a great desire to do the mission that we set out to do. We both kind of got to the point where we knew that we had a mission to do, and we knew it was going to be tough as far ae getting a good flight plan was concerned , a.nd we were just trying to get the the best we could and go. That's right. I think that the situation that we finally ended up in was that we tried to have a very good launch and first couple of orbits and a good last orbit or two. All the stuff in the middle, we knew we were going to have to handle re&l-ti.me . I finally found myself forced into the situation where I couldn't even worry about the middle fl~ght plan. We had to lay it out in general and expect a great number of changes. This is exactly what we did. We handled it in real-time. I'm not suggesting that we do tnis ~for future flights, £or €0f'~FIDE~~TIAL
White McDivitt I really hate to see us go right on down until the last minute before •·we get this information prepared . I think it ' s too bad , but I think on our flight a l ot of this just couldn' t be helped because of the drastic changes in the flight plan in the last two and a half months. I don't fee l we ' ve got a big beef coming to any body. I lmow a lot of people were working pretty ha.rd . That ' s right. There were a few things on our checklist that could have been done earlier , but I think the total miss ion plan ,as such ,was modi fied at a late date to change the objectives by a great amount . We in the crew agreed with the change . It almost doubled the amount of work that we had to do in those last couple of months, but I think that by accepting it and trying to make the thing work , we were abl e to overcome the pr oblem , and it -wa~ indeed a major problem. A situation that I hoped wouldn ' t occur and did occur on our flight concerned the checklist, the data books , the pro cedure books, the map for the orbit navigation and our charts and graphs . We didn't receive the check list and the pr ocedure and data books for our flight <ie¥~ FlD 'E ' NTIAL
237 to look at until 8 : 00 o'clock the night before the flight . Consequently , we didn't have a l ot of time to go through them the way we should have. We should have had these books and charts in our hands no later than two weeks before the flight . Here again there were some extenuating circumstance, but I 'm not sure that the circumstances were really that great . I still think that we should have gotten these out earlier. The people down at the Cape doing these things worked themselves to the bone night and da1,practically , to get these things done. I have nothing but ~he highest praise for the people from FCSD that came down to do this job , I just sort of suspect that we should have gotten started on it earlier and that maybe we should have had a few more people down there doing it . Any comment on this, F.d? White No. This is the thing that I think I was harping about a long time before the flight, because I saw the same thing happen on GT-3 ,when the checklist came in at the last minute . In fact, the last night before the flight, I remember John walking down the hall looking at hie flight plan and his check list and commenting on this surprise and that
238 ~{flDE~-.tTIAL McDivitt White surprise , a.nd there wer e a few surpr ises in ours . I wouldn ' t say there was much we didn ' t know about , because we had gone over it pretty thoroughly . But all our experimental procedures a ~d our books--we ' re partially to blame in some reepects also , because we were running the show and knew exactly what we wanted . But I concur very heartily with Jim ' s recommendation t hat we get these t·ni.ngs ma.d i~ up at least t wo weeks ahead of time so th~t we can use them in t he simulator , and that we ~ 1se the little hand-held checklist exclusively in the simulator that we are going t o fiy with if yo11 could get them n~iled fown th~t well ahead of time . That ' s what I would have liked ~o h~ve done . That ' s what we didn ' t do, tbo1igh. Yes , I don ' t really see any excuse for dragging it out to the last day. If t hese things would hfl.'l '~ been eight hours later than they were , they wouldn't evBn h.~ve made the flight. I think ,'l.'1,1ther thing, too , is t hat right now we've got a good set of books and checklist. I recommend heartily, unless the cr ew that comes beb-ind ·1s h .1.s som8 very strong diverse opinions , that they use som~thing similar so that they can get somebody started making t hem early enough to be useful. C~EIDEl'4TI/\LrMcDivitt White McDivitt White 239 -COtslFIDE~◄ TI -Al~ I concur wholeheartedly. They may not like everything about them , but I think that they proved their value with us in our flight . I sure would rather use something,and use it wel l, than use something that may be a little bit better and use it poorly. Okay. I think that covers the flight plan topic, don't you? Yes sir. 12. 3 Spacecraft Changes McDivitt White Here again we had some changes that were brought about by the change in flight plan, but I think we handled all of these adequately. I just don't think that we ought to use GT-4 as an example as to what should be done on a flight, as far as no change and things like that . I feel that if we don't have the equipment onboard the spacecraft checked out and ready for service by the time the spacecraft leaves St . Louis, they shouldn't fly on the flight . I ' ve felt like that since the time I got assigned to this flight, and I still feel that that's the way to do it, unless you have a maj or change for a worthwhile r eason . I was sure wondering r ight to the very end if they
240 McDivitt White McDivitt White 12. 4 Mission Rules White McDivitt White were going to get these final changes in that were required for our flight. They sure waited a long time to put them in. Yes, two or three days before the flight we still had a lot of things missing. In fact, when I got into the spacecraft, about the first thing I noticed was that the velcro wasn't around the 8- ball. About 30 minutes later, while we were lying there waiting for the launch, El looked up and pointed at the 8-ball at the place where the velcro was not. Yes, there wasn't velcro in several places where I had wanted it, and in several places where I had actually drawn in the lines where I wanted them to put the strips. Inst~ad, they put them 90 degrees to where I had the lines . I can ' t believe they would do something like that. I'm not really complaining. I think they did a pretty ,good job . Do you have anything else on spacecraft chan.ges? No. I thought this was one of the smoother points . What? Mission rules? Mission rules .
241 McDivitt White 12 . 5 ExPeriments McDivitt White So do I . I don ' t really have any comment . I think we had a very good set of mission rules, and I don't have much else to say about it . I concur . I think we set a record on running through the mission rules review, and I have one recommendation to make. I recommend highly that the crew review their rules thoroughly prior to the meeting and send their disagreements to Flight O pera tions Division, so that they can either concur with them and incorporate them.or disagree and then iron the differences out on the major things before you come to the mission rules meeting. Then, you ' ll find that you sail right through in just the first meeting , and this is exactly. what we did. I think we had some pretty good pre- missi on pl anning on our e:xperiments, e~cept D-6 , and I think the people in FCSD, specificall~ fe l l down on the job . They did not prepare the ns.rget ;cquisition Folders that we needed. They arrived down at the Cape about two weeks be.fore the launch v i th a .foot - thick pile of maps for us to memorize . They had a WAC Chart of every place that we were going to fly over, the -who l e 30 degrees north to
242 McDivitt White M cDivitt 30 degrees south, and that sure isn't what we needed . I think that there wan't any imagination used here . I just feel that the people who were responsible for perfonning thi s duty fell down on the job completely, and did nothing whatsoever but t alk about it . When we really got around to flying t his thing they didn ' t have a thing for us . It turned out tha t t he peopl e who finally ginned up the maps for us were the people f rom the Department of Defense Off ice here who were monitoring the thing from the technical standpoint. I sort of felt that this target ' acquisition stuff was a function of FCSD , and as a matter of fact the people who were concerned with it led me to believe this. When we got around to flying the flight, we found that there wasn't any way to acquire these targets . They hadn ' t done any work with it at all, so I think t hat this is a real low point in the FCSD. They didn't even have what I would consider a satisfactory method of calling the i nfonnation up to us. No, to put it bluntlY, it was screwed up and un worked upon. I think the planning for all the other experiments was adequate.
243 White M cDi vitt White McDivitt White M cDi vitt We had one area where we were a bit too ambitious, and this was in the stars for the Air Force D-9. We reviewed this, also, so there was no lack of pl anning. It just turned out that using these stars in the sequence that we had for them ,with the type of fuel constraints that we had imposed upon us, we just couldn't effectively run the ex periment without using a great deal of fuel. Yes . And I think that this came about just because of a lack of lmowledge on everyone's part , on just what we could handle in the spacecraft and the rates that the stars move through the skies . That was something t hat we learned on this flight. I think so . I think that's part of the qualitative data that we brought back for D-9, but I do feel that the pre-flight planning for D-6 was completely inadequate . Anything else on a:n.y of the other ex periments? No , I think the other experiments were well briefed to us . We understood them quite ~ell and I think the procedures were well taken care of. That's right . Let me clarify one thing. I t hink t hat the technical aspect of D-6 was one of the best briefed of all the experiments. The DOD people
244 who were responsible for it had some of the most detailed and thorough briefing guides and forms for us on the equipment, and we were more briefed on the equipment. It was just the procedures that were lacking. White Yes, I felt that I knew the equipment and its assembly end usage on the D- 6 backwards and forwards . Procedures for conducting the experiment were quite clear to me , but the only thing that we didn't have was a good method of passing up the targets and target acquisi tion once we got up there. Also, just handing me 243 targets was a pretty simple-minded approach in trying to solve this problem, I thought. McDivitt I don ' t think I have anything else on experiments . White Nope .
245 12.6 Training Activities McDivitt White McDivitt Well, I w ouldn ' t do anything differently. Jim , I wouldn't either. That 's one of the highlights, I think , of our mission that we were well trained for it; and I felt in all respects we were well trained. I don ' t be lieve I ' d add anything extra, and ther e 's nothing I think I ' d take out, either. Well, I think that the training went along just about as we'd planned it and hoped it would work. I do feel that the simulators didn't provide us quite the training that we needed early enough in the program. I think the simulator here in Houston was too busy inter facing with MCC and switching from one building to another and updating to "5" configuration and a whole bunch of other things . We never really got it the "4''. configuration. The one down at the Cape took too long too convert from the GT-3 to the GT- 4 configuration. As a matter of fact, as ea~ly as about two weeks before launch I had done four reentires on the s imulator down there .·
246 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White CO tsl FIDEt\JTIA L I did four for the whole time. Is that right? My total reentries wer e four. I remember I got three that day before the launch. I have one thing, though, Jim, that I think that I would do differently. Okay, what's that? Now that I know what kind of checklist I need and what kind of procedures books and data books that I need , I'd have those things ready a month ahead of time . I 'd use them and get so familiar with them and iron any little bugs out . We still had some bugs in our books . That's right . It w as a little hard to use. It was a little hard to locate things in there. And if I did anything differently, I'd put my emphasis real early on getting my checklist and dat a books up even though I know fully well that they'll change in some little respects r ight up to the flight, but I ' d get them out so I'd have them. We didn't have anything up to a week or eight days before t he flight.
247 McDivitt White McDivitt That's right. The things like how to do the experiments shouldn' t change. They should stay exactly the same. The operational checks should remain the same, and maybe t he flight plan will change a little, but you really could have most of those books done long in advance. ·Then you know exactly what information you' re • going t o take up on the f l ight with you and can get thi s lai d out l ong in advance. I t hink this is one bi t of experi ence t hat we could pass on to the guys coming behind, particul arly the ones that haven't flown before, at least in Gemini.-just what informati on we took a l ong and the reasons why we took i t and what our recommendations would be and what we would want to take now. Because remember you and I sat up there the night before the launch and sifted through a pile of stuff and decided just exactly what we really wanted to take. Of course, on t he other hand we knew what we wanted. I think we were j ust looking for i t in that .pile of junk that we had on the table.
248 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White Yes . We had t hat list of things that we'd made up. Decided we were going to take , If I had it to do over again , I think I'd have this all in mind earlier. Yes. You and I , t wo weeks before the flight, I don't think ,fully knew exactly what we w anted, and it wasn't ready for us then, anyhow . Yes . You're r i ght. Matter or fact , some of the stuff we t ook was our own personal stuff , l i ke those s t ar charts. Yes . And t hat polar star chart was mine and that Mercator was yours. Right. co~~FIDE ► ~TIAL
249 13.0 MISSION CONTROL 13.1 GO/NO GO 's McDivitt O kay. Mission Control. Mission Control is the next major topic . It says describe and discuss updating on the status of the spacecraft on the mission. GO and NO/GO 's, I thought , went pretty well. You have any comment on that? White No . Sure didn't. 13.2 PLA and CLA Updates McDivitt PLA' s and CLA updates, I thought, went extremely well. You have any other comments on that? White No. We used the form and they're easy to copy down. There ' s sure a lot of information they can get up in a short period of time. 13.3 Consumables McDivitt The conswnables, we bad- - White I got some comments on that . McDivitt Okay. Go ahead . White Okay, I thought that their monitoring of our electrical system w as deficient . I don ' t believe they gave any indication of what our electrical consumption had been , up till very near the end of the fl ight, and they informed
us that we were 130 or 150-- McDivitt 160, E:d . White --amp-hours over , a.nd I would've liked to know this at discrete times throughout the flight . McDivitt I t hink ,really,this was our fault. I think we should 1 ve called down and asked them. When they did give it to us , they gave it to us because we did call down and ask them. White Yes, okay. Maybe that was~· but I was look ing f or it more often than that. Maybe we could have t his part of the GO/NO GO, and they could say you're on your electrical profile and your OA.MS profile . This might be a part of it to be sure. McDivitt Yes . That woul d be a good i dea . 13,4 Flight Plan Changes White Flight plan changes. McDivitt Flight plan changes . Well , we had a few. think that i n general t hey all came off where they should. I don' t really have any comment . White We had one area in which they wer e deficient with t he MSC-10. McDi vitt I've already talked to Jerry about that . He I
251 White McDivitt White says that there was a misunderstanding between us . They sent up to do the MSC-10, and then they said not to do the MSC-10. Do it later. We didn ' t get the message. I didn't hear that. Yes . I thought all the flight planning was good except in this one instance that we ' re talking about. W e were directed to do MSC-10 in one pass, and then before it was done, we were directed to start another check. We got this information pretty late before we started the experiment and hence didn't get it. We didn ' t check over the times ours elves and I gues s we should have . So that when we got around to doing it, we found ourselves running into t he situation where we were supposed to be doing two experiments at the same time. Fortun ately , I think we wer e able to accomplish all the objectives of both experiments, but there w as no need to hurry when we were up there for f our days. Jim, I've got another one too . I've thought a lot about it. I thought about this one before
252 EO~~FIDE~~TIAl McDivitt White ,, the flight, and I think about it right now. And I thought about it during the flight. I think it's time to start a crusade. I think it's time to start a crusade on the elapsed time. Get us a clock. It's going to cost money, but I think we ought to get ourselves a good elapsed time clock inside the spacecraft. Get FOD to start going on elapsed time. And here's another funny sounding one, but I don ' t see why we couldn ' t do it--why we couldn't have a flight watch in ten-hour in crements. Let somebody build a ten-hour watch with a counter on ten hour increments . And then we'd have the timing system that we need on the spacecraft. What do you think of that? I know you and I have talked about this before but I think it's time- - Yes. We were forced to run our mission using both elapsed time and Greenwich Mean Time and it's almost an insurmountable problem. I think it's really got our data all fouled up right now , too . I think we'll unsnarl it all right, but, boy, if we could've been putting all our times into those tapes and on our data books in str~ight elapsed-time increments, and even
253 ~~ FID Et'4TrA L McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White when it gets into long time, you lmow, fourteen day flights, you can still put in 430 and 20 seconds as well as you can the regular Greenwich Mean Time. Yes . I think that it wouldn't cost us any more to have Omega make us a ten-hour watch and fix these dials up on it so that we could keep track 9f good elapsed time. You've got to leave the minutes and seconds alone there . Well, let's not argue that here or even discuss it. I think what Ed says is right . We were forced to run the mission in both elapsed and Greenwich Time, and · r don ' t think that was the way to do it. I think we ought to really start after this elapsed time thing quickly and get on with it. Right . It's time to get on with this. I think it's time to make a crusade on it. I think everybody ' s ready for it . Yes. Except the few people that are fighting it, and I think we can overcome them.
254 13 . 5 Systems McDivitt White McDivitt White Okay. Mission Control System. I think the Mission Control on this flight was nothing short of excellent. We got all the information from the ground that we needed. We didn ' t get bothered by them unnecessarily, I don ' t believe . They were there when you needed them. They were there when we needed t hem. That ' s right . I have nothing but praise for the ground control on this flight . How about you , Ed? I did too, and I had the feeling up ther e that I had confidence in what they wer e doing down there and in the decisions that wer e being made . I felt that when I needed information that the source was available down there and I could alw ays get it. That's a very good feeling. GO~~FIDE~TIAL
255 14. 0 TRAINING 14.1 Gemini Mission Simulator McDivitt Okay. Over on Training now. The first topic is Gemini Mission Simulator and I think we touched lightly on this subject already. I think that it's an excellent trainer for pro cedures, system knowledge, launch, orbit, retrofire, reentry, and crew stations. I think t he big problem with it is that it takes too long to turn it around. I think that we're fool ing around with it too much, c~mmitting it to supporting other functions besides flight crew training. The simulator at the Cape was sup posed to have been turned around at roughly two weeks after GT-3's launch, and about six weeks after the launch it still w~en't doing it~s job. When we went down there to start flying this completely checked-out simulator, we found that the launch phase worked, the orbit phase did not work, and the reentry phase did not work. After we got the orbit phase squared away, we found out that· we kept losing reentry eomm;:i.nd system. We couldn ' t use Direct Control Mode in anything. We never did fly reentries OOi'IFIO EttlJiA ~ ~.
256 ~ co~~FIDEr~TIAt 1-'" White McDivitt White McDivitt until shortly before the actual flight , at which time I think I had four total reentries about a week before the flight. Ed said he only fl ew four reentries on the simulator at the Cape in total . I probably flew fifteen, I would guess . That ' s total , so I think that the Gemini Mission Simulator fell down completely in preparing us for this flight . Well , not quite that bad, Jim. Well . Okay. We did get a lot of training from it, but I think that the tum-around time is completely inadequate. It made the job for the flight crews a lot tougher than it should have been. I don ' t know really what the problem is, but I think the people down there are working hard , and when things were working right, the train ing was outstanding. But, gee , there 's just too much time when things weren't working right . That's right. I think that's a good point to make. People down at the Cape try very hard, and I don't think it's their problem. The program for the Cape Simulator was done here . co~~FIDE~~TIAt
257 . COt'4FIDE~~TIAL When it arrived down at the Cape, it was com pletely inadequate for the job , and I can ' t understand why that program wasn ' t checked out in better shape when it went down there .. White I think , also, they're caught as second- rate ci tizens as far as keeping their simulators up to date and getting the latest spacecraft changes in them. They seem to be way behind t he space craft and indicated to me that the system did not permit them to update the simulator wit h t he speed with which it ought to be updated to t rain the crews properly. The things that were characteristic of Gemini 4 were being incor porated in the simulator down there in t he last two or t hree weeks when they should have been incorporated in the first two or three weeks after the changeover from GT-3 to GT-4 , I think we just have to work on a faster processing of the changes in getting the pieces of equipment and the changes out to the simulator so that they can be incorporated in it. Once they got the changes down there , they got them incorpor ated into the simulator, seemed like, pretty -CO IS~FIOEI\ITIAL
258 McDivitt GO~~FIDEt~TIAL f ast . As long as t hey weren't there , they couldn ' t update that simulator . Another thi ng that I 'll,for the life of me , never understand is wher e in the world the food boxes were for that simulator down there. I think somebody should explain just why it took about one month to locate a pair of food boxes and put them on the simulator down t here. It was the only way that we could actually work on the storage of the pieces of equipment for our flight, and we didn't get a chance to look a t that until what I consider too short a period of time prior to launch. Yes. It seemed like t hese food boxes were ordered a year in advance , and they never showed up . It looked like there was a complete lack of follow - up on somebody ' s part here . Then it turned out that they did find the food boxes but didn ' t release them to the Cape simulator quick enough. I came home here to Houston and found that we had a complete set of good food boxes in the Houston simulator; whereas,the one down at the Cape did not have any at all . This sort
259 of goes along with putting the following missions in front of the mission that ' s about r eady to go . One last comment that I would like to make on the simulator is that we made a mistake in building it so that it t-JOuld only tilt up 30 degrees . This lying on your back in a simulator is for the birds. You can sit up in it a lot longer than you can lie on your back . Also, everything that you have to do when you're lying on your back is about five times harder than it is when you're sitting up- nothing at all like zerc g. I feel strongly that we should look into some method of making this simulator go all the way up to a 90-degree point . White Here , here! One other thing on this simulator , too , whil e we're thinking about it . I think , there 's no question in my mind, the most effective trainer we have is our mission simulator. I think it could be made about a third more effective if we had a decent out- the-window horizon provided . W e didn' t have anything that I ' d call satisfactory available to us prior to co~~FIDEt~TIAL
260 McDivitt 14.2 LTV Simulation McDivitt White McDivit t White McDivitt flight . I agree. LTV Simulation. I think that on the t wo trips that we made to LTV to do the a bor t simul ations we got as much for a.n hour of time spent as we did in any other part of our t r aining. We were able to do a great number of runs in a very short period of time , and we got all our abort procedures down pat in just a very shor t period of time . I think that I can ' t say enough for this . I certainly will be glad when we get this type of a simulation i t MSC so that we don't have to travel out of town to get this kind of training. I hope t hey can get it so it works as well as i t does up t her e ,down here , because one thing that impress ed me was that you could go up there and be able t o run 70 runs. That's right . In a day . And not sit around waiting for t hings to get f i xed all t he time . I think on the one day we went up t here , Ed GOE Ii IE HilUI 1 ¼.t -
261 White 14.3 Centrifuge McDivitt White and I together ,in one day,had about 160 runs . Yes . Pretty close to that . Centrifuge . . I think that t he centrifuge contributed very little to our mission. I sort of feel that once you ' ve been on the centrifuge and you ' ve learned what the effect of g's are and how to counteract their effect~ that there's not a great deal more to be gained . I didn't really feel that I got that much out of the centrifuge t ime. How about you , Ed? I think that your orientation in the centrifuge is very impor tant . In other words, I think that it does give you a feeling for what the g 1 s are going to be like and what the g 's on the lift off and reentry are . I don' t believe there ' s any necessity for beating your head on a centri fuge over and over, running it up there . I certainly wouldn't want to go run a series of runs just before the mission so I ' d know how it ' s going t o feel on launch , because Ialready know how it 's going to feel on launch. The first time you run a few runs on a ce~trifuge, you
262 know pretty well what it feels like. I t hink that it ' s good in moderation, but I certainly don ' t think that you should over-train on it . It's not something that you need to train on every time for every flight. 14,4 Translation and Docking Trainer McDivitt Translation and Docking Trainer . I thought that the Translation and Docking Trainer was an excellent trainer for the D-6 pass that we did , the Apollo Tracking Pass . I think that the simulation that we set up at Martin Denver was also an excellent tracking task f or this , and I sort of felt that we got the techniques from these two t rainers that we needed to successfully perform this experiment. White I have a couple of comments on that . I felt the same way. Of course, we didn ' t have this trainer used too much for the docking phase, but I thought it was quite good for the tracking aspects and also for thruster failure. McDivitt That ' s r ight . It gave you a dynamic simulation of a thruster failure and what you could do and what you could notice when you actually have a
White McDivitt White 14 . 5 Planetarium McDivitt Whit e thruster that failed . I used it quite a bit shortly before the flight to practice t he dock ing and the station-keeping that we never r eally got a chance to perform in flight . I felt that it was quite valuable for this . Yes . I think that it ' s a very good simulation , too , of the actual way the spac ecraft really m oved. Yes. I think it is t oo . I t hink it is too . Anything else on Translation and Docking Trainer ? No . Planetar ium. I think it's ver y valuable training. We used this one down here in Houston , and we used the Morehead Planetarium. There ' s not a bit of question in my mind which one you ought to use, and it ' s Moreheady because the display of the stars is about as close as you can get to the r eal stars out in the sky; whereas,in the one down in Houston the projection of the stars just doesn't have the quality to provide the
264 M cDivitt vfhite McDivitt ~f,g[p IIITffl_ ~ information that you want to get. I have one other comment , though , as far as the stars are concerned. I think that probably we got as good training with our stars during our night flights as we got during the planetarium work. I f eel that's true too . You've got to go to those planetariums to see all the stars in the sky, but the night flying we did with our ttar chart was probably the thing that really imbedded the location of these stars in my mind. I kept looking at them night after night after night after night , and when we flew I was convinced t hat I could go up t here and find all those stars that I needed t o find . I think I had no trouble at all finding them . Yes . We saw every one that was out a t night. I think we saw them all . I think we can come back wit h good i dentification on them, and what ever informat i on they want us to tell about them,we can tel l them. That's right. And where we di dn't know the exact name of a particular star in a constel lation,we could always tell which star it was in
265 White McDivitt White the constellation and be able to find the name of the star after we got back here to the ground. But I do think that the star training we had was worth every minute of it . Yes, I'd go back some more, too . I'd go back to the planetarium some more. That's right . It 's one of the things that you really have to keep at all the time, because you can never go out at night and look at al l the stars in the sky. You can only see a certain restricted area, and it takes a lot of looking to see the whol e sky. By the time you look long enough to see the whole sky,it 's six months since you've seen certain stars, unless you want to stay up all night. Spacecraft orientation. I think the little devices they ginned up at the Morehead Planetarium are real good in this respect . You can sit there and they can simulate your orbit. They can put you up in the barber chair and ;you look out and see approximately the number of stars you can see out the spacecraft, and I thought that's about what I could see out of the spacecraft. When I
266 actually got up close to the window, when we wer e up flying, I could see more stars , as I thought I could. I thought that the training we received was good . McDivit t Yes . No doubt about it,that was all time well spent. 14.6 Systems Br iefings McDivitt Sys t ems Briefings , We actually had briefings on every system in the spacecraft , and there are quite a number of them. The schedule was such that we had a general briefing here at Manned Spacecraft Center on each and every one of these systems . I think we had a second briefing here at the Manned Spacecraft Center on certain systems like the ECS before we went to the altitude chamber. We had a number of briefings on the systems again up at McDonnell by McDonnell engineers in St , Loui s. We went dovm to the Cape , we had another general briefing by the McDonnell engineers at the Cape probably six weeks before the flight , and then about ten days before the flight we had a final systems briefing where they just discussed any changes ~ El~ .
267 that had been made since the previous briefing and brought us up to date on some of the things that had occurred duri ng this spacecraft systems testing. I thought every one of these systems briefings was worthwhile, and I think without each and every one of them we would have been much worse off than we were . I think that if I had it to do all over again, I'd schedule them just exactly the same manner we did this time . One or two here at the Manned Spacecraft Center, then again up at the contractor, then a couple of them down at the Cape. Any comment on that? White No . I iiked the manner in which they were presented , as a buildup of details as we went along~ The final ones down at the Cape were just certainly not systems briefing, They were details of the system briefings . 14 . 7 Flight Experiments McDivitt Right , Flight Experiments . Simulations . We didn ' t have to do any simulations on MSC-1, -2 , and -3, They were just throwing switches . The medical experiments , the Calcium Deposit Experi ment and the Bone Demineralization Experiment, required that we have a number of x- rays taken \ =--- t•tJFQ: I ~
268 I and we did indeed go make a couple of dry runs and a couple of wet runs on the x-ray table to make sure that we could get it done quickly. think this paid off. We never had any delay due to these x-rays . We certainly all knew how to use the exerciser . And the phonocardiogram needed no practice. S- 5 and S-6 did not r equir e any training here on the ground , because these were supposed to be photographs from orbit . That thing was impossible to simulate on the ground. The D-8 required no simulation , so it boiled down to D-6, D- 1 , and D-9 as the exper i ments that required simulation prior to flight. As we said earlier, we felt that the. Translation and Docking Trainer and the Martin Denver simu lation for the D - 6 experimentwAre very valuab l e . ·They gave us the techniques that we needed to perform this thing in space. Gemini Mission Simulator was invaluable, too, for everything- for experiments , operational checks and for the whole mission. White As far as any really D-9 work, though , with the simulator , all we could go t hrough wer e kind of
McDivitt White McDivitt 269 cursory procedures . There was no star field or anything to utilize , which I think would be useful . If we had a decent star field , we could use it out of the GI'1S . Also , on D- 6 the GMS did not provide us anyt hing we could use . Ther e were procedures , right . And like you said, the Translation and Docking was all right for D-6 , but, practically, we had no simulator anywhere that gave us any - thing that I could get out for D-9 . Okay. Are we through with t he briefings? We had a real major briefing that lasted t hree or four days here at the Manned Spacecraft Center about four months prior to the flight . Wasn' t it , Ed? Yes . Well , w as it that long? It w as in March or April-- March wasn ' t it? Somewhere around there . I t hought it was later than that . We had our first real major briefing three months before the flight,on the 8th of March , and we had the experimenters come to Hous t on and go over their experiments in great detail to explain what they wanted and how they w anted us to go about get -
270 ting it . I thought this was very good. We had another briefing on experiments in the flight plan review about six weeks before the flight, and we had another experiments review about ten days to two weeks before the flight . Again , I felt that each and every one of these was certainly time well spent. I think that, probably,the first experiments briefing might have taken place a little sooner . White I've got a comment on D-6 here . Ten days before the flight, they came in with the infor mation for D-6 and said, "How do you want to run the tracking on D-6 and send the infor mation up? " This was not the time to bring up this type of information or try to make this type of decisions. These decisions should have all been firmed up at the six- weeks briefing, and this is what the six-weeks briefing was for . It was to tell us how we were going to run our experiments. After that time there weren 't supposed to be any changes to the procedures , and 10 days before the flight was just to incorporate any last-minute changes a.nd solidify
McDivitt White McDivitt 271 any things that might not be understood too well in the procedures . So this is where , I think, that t he people giving this information in D- 6 never were with it--as far as get t ing the information ready for us for it . Very good . I concur completely . In the future I think the experiments should be firmed up by six weeks prior to flight and the procedures should be well in hand at that time . They shouldn ' t drag on and be dragging on right on down to a few days before the launch, which is exactly what happened on D- 6 . Okay. Equipment . We had some of the equipment available to us as early as six or eight months before the flight . Other equipment kept dragging in until the very last day , just about. I don ' t bel i eve that you can get the training equipment avai l able to the crews too early. We found our selves , in many cases , with the training equip ment locked up out at the Cape for safe keeping- so safe that we couldn ' t even get to it , and we didn ' t get a chance to use it the way we should have . I think only by a lot of noise ma.king, I
272 White McDivitt White guess, were we able to ever break this stuff loose. Training equipment is just what it says--· it should be used for training and it shouldn ' t be kept under lock and key away from the crews. I had that same feeling down there , Jim. I think we both kind of got on this one . It seemed like they'd want to get all the t r aining equipment all together and say, "Ha , ha, 'we've got it all together. We're all up to snuff. There's all of our training equipment. It's all in that locker over there. " That ' s not the way it ought to be. The training equipment shouldn't be in that locker at all . It should all be out to the crew. In t he hands of the crew. And I think up in the crew quarters is where the training equipment belongs and down in the simulator. It should be out and being used . think that one of the keynotes to our success in having a decent amount of photography taken on the flight was that we took the cameras that were available, whether they were flight type or the commercial types of cameras that we car - I
273 ried, and became very very familiar with them in the months before the flight. I recommend very highly that crews that follow in the future get the equipment and utilize it so that it becomes second nature to them prior to the flight. McDivitt Okay . I don't think we need any more on that , do you? 14,8 Spacecraft Systems Test McDivitt I think that we learned quite a bit from our Spacecraft Systems Tests . We had a great number of them in St . Louis and then down at the Cape . I think that the amount that we learned and the time we spent was a little low. I think the rat i o of what you got for your hours spent was low, but I do feel that it's a neces sary thing and that you really should participate in this spacecraft testing. There were long periods of time when we learned nothing, absolutely nothing, but on the other hand we got a feel for our spacecraft and saw how a lot of the systems were working and the only way you can do this is to actually partici pate in
274 White McDivHt 14. 9 EgTess Trajning McDivitt the tes ting. You know, it doesn't seem to fit in here anywhere else, but I think maybe at this point we ought to indicate we attended every one of the management meetings up there at McDonnell while our spacecraft was up there progressing along through the assembly line. I recommend that all crews in the future have representation at all those meetings. That 's right. The most important meetings I've ever gone to in my life, at least since I've come here to the Manned Spacecraft Center , were those Gemini management meetings up at McDonnell . I can't express Pnough the· need for a represent~tive of the flight crews to be there at t}).e meetings. Egress Training. I thought the briefings were excellent , the flotation tank work was excellent, the Gulf exercise was excellent, and the survival gear briefing was excellent. I can't say how glad I am that we've had this training when we plopped down out in the Atlantic Ocean and we were sitting there. Even though we were about to be rescued , I knew that even if they didn't rescue ~ EL&liffilBf!.t W~
275 us right then , I f elt fully confident about being able to take care of mys elf out there in that water. White W e were well prepared in this area , 14 ,1 0 Parachute Traini ng McDivi tt P~rachut e t raining. I thought t hat the parachute training that we had was good . I thought that t he parachute training into the water wi t h pressure suits on was by far the bes t t hat we had . It was the most realistic and it was the kind of training that we would need during actual flight . White And I recommend highly that all crews do this and they go in suits as close to the same kind of con dition that you ' re going to plop down in that water with, and go through the full inflation and not skimp on a thing. McDivitt You get all tangled up in a parachute just the way you're going to get all tangled up in the parachute when- - White That's right . Inflate the life rafts and inflate the Mae Wests and inflate the whole works every time . And if we don ' t have enough life rafts
276 to do it every time , see to it t hat we get it . 14 .1 1 Launch Simulation McDivitt White McDi vi tt White Okay. Launch Simulation. I think that the launch simulations were excellent. I think t hat was the first place that we really had a chance t o work with the people who were going to be controlling us during the flight . I think we got a lot out of it , and I think they got a lot out of it . What we really had t o do was learn , I guess , r espect for each other , and I guess the only way we could do this was to see how each~ of us was going to handle a situation that arose . I don ' t have any ot her comment on it except that I think t hat it was certainly worthwhile . I 've got a comment . Not on t hat, but a thing t hat f its right in . Shoot . I think that the reentry simulations that we did should be made a regular part of the preparations for flight . It's just as important to me as the launch simulation. I t hink t here should be regular reentry simulation for the preparations prior to the flight in the same manner as the
277 launch simulations. McDivitt I think so too. I think those reentry simula tions we did that day were certainly worthwhile . .. We only had to do a few of them to learn the procedures for getting the information back and forth . We tried one one day , and it w as so horribl e that I ' m certainly glad that something like that didn't happen during flight. But after we had done a couple of more it smoothed out, I had no doubt in my mind whatsoever that we were going to be able to pass the in formation back and forth. White That's right. I felt that they were equally as important as the launch simulation . 14.12 Network Simulation McDivitt The Network Simulation. We didn't actually participate in the Network Simulations , and I don't think we missed a thing. I think, though , that something that was r equir ed was a discussion with the Network Controllers . We came back to Houston to tell them our points of view and explain to them the kind of information we w anted passed back and forth and the for mat of ~hlante.d this infor mation given to us. ~• F 1 tiltRf11l ~ : I
278 White 14 , 13 Zero- G Fl i ght McDivitt White ~ Ji ilat. think that during the flight it certainl y proved that it was worthwhile, because that w as the way we got it, and we wer e able to get this • information in a usable manner in a short time . We didn ' t have to go over and over and over. I don ' t have any other comment on that . F.d? No . The zero- g flights are the next topic . I sort of feel that the zero-g flights were one of our most valuable training tools , es pecially since we were going to do the extravehicular activity portion of t he flight . Without this we wouldn't have had the confidence in ourselves in getting in and out of the spacecraft and opening and closing the hatch that was required , so that we probably wouldn't have even done it . F.d , do you have any other comments on that? Concerning the little bit of a hatch problem that we did have, I think that the work t hat I had done on the zero-g airplane sur e prepared m e well to meet the problem t hat we had. I recommend very highly that for any egress work, in which we 're going in and out of the space - JJit;FAO'~ -
279 craft zero-g , that you get up there and work the procedures out thoroughly between not only the guy getting in and out but between the two guys • that are sitting in the seats . This is the way we flew it . We didn't go up there and fly just one go.y jumping in and out the batch. We went up there and flew wi t h the gu:y in both seats, whether the man in the left seat actually worked all the time or not. There were t imes when he had to help , and in our flight it paid off, because there was a time when Jim had to help, and he knew exactly what the probl ems were and was able to give the help necessary . McDivitt Another thing that might have helped here was that I ' ve been in and out of t hat right-hand hatch almost as many times as F,d had . White So we knew just what the pro.blems were. McDivitt So we knew exactly what the problems were. 14 ,14· Flight Plan Training McDivitt Next topic is Flight Plan Training. I think we had such a great number of changes in our flight plan that it ' s really no t fair to discuss this in any great detail . The approach that we did take , as I mentioned earlier, was t hat we would > i::ut IFl □ - ti --
280 fr llliE. White McDivitt White have a good launch and first few orbits, a good retro-preparation , and a good retro and r eentry , with the center of the mission being taken care of by doing the experiment or doing the operationa l check by itself without regard to what went before or what went after. I think this is the kind of training you really need on these long duration flights. Anything else there , Ed? No. I concur heartily. I think that practicing it piecemeal is the only way you can do it . You have any concluding comments? I think we've been ma.king conclusions all day long. I t hink to try to conclude them all , we'd never get them.
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