DISCLOSURE / FILE
NASA-UAP-D020 is the September 2, 1965 preliminary transcript of the Gemini 5 Part II flight crew technical debriefing, including a Visual Sightings section where Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad discussed debris, snow, and glittering material seen during the mission.
NASA-UAP-D020, Gemini 5 Technical Debriefing, Part II, 1965
NASA-UAP-D020 is the September 2, 1965 preliminary transcript of the Gemini 5 Part II flight crew technical debriefing, including a Visual Sightings section where Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad discussed debris, snow, and glittering material seen during the mission.
NASA prepared this confidential preliminary transcript from voice tape recordings of the Gemini 5 crew debriefing held at Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, from August 30 through September 2, 1965. The table of contents places Visual Sightings in section 10, with powered flight, orbital flight, and reentry subsections. The supplied blurb identifies pages 157-220 as the section where Cooper and Conrad discussed debris, snow, and glittering pieces seen during flight. The extractable pages also show the transcript was rushed for mission analysis and carried national-defense handling language before later declassification.
PRELIMINARY GT- 5 FLIGHT CREW DEBRIEFING TRANSCRIPT PART IIp.2
Prepared By Spacecraft Operations Branch Flight Crew Support Division September 2, 1965p.2
This preliminary transcript was made from voice tape recordings of the GT- 5 flight crew debriefing conducted August 30, 1965 thru September 2, 1965 at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida .p.3
This document contai ns a transcript of the second part of the total debriefing.p.3
10. 0 VISUAL SIGHTINGSp.4
10 . 2 Orbital Flightp.4
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22 Authority: NW 91526 GEMINI V j Technical Debriefing Part ~ I_ I__________________ CLASSIFICAT:ON CHANGE o_ ----.......,,_~ s:..;;...: 1 :...::...,::. 1-=-= c L~A o_~ s F E By authority of • o I G !>- .2. -/ - ? "'t.. Chanied by C'~ ~ , Date NOV 2 0 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 Directive 1382.2. THIS MA TE ,-IAL CONTA I NS INF09'MATION AFl"£ CT IN G THE NATION" L DE FENSE OF TH t: U NITED STATES W ITHI N THE MEANING OF TH£ ESPIONAGE LAWS . . TITLE 18. U .S.C. SECTION 793 AN D n• . THE T9'ANS MISS IO N OR REVELATION OF WH ICH IN "N Y M"NNIEl'I TO AN U N ....UTHORIZ£D P'E ASON IS PIIOHIB IT E D BY LAW. GROUP 4 DOWNGRADE D A T J YEAR I N TF RVALS CECL ASS IFIEO AFT£9' 12 YE ...,,-5 973 l
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COt~FIDEt~TIAL PRELIMINARY GT- 5 FLIGHT CREW DEBRIEFING TRANSCRIPT PART II Prepared By Spacecraft Operations Branch Flight Crew Support Division September 2, 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 co~~FIDEt'4TIAL
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Concatenated page-by-page transcript. Born-digital pages came through pdf.js; scanned pages were transcribed by Claude vision OCR. Pages marked unreadable failed multiple OCR retries (heavy redaction, microfilm artifacts, or blank separators) and are kept in place for audit.
22 Authority: NW 91526 GEMINI V j Technical Debriefing Part ~ I_ I__________________ CLASSIFICAT:ON CHANGE o_ ----.......,,_~ s:..;;...: 1 :...::...,::. 1-=-= c L~A o_~ s F E By authority of • o I G !>- .2. -/ - ? "'t.. Chanied by C'~ ~ , Date NOV 2 0 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 Directive 1382.2. THIS MA TE ,-IAL CONTA I NS INF09'MATION AFl"£ CT IN G THE NATION" L DE FENSE OF TH t: U NITED STATES W ITHI N THE MEANING OF TH£ ESPIONAGE LAWS . . TITLE 18. U .S.C. SECTION 793 AN D n• . THE T9'ANS MISS IO N OR REVELATION OF WH ICH IN "N Y M"NNIEl'I TO AN U N ....UTHORIZ£D P'E ASON IS PIIOHIB IT E D BY LAW. GROUP 4 DOWNGRADE D A T J YEAR I N TF RVALS CECL ASS IFIEO AFT£9' 12 YE ...,,-5 973 l
COt~FIDEt~TIAL PRELIMINARY GT- 5 FLIGHT CREW DEBRIEFING TRANSCRIPT PART II Prepared By Spacecraft Operations Branch Flight Crew Support Division September 2, 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 co~~FIDEt'4TIAL
(' PREFACE This preliminary transcript was made from voice tape recordings of the GT- 5 flight crew debriefing conducted August 30, 1965 thru September 2, 1965 at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida . Although all the m aterial 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 . This document contai ns a transcript of the second part of the total debriefing. A prel iminary transcript of the first part was publi shed on September 1, 1965 , and it contains the crew' s description of the mission from an operati onal standpoint.; CAts4flOEt!!IIAb TABLE OF CONTENTS Paragraph Page number 8 . 0 SYSTEMS OPERATION 8 . 1 Pla t f o:rm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . . • • 1 8 . 2 O.AMS •• ..... . ....... . . . ......... . . . .....• .. •. •• ••••• 16 8 . 3 RCS • ....... . .. • ....•..... . . •. .••. .. .... . • .•••••• • • • 47 8 . 4 Environmen t a l Control System ·•· •·• ··•·••· · ··•••••• • 54 8 , 5 Comm.1.lllications .... . . .. ............... . .. . ...••••••• 66 8 . 6 Electrica l Sys tem ... . ... . ......................... . 80 8 . 7 Computer ..... . .. . ... ... ......... . ........ . .. . . . ... . 82 8 . 8 Cr ew Sta tion .................. .... ................. 90 9 , 0 OPERATIONAL CHECKS 9.1 Apollo Landmark Identifica tion • ••• • ·••·••·•••• • •• · 132 9. 2 Cabin Lighting Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . . • . • . • • 146 9. 3 SPADATS Tra cking Check . .. . .. . .. . . .. . . . . .. • .. • • . . .. 14 7 9. 4 UHF Antenna Pattern Test ..... .. . .. .. . .....••.•.••. 147 9. 5 Thrus ter Illuminat ion Checks ........... . . •....•••• 148 9. 6 Dual Command Transmitter Tes t ....... . .. .... ...••• • 148 9. 7 Radar Test s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . • • . 148 9. 8 ID1 Eva llla.tion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • • . • . 150 10. 0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS 10 . 1 Powered Fl ight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 10 . 2 Orbital Flight ...... . ... . ....... . .... .. ....•• . .• . . 153 10 . 3 Reentcy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 11.0 EXPERIMENTS 11 . 1 Visual Definition of Celesti al O bjects (D- 1) , Nearby Object Photography (D- 2) , and Terres t rial Features (D- 6) ••···· • ·•·• •· ··• · • •• · • · ··• •••• •• •• • · 210 11. 2 Cel estia l , Space and Terrestria l Ra diometry ..•.••• 222 11. 3 Synoptic Ter r a in (S- 5) and Wea ther (S- 6) . J?rl.otography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . • • • • • • • • 228 11 . 4 Visual Acuity and Astronaut Visibi lity (S-8/D- 13) and Vision Test (M- 9) .......... .. ..... . ......... . . 233 11. 5 Electros tati c Charge (MSC-1 ) .......... •• . . •.•• • •• • 242 11 . 6 Zodiacal Li ght Photography (S- 1) .... .. .......• •• .• 243 11. 7 In- flight Exer ciser (M- 3) ........... . .... . ........ 243 11. 8 In- f l i ght Phonocardio gram (M- 4) ••••··•••••••· • ··•• 244 11. 9 Cardiovascular Refl ex Conditioning (M- 1) . •••••••• • 244 11. 10 Cloud Top Spectrometer (S- 7) •·•••••··•••·•• • ••· ••• 246 11. 11 Miscel laneous ............. . . . ... . .•...... . ...••••• 248
CQ t-4 F-1 DEt-4TIAL 12 . 0 PR.EMISSION PLANNING 12.1 Mission Plan (Trajectory) .. . .. .. .. ..... .. . ......... 255 12. 2 Flig}lt Plan .. ... .. ... ... . ..... . . ..... .. . . . .... . .... 255 12.3 Spac ecraft Changes . . .. .. ..... . ... .. .... ... . . .. .... . 255 12.4 Mission Rules . . .... . . . ..... ........... .. ...... ..... 256 12. 5 Experiments .. .... . .. . . ...... . .. ..........•......... 2 56 12.6 Training Activities . . .. . .. .. .. .... .. . ....... ...•.. . 257 MISSION CONTROL 13. l GO/NO GO •• . . ... •. ....... ... ... . . . . ...... •• •. •• • ... . 261 13. 2 FLA and CLA Updates .. .. .... ... ... ....... . .. ... .. . .. 261 13. 3 Consumables .• .. . .. . . . .. ... ....... ..... .. . . ......... 261 13.4 Flight Plan Changes • . .. ... . . . . ... . .. ....•.. ... .. . •. 264 13 . 5 Systems .• • . .. ... . ............ .. . .... ..•.•..•• . . . . .. 267 13. 6 Experiments Real - Time Updates .. .. ........... . . . . .. . 268 TRAINING 14. 1 Gemini Mission Simulator . . ................. .... ... . 270 14.2 LT\T , DCPS • , . ... .... . . . . .• .. . .........•• . .••. . • •. .• • 284 14. 3 MAC Engineering Simulator •• • ••·•·••· • · •·• ••••••· • •• 285 14.4 Centrifuge ... ...... . ... . .. . ........................ 286 14.5 Translation and Docking Trainer ••• · •····•·• · ··•••·· 286 14. 6 PlSlletaritllD. .. . . . .. . . . .. . .... . .. ....... . . ... . ....... 288 14 . 7 Systems Briefings . .. .. ...... . . .. .. . .. . . .. .... .. . . . . 292 14 . 8 Flight Experiments .. . .. . . ... . . .... . . .........•. .. .. 293 14.9 Spacecraft Systems Tests . .. .... . ... .. . ..... ........ 294 14 . 10 Egress Training ..... . ..... . . . . . . . ...... .... . .. ..... 296 14.11 Parachute Training ......... ... ... . . .... .. .......... 297 14. 12 Ia.unch simulation ............. . . . . . .. .. . . .... .. ... . 298 14. 13 Network Simulation .. ....... . ... .. ... . . . ...... . .. ... 298 14. 14 Reentry Simulation . ... . ... .. ...... .. ... .......... . . 298 14. 15 Simulated Network Simulations . . ... . . ....... . ...... . 298 14.16 Zero "G" Fligh.ts ............ . .. . . .... . . ........ .. . . 299 14. 17 Flight Plan Tra ining ... .... .. . . . . . . .. ......... .. ... 300 15. 0 CONCLUDING COMMENTS 15.1 Crew Q u.arters .... ; ....... . .. . .. . .. . . .. •.... . .... .. . 30 2 15 . 2 Physical Training and Aircraft Flying . ... ..... ..... 303 15.3 Sea I.a.b . . .. ........ ... ....... . . ... .. . . .. . .... .. . ... 304 15. 4 W a tches and Clocks . .. . .. ....... . ....... ...... .. . ... 304 15.5 Miscellaneous Discrepencies •• · ··•·• · ·· • • ••••••••••• 306 15. 6 Medica l Aspects .. . .. .. .. . . . . . ........ . .. .. .... . .... 310
1 8.1 Platform Cooper 8.O SYSTEMS OPERATIONS By day we used standard procedure of finding a zero yaw, which is a little easier to do down at about retro position. The nose is a little bit in the way for determining zero yaw unless you pitch down just a little past nose low in zero zero- zero position. When pitched down just a tiny bit, zero yaw was very readily apparent to within a fairly reasonable degree of accuracy, and then ease it right on up . We had lines for the zero zero position to give us our pitch and roll on the horizon. This was the regular day alinement. Night was pretty much the same except we 1 d get zero yaw by a star, get roll and pitch by the zero lines on the window (or knowing where they were approximately) line this with the top of the air glow or the horizon. At that point you'd go into Cage, hold it there at that position until it caged) then uncage the platform to BEF or SEF whichever the case might be, and then to to Plat form and Attitude on the FDM and FDI's. Then aline the platform fine aline SEF or BEF by keeping ,
2 the needles zeroed. It would slowly gyro torque itself and correct out the small errors for fine alinement. Anything to add, Pete? Conrad Well, I didn ' t hear all of that, but I think the alinement is straightforward. One thlng I had not read in either the GT- 3 or GT- 4 debriefings on this subject on out the window alinement was that we have a window gage that you can us1i t hat will put you right on in roll and pitch ancl, of course, for yaw you still have to use the same out the window reference. Cooper One thing that I think that should very definitely training wise be readily available anc. we looked and looked and looked and couldn't fir..d any was an actual scale picture of the left hand wi ndow and the right hand window with what the hcri zon should look like at zero-zero-zero and at retro attitude and at minus 90 degrees left and 90 degrees r ight and at 60 degrees left and 60 degrees r ight and this type thing . I've never seen an a~tual drawing showing the horizon line on a window a·'ld what i t should look l ike .
3 Conrad Yes Cooper I think this would be a tremendous benefit and shouldn't be difficult to come up with. Conrad If you place your eye so that it goes through the lower left corner of the right window or the lower right corner of the left window and run that eye position right through the front RCS yaw thruster, the lower yaw thruster in the front ring, I guess that's ring A, anyway, you take a line between your eye, the corner of the window and the front RCS yaw thruster, right through the middle of it, and put that line on the top of the airglow or the horizon. Then the spacecraft, and this looks like an excessively nose up attitude, but it's not, you're zero degrees in pitch then the window frame is just about vertical to the horizon and it forms a perpendicular angle. Cooper The inside edge of the frame . Conrad The inside up and down edge of the window corner makes a perpendicular angle to the horizon and you can use that as a roll gage. If you set it up
4 that way that platform isn ' t i n roll or pitch. off 4 or 5 degrees Cooper So, i t r eally looks like, when you fir3t start lining it up, it appear s to you that f ::-om the left seat that you ' re actually rolled l eft , Conrad Yes, that's right . Cooper And f r om your seat it would look l i ke j t actuall y r olled right . was Cooper It doesn ' t look horizontal at al l, but that ' s due to the fact t ha t you 're sitting off by thi s offset . Conrad One other thing that you might say about platform alinement is that if you ' re not on in roll and pi tch, mainl y roll, t his really will ea t you up in alinement time . Cooper Roll and yaw are you can be off a out. t he bad errors creator:, . l ot i n and it' 11 corr ec:t Pitch r ight Conrad Not if the other two (roll and yaw) are off . Cooper But if you 're off in roll and/or yaw th€n it really takes a long time and its real rcugh .
5 Conrad You don't want to be deceived by the fact that the needles are holding in the center pretty well. Cooper That's right, one thing that we found when we were going through this real, real long platform alinement prior to getting all l i ned up for retro fire was that we had the needles all alined, t hey were sitting all glued out . But you have to s i t there with them for a little b i t glued out . They sit there all zeroed out, it looks like everything was all alined and al l of a sudden yaw begin to ease off quite a bit showing that we weren ' t alined. Conrad At one time we went to Orbit Rate when we had not pulled the yaw all the way in and, boy, it showed up in r oll as we started moving around. Cooper Orbit Rate and Horizon Scan. Conrad I mean it shwed up in the roll axis . Cooper Oh, yes. Right . Conrad You have to take t he time and be careful with the platform alinement, no doubt about i t. ° CSf*fDEt◄ TIAl
6 , Cooper And i t takes t ime to do it and do a job on it . r ~ally good Modes . The only thing I can say about that it takes an excessively long tim1 ; Cage is to Cage . Conrad I 'll comment on this even though we d:i. dn't get a chance to do the rendezvous , but even in simula tion, it was apparent and the l i ttl e bit t hat we did in flight caging the ~latform, getting ready for alinements and t hings l ike -;hat, it was very time consuming . I think tha ·; you could find use for a f ast slave cycle . Cooper Very much so. Conrad Fast Cage cycle is what I should say. I 'll say it's a luxury item but it sure could be helpful . Cooper SEF and BEF worked j ust like advertisEid . SEF for fine aline and small- end- forward, BEF for reYersing your phase angles so that you ' re still steering to and fine alining blunt en cl forward . Conrad J i m and Ed made the comment that t hey never alined BEF, that t hey a lways alined SEF. We alined SEF normally through the flight and when ,:e were ready 60 ►◄~ ~
7 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad to retro, we wanted to save as much fuel as possible, so we alined BEF and I think alining BEF is easier than in SEF. Yes , I think you can tell yaw better going backwards than you can going forward. Yes. I don't know why, maybe it was just psychological . I agree with you, I really think you're right. I think you can tell it better. It streams away from you a little more . Yes. It was easier to pull in in yaw. I thought it was a little more comfortable feeling . I enjoyed the riding around alining the platform BEF much more than when we alined it SEF, and I felt we were closer to being on most of the time when we pulled it in in yaw. O f course, we had a little better control system there, it does help. Yes . M t ◄ FIDE ►~TIAL •
8 ~NftDE~~TIAt· ,_ Cooper I think either way (SEF, BEF) is good, both worked very a dequately and it just depends on which way you want to aline for what you ' re going to do . BEF is certainl y a t least as acceptable as SEF. ORBIT RATE was not bad off a t all . We didn't have any l arge errors in it due to t he f a ct that we had more nearly circulari zed our oroit from t he burns that we did . Conrad W e were about at 171- 60 at that time p <=:riod . I don't know what t hey ha d picked as an orbit rate number at the end finally for the REP . Cooper W e were about 107, 166 . Conrad Yes . I was really surprised with how ,..,ell the platform stayed on after just t aking a quick look at zero- zero- zero, not even trying to ali ne these. W e j ust passed freely through this in dr ifting flight and uncaged the platform right into O r bit Rate, and it didn't get off five or ten degrees in any of the three axis . Cooper For about 20 hours . 'i0 ►~FIDE ►~TIAL
9 G©t◄ FIDl!~~TIAL Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad ,, Cooper Yes, for about 20 hours that we drifted around. It was finally off the most in roll. It got about 15 degrees off in roll . Orbit Rate worked very well . Other than inertial work, I just didn't see any big advantage in free. You'd still think in terms of the local horizon up there most of the time. Yes . We just never had much occasion during the f light to use FREE. Platform displays . Bal l oper ation through the poles was just fantastic! It was so smooth. The only way you could tell that you were going through a pole is you could see the roll index, vehicle is on the roll gimbal, flip . Yes. This is something we had trouble finding out, whether this was the case or not and we deliberately ran several specific checks of this. <!rJ~~FIDEt~TIAL
10 Regardless of which way you approachec. it from, whether you approached i t fast or slm.- or whether you 're going through the 90 or 270 pojnt on the ball, you can go right smack through the middle of it, you can sit right in the middle of it, you can move up or down, r ight or left and the ball doesn't jump, doesn't j itter, doesn't do anything . It's just beautiful . Conrad Yes . Cooper W e did a burn right through each one of the poles . I think the controls are pretty simila-r to what they are in the s imulator . There are t wo exceptions, one of which I think i s valid and which I think may be influenced by the fact that we had a lot of s low degredation in ou:~ OAMS system. I thought that the PlJISE system in the spacecraft had a lot less torque, a reasonable amount less torque and it got a lot leBs, as we went along it got less and less and leHs . Conrad Yes . Cooper But even i nitially, it felt like thP- PlLSE system
11 had less authority in the spacecraft than it does in t he simulator. On the other hand, I felt the RATE COMMAND system had a heck of a lot more authority in the spacecraft than it does in the simulator . Cooper That RATE COMMAND just flat snaps you in. In the simulator, when you come around in RATE COMMAND and you let off it will go through 5 to 10 degrees. You have to let off on it 5 to 10 degrees early. By golly, in the spacecraft you didn't have to let off even a degree early. When you let go, it stopped right there jus t like you put on the brakes. Conrad Yeah. It was good and it was tight . Cooper It was so tight that you almost had to - - Conrad That was OAMS Rate Command. Cooper You almost had the feeling that the OAMS Rate Command was almost bending the Adapter Section . I t had such high torquing rate . Conrad On day 2 and 3, our OAMS system was working completely correct. I was extremely impressed
12 • FCSD REP Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad FCSD REP Cooper Conrad with how nice a control system i t was. We made several maneuvers using this control Eystem and didn't have any gripes on that sys tem at all . As Gordo said we were really impressed wjth the Rate Command system. When you turned around 90 degr ees in crder to get rid of the REP, did you use the 8-ball ? Yes . FDI 's are on this Gimbal flip bus i ness too, you see . They do that in the trainer, but they were steady as a rock in the spacecraft . Yes, we used the FDI's for t he fi ne al ine . Al though to get there we used the 8- ball . We had trained to use the IVI ' s . That 's right. W e used the IVI ' s , not t he FDI' s . We used t he I VI ' s as the real fine measure of being l i ned up . We used the FDI 's too . You can use anything in the spacecraft.
13 Cooper .. Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad • You can't use the FDI 's or the 8- ball as a reference in the mission simulation because you have this gimbal flip which just gives you fits . We didn't use Ra te Command very much, mainly just for the burns . In fact, t he burns are the onl y times we used Rate Command. I used the Dir ect system several times and I thought the Direct was really good. It was good and crisp and you had good authority with it. I had the impression that the spacecraft was a lot more stable vehicle in Di rect than it was in the simulator . Tmt' s right . In t he simulator you tend to sit there and go too much and go too much . When Gordo'd stick a shot of Direct in to go someplace, it never showed up in another axis . An equal shot i n the other direction would stop it r i ght now. Yes. The effects momentum of the spacecraft didn ' t seem to be as great in flight as they were i n the ~f:HDEt◄TIA ~
14 "t OMFtDE~ ◄ TIAL simulator. You didn ' t have to lead a :, much. Cooper That's right . The Direct system was a much more precise system in the spacecraft than it i s in the s ' mulator . Conrad I thought it was quite easy to fly, but there's no doubt about it, boy, that Rate Corrun and eats up the fuel .
15 • Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Direct uses quite a bit of fuel also. We did use a little fuel t hat one day. We were doing so many experiments in a row that we had to very rapidly get the spacecraft back to a zero zero- zero or a pitch down 30 posi tion. When you track one of these targets and come through the nadir and keep on going, boy, you're really smoking towards a rearward direction. You're sitti ng i nverted BEF. That's r i ght, you ' ve got rates built up going away from you and you ' d have to use Direct to stop those rates, get yourself moved all the way back up here and s top them again. Maybe it'd be so tight that you'd use Di rect to get down and start on it, and then switch to Pulse and track in Pul se and then r i ght back up and start doing something else. Well, we di d eat up a lot of fuel that day, but we got everything done that day. We hit darned near all targets. Di rect i s a real responsive , real fine way to maneuver. 60t~Fl0Et.t:tAt
16 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper 8. 2 OAMS Cooper Cooper •i Q: Mf~Cf1st I IAla .. Platform controls were very straight fc,rward. I thought they all functioned as expected. The Platform took the full 25 minutes to go through the fast heat, and the first time on it was really cold and took another 3 minutes worth before start of the Cage Cycle. After that, it seemed to stick right around 25 minutes to get the platform up and on the line and start into Cage . Right now, I've got extreme confidence in that Platform. I really think it does well. '.Ihe platform did an outstanding job during the entire flight. I t sure did. We fired the OAMS on the pad and it was mushy. You couldn't hear them fire just gas mainly, About the third round of firings however, you could really feel them fire off, they were all good. During flight the OAMS started out very good and in about the third day began to degrade. ~:he f i fth day
~liUiiAL 17 i s when we found the two thrusters that were not operating correctly. Conr ad 'Ille number 8 thruster was working real good when we found that the number 7 thruster was out. So we shut the sys tem down again and had a big talk with Houston about this . We went one more revolution and they gave us some tests to perform on 7 and that 's when we di scovered 8 wasn ' t working. Conrad 'lwo of them quit , within an orbit of one another. Cooper We had already run complete tests on it and number 8 had been working on the previous tests and quit on the next one. 'Ille story of the old OAMS inflight system was that gradually as the days went by there was more , and more that went wrong with it unti l f i nally at the end we had less than half the thrusters left and they were pretty bad. Conrad I realized a couple of heater blankets were probably out on the OAMS system, but I'm still convinced unt i l somebody convi nces me otherwise, that the thing that shot the OAMS system down, was the decision to turn off the OAMS heater. I had ques ioned the decision in the air to only point that
18 I could. I didn 't think we were in that much trouble for electrical power. I still think it was a m i stake be cause I think even with a couple of blankets out, if we'd have kept the ,3ystem warm wi th the rest of the heaters, we'd have never froze them up. Cooper 'llie thrusters themselves were actually ·vorki ng because you could actually get a glow off of them. There was a little bi t of fuel or oxidiier coming out of it and burning , but it wasn't getting the proper amount of mi xture ratio. Conrad Now, they could have been dirty. That :ould be it, but it was purely in the valves i n the thrusters themselves because they were putting out thrust even at the end. I f you wanted to hold it i n full D:Lrect wi th 7 and 8 circuit breaker e ngs.ged , you were getting wet f uel thrust. Cooper Yes . You were getti ng a little wet thr~st. Conrad let's go into how the whole thing occurred. We had shut the heat er down a long time ago and we really hadn't agreed wi th that, but there wasn't much we could do about it. We were i n the m i ddle
, 19 of doing experiments on the fifth day, and we had had a little trouble alining the platform. What was happening, apparently was the number 7 thruster was getting cranky, but we also knew we were vent ing hydrogen and we knew this because we were getting some torqueing out of that. At the t i me Gordo was having trouble ali ning the Platform, we thought it was because the hydrogen was venting. Finally Gardo said, "There's something wrong with t the control systems. " Once we deci ded there was something wrong wi th the control system, that ' s when it went just like back i n the simulator. We shut everything down, went to Direct, thought about it for a second and turned off all the circuit breakers , turned them all back on one at a time , tested all of the thrusters and, sure enough , when we got to number 7, it was out, completely out. Conrad So then I tri ed secondary ACME bias power. We tried the seconday yaw and the secondary attitude drivers with no effect so we were relatively as sured that something had happened in either the hand controller or the fuel was not feeding. We decided to power down r i ght there , which we did , and we advised flight of what the problem was . £ 8.M&HW~Jl~i I
20 think that's about the time we really decided the s canner wasn' t a ny good , or had we already tol d them about that? Cooper Yes. We 'd already t old them about that. Conrad Yes , you ' re right. I know what it was . That's when we discovered that the voice tape was out. We were right i n the middle of s everal experiments and it occurred approximate l y like 16:30: 54 on the f i f th day. We r eported to Houston that the voice tape was out, the number 7 yaw L~ft thruster was out and that I had turned the OAMS heater back on. I was suspicious of that all the ·;ime . That's when they called up a nd gave us this m:i.nimum power down. Why did we go i nto that? They had us power down everything. Cooper At about the same time that we came up with this, they came up with this idea that the hrdrogen was boiling off s o fast that we were going t o be out of hydrogen by about the end of the f i fth day at the rat e we were goi ng i f we d i dn't power down and stop the usage of i t . .iO~~FIDEMTfffl: •
21 Conrad Cooper Conrad FCSD REP Conrad Yes. That's when we came around on the next revolution. 'Illey had us fire up everything again to take a look at i t and that's when we found out number 8 had just gone down the tubes too. But number 8 was still givi ng us something; number 8 was stil l burning, but it was burning off mi xture. You could see a flame . You could see a glow out of it. You couldn' t hear it like you could hear the other thrusters, but you could see lights on the ni ght side so you knew something was coming out. 'Ille drivers just weren't openi ng all the way or some thing. The fifth day at 16:30 is the first problem you had with the OAMS, is that right? No, earlier. When we first powered the system up, we were having trouble with that very f irst platform alining and we felt we were having some hydrogen venting problems. 'Ihat's when we drifted way off, and Gordo said, "'Ille Pulse system isn't going to hack this hydrogen venting. " He went t o Di rect and blipped the yaw l eft thrusters. •
22 All kinds of garbage came by the spacecraft. It looked like we blew a whole bunch of junk out of it. I remember distinctly seeing gold balls . Cooper Great b i g balls of l iquid. Conrad So it must have been raw fue l . Something at this time wasn 't working right , but I guess number 8 was putting out full thrust and number 7 was still work i ng but not all the way. Now mayb<? right then and there if we'd have really worked that system over; fired all the thrusters in Direc1 ; and a couple of good healthy loads throug it ,., and put the heater s back on the line, we might have sal vaged thew vaged the whole system. It must have been right at the point of freezing up. Cooper This was early i n the fifth day. .£:Obi:EIOEttllAL
23 Conrad We didn't hit the direct thrusters long enough to heat them I don't think. I do distinctly remember saying to Gordo "We blew all this junk out of there . " Conrad We ' d never seen anything like that before and we'd been up there 5 days and seen all sorts of things . We could see liquid oxygen when we vented it, if we vented i t under the right light conditions . We could see when we vented hydrogen under the right lighting conditions. It would all float by the spacecraft and at low sun angles, either at sunup or sundown any one of these quantities, ECS o 2 , CRYO o 2 , or RSF hydrogen, you could see it come whistling by the spacecraft. We were continually floating around in these old silver balls of either hydrogen or oxygen. Cooper Okay, well that was pretty well the background of what happened. Some thrusters that had checked out good would subsequently check out bad or be completely inoperative as the days went by. So finally we wound up with maybe half of the total OAMS thrusters still operating properly.
24 Conrad • We had some thrust remaining in every axis but yaw l eft . We had some in yaw left if you just wanted to dump raw fuel overboard . I don ' t know whether it was fuel or oxidizer. Cooper Generally, what we'd do is roll and pitch to get our yaw left . Conrad I f we were tumbling and wanted to damp we just waited until we translated into the right axis in whi ch we had some authority . Cooper The one axis that always seemed to work pretty good so far as control authority was pitch. Conrad Yes Cooper Pitch up and pitch down seemed to work reasonably well all the time. Conrad Yes . I wonder i f that had something to do with the pitch thruster lines on the manifold being close to the source. Pitch was always good . Our trouble was mainly coupling in the yaw thrusters both right and left. Cooper Source pressure was easy to monitor . SJurce temper ature we could monitor and it was too CJld .
Conrad Cooper Cooper Conrad Cooper Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad 25 It ran down in the 48 degree area . It showed that it was running too cold . That's why we questioned turning the OAMS heater off , Regul ated pressure was fine . Right on the money . Propellant quantity seemed to read r easonably good until it got down towards the end. At that point (from about 10 percent on down) the propellant quantity just went on down to the bottom of the scale . It was reading below zero and yet ground readouts indicated OAMS propellant quantity remaining . Monitoring of OAMS propellant r emaining onboard information was fairly good . Yes. I thought we were fairly close. Gr ound i nformation agreed fairly good with onboard information in general . The whole OAMS sy stems got to be reviewed . I think that they think we wasted a lot of fuel and I think that on day 3 we probabl y were a little overgenerous with our fuel usage. But I ' m still ret◄ FtE>Et.~TIA ~ I
26 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conr ad CO t--1 FID Et◄ :rIA~ ,; convinced that because we went so long with the OAMS heater off that we were not burning a nominal fuel to oxidizer ratio. Yes . Even though we were in a rush to get a lot of .... these things done, I was still extremelr conscious of fuel usage . Although I'd used Direct to get i t started, I wouldn't just fire all the way around in Direct input, let it coast around, a~d then stop it right there. Yes. I never saw fuel usage in the sim1lator like we saw in flight . I t just seemed to go down very rapidly on the gauge during that one period of time. And yet we went night after night all night long in Horizon Scan or in Pulse and would hardly use any fuel at all . As a matter of fact, the ground gave me the figures. This was when we were ::unning all ni ght long in Horizon Scan so that we had a nice reference . They said "You' re using about 2 pounds a night. 11 Now, that seems like a r easonable amount for what we were doing. •
27 Cooper We were using it for Attitude Hold and for getting pictures and to get through the day side . Conrad Oh Yes. We never used Rate Command except for the maneuver burns. Cooper We were tracking the missile using Diredt. get on it in a rush so I went to Direct . Had to Conrad Cooper I questioned propellant quantity prior to lift - off. It was 87 percent at lift - off, I thought we were supposed to be 100 percent on the gage at lift - off . I thought we had propellant quantity loaded to the maximum? Well, they said we were about 50 pounds under . Conrad Yes, they said we had about 50 pounds less fuel than we were supposed to have. Cooper We asked them about this before we l ifted off, Cooper At about 4 or 5 minutes before lift - off, them about this. we asked Conrad We got a "We ' re checking" and that's the last we heard from it. And off we went .
28 Cooper So then we asked again when we wer e in orbit, "About this under load on GA.MS fuel" . I suspect t hat something was fouled up because we didn ' t get a full 0AMS load . That was pretty bad . Cooper I think monitor ing onboard of propell~mt r emaining t o compl et e the mission was pretty good. The fore cast fuel for mis si on completion of GE,mini V ought to be reviewed because somebody didn ' t quite come up with the right fuel figures . Twenty- six percent remaining after the REP would not havE been nearly enough to have ~one the r emainder of the mission . Conrad Yes . I t hi nk t hat in computing the a.mount of fuel used t o perform a maneuver, they figure out how much to get the r ates going but they must s top there . They must not f i gur e how much fuel it takes you to . get back to, say, zer o- zero- zero . Appirentl y t hey assume that whenever you get done with a tracking maneuver, you j ust drift to get back to zero- zero zero. Over the U. S . we had maybe 6 or 7 minutes be t ween a 30 degree pitch- down target to the next 30 degr ee pitch- down target . You ' ve got to t r ack it all t he way through, bing the spacecraft all the way back up and then go to and track the next target .
29 Cooper And stop your rate at the back . Conrad As a matter of fact, that's about twice the fuel usage . They may take this into account, I doubt it. They're very conservative on their estimates . Cooper Selector controls and switches were all right . Attitude controller was fine . Maneuver controllers . ( We had every intention of checking the right one and we never did check it because of other problems . Inflight malfunction irregularities we've already covered pretty well . Cooper Attitude Control Modes, Rate Command was excellent . Reentry Rate Command we never checked . Conrad I don't even think you need it . Cooper And I think it could be removed from the spacecraft as far as I ' m concerned . I never used or need it on the simulator . I never liked it. Conrad Pilots aren't going to tolerate these higher r ates . They will damp before these rates are reached. Cooper Direct is a good mode. There ' s nothing at all wrong with Direct . I thought it was much crisper, much crisper in the spacecraft than in the simulator
30 Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper shows that it is . The Pulse mode was very economical on fuel and I felt that in the sinru.latc,r you had a little more authority than you actually did in the spacecraft . The spacecraft had slightly less authority in Pulse than the sinru.lator does . Inci dentally, you can use Pulse just for a month of Sundays and never see the fuel go down on the 0AMS gage at all. You can use Pulse all day long with using little fuel usage . Horizon s can, the primary Scanner was inoperative as was stated e3.Tlier . The Secondary Scanner worked fine. The sca::mers, I think, operated quite satisfactorily. We had a lot of scanner dropout in the primary and eiren in the secondary. We had some dropout in the :iecondary when we first were going in and out of i;unlight areas . But then it seemed to work allright . Horizon Scan Control Mode worked fine . Real good. It's a loose mode but it still works fir..e . It's got wide limits on it of course, -which i s okay . The mode itself works fine. There was s ome thing really fouled up in the platform rnode . It didn't work at all like it's supposed to. The platform mode is supposed to be plus or minus 5/loth of a degree . If it was plus or minus 10 degrees I 'll eat my hat . .. •
Conrad Cooper Conrad FCSD Rep Cooper Conrad Conrad Cooper 31 I thought it held to about a degree and a half . Not in yaw , you remember . It allowed yaw to wander off by probably a good 10 degrees there. Remember it allowed right yaw to wander off by about 10 degrees and just sit off there in right yaw several times. It wouldn't even bring it back. Yes . That was the trouble . Do you think this had anything to do with your con trol problem? W-ell, it may have been . It may have been that con trol was somewhat intermittent right there . I don ' t know, but it might have been . But Rate Command sure worked good using those same controls. Yes . I suspect that being the first time that it was cranked up since spacecraft number 2 , it may not have been tweeked as well as it could have been. It certainly didn't work like it did on the simulator , I ' ll put it that way. It didnlt work properly, and it was no good the way it was. We never used it after we originally tried it out and after we 1 d tried doing this one burn on it to see if it would hold. The one that it did hold on, our first perigee adjust, it held beautifully. During the next one, it got so bad it wasn I t any
32 Cooper Conrad Conrad good . Ther e again , it might have been a f unction of the thrusters going out . In any event , I think that 1 s an error ,;hat somebody needs to look i nto . I ' m n ot sure that pl atfor m mode is doing what i t should. I know that , t heoretically , • and by t he diagrams on it and the limit s that it ought to be a ver y pr ecise control mod E! . Spacecraft separation at SECO + 20 couldn ' t have been better , jus t fine . Translat i on per igeE! adjust went like cl ockwork. Tha t was our fi r st r eal burn and I thi r.k we got something like 9 . 6 f t/sec on t he IVI ir.stead of 10 . 0 , but t he burn wasn ' t that crit icaJ . I checked accelerometer bias and it seE•med like the accel er ometer bias incr eased l a t er in the f light . I specif icall y checked it f or the REP end it was okay . I 1 d just set up zer os in the wirdow and went to Catch- Up and they stayed zero for 3 or 4 minutes or longer . So that satisfied me . I checked it l ater on in the f light and I don ' t think we r an more than a minute and we clickEd up a f oot per second on the fore - aft window. That can be checked on the tape . In the beginning it was entirely acceptable for the REP .
33 Cooper I think we had some bias, just how much I don ' t lmow. The timing of the translation was fine , updating was fine. Operations and checklist were okay. Computer usage, okay. Conrad It was easier to make a burn on the simulator that had no up- down or left and right in it than it was in the spacecraft . Gordo did a real good job of tracking on every burn and I didn't see it wander hardly at all . Cooper And all the IVI ' s would be zero . Conrad And all the IVI 1 s would be zero, but we'd have .4. of 10 a foot in one axis and ~O in another. Conrad 8 Yes . The worst cross- coupling, we had 10 in one axis, and when we burned in the platform mode, but we were checking that . It could have been accelero meter bias again, or, the spacecraft is more sensi - • tive to picking up up- down and l eft - right velocities than I thought it was . Conrad Gordo did a real good job of tracking. He tracked as well as he did in the simulator and we never had this show up in another axis in the simulator . Cooper It would be zero , zero , zero in the simulator. Conrad It was hardly worth my time checking address 81 and 82 in the simulator because I could just tell he
34 wasn't going to have any velocities in there , and very seldom did . But we never fail ed t o have fairly sizeable ones , like fa and fo fps, in another axis and I'm not quite sure how it got therE·. I guess the spacecraft is extremely sensitive . If you ' re going to make pr ecise burns , you I ve gotta really burn precisely and i f you want to take out the errors , take out the address 81 and 82 errors so that you don ' t introduce anything else . During the difficult ren - dezvous maneuvers, you have to plan on more f uel usage because you're going to have to take it out with the up- down thrusters . Cooper I think what you ' re going to have to do is stop short of burning off all your forward or aft velocity, particularly the forward velocity, and then use the canted thrusters to burn off the right- Left and up- do,m and that will take out part of the remaLnder of the forward velocity. If it hasn ' t taken it all out , then bleep out the rest of the f orward . I think that 1 s the only way you can do it if you want to burn them al l t o zeros. I don ' t believe you can t r ack any more precisely if you keep all your IVI ' s zeroed right down the money. If you burn it off and stop just at the right time so that everything should turn
35 Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper Conrad Cooper ;CO tsifH0E1t~I IAL up zero , then youst i·11 win • d up wi ·th .1_ 2- or 10 , 10 , 6 I in all your windows. I just don t t know how you re 10 ever going to do any better than that . (Unless you use the above procedure). Translation REP deployment was passable . This one you didn ' t . You didn ' t fire back at the REP after jettison? No. Let's replace this maneuver with the simulated opera tion (phantom rendezvous). We did deploy the REP and the radar did operate properly. Originally when the debriefing guide was made out, this section covered the translation back after REP deployment and the subsequent translations . Okay . We ' ll just have to use the translations that they made on the simulated run . We kicked the REP out at 90 degrees right yaw. We kicked it out at 02 07 + 15, or 15 seconds l ate . The reason we were 15 seconds late , as we stated earlier, was that going into the night side the night before , after all our careful platform alinements , all of a sudden the horizon scanner began to drop
out on us and we began to drift off in yaw. Conrad Dropping out wouldn't have been bad, but when it dropped out it also commanded some thrusting. Cooper W e got some real good blips out of it . Conrad W e were alining i n the Horizon Scan Mode and I got the impression that it pitched us up . Cooper W e wer e already alined , and we had gone to Orbital Rate and Horizon Scan, just to come alcng there in time to go in . As soon as we had the Ilatform all al i ned , and before we went in on the night side , I decided I would realine the pl atform ji.:st very briefly . So I had gone to SEF and to IULSE and I was checking and pulsing it . • But becai.:.se t hen in SEF position all your torquing is done f rom your Horizon Scanner. When t he Horizon Scar,ner began to drop out we began to get real erratic needle display and it looked like our platform alinemEmt was deter iorating. I was trying to correct thiB , but obviously, it was really kicking us off . That was when we went t o CAGE , tried desperatelr to get it caged and realined in tim e , and thought we had i t realined . We may have had it reasonab:.y well alined by the time we f inally yawed right . I ·; looked like it was . The needles wer e all zeroed out and
FCSD Rep Cooper Conrad Conrad Cooper Conrad everything was settled down . The Horizon Scanner .was working at that point . It quit working properly after we turned to yaw right . We had already gone into Orbital Rate, so we could care less about the scanner at this point . We got it alined, and we ' re already in Orbital Rate . We yawed right , got squared away and 15 seconds late ejected the REP on the IVI's all zeroed . We then used a couple of DIRECT pulses , zipped back around , picked it up going around to the 270. It was going right straight out to 270 on our ball . We could see the REP light whenever we were passing through the 90 degree point . On my side, I could see it flashing on the nose . By the time we got around it was in quite close, we could see it going out with a very slow tumble rate, flashing . What would you estimate the tumble rate to be? It was tumbling very slowly, I would say maybe a half to 1 degree per second . I 1 d say a degree per second. I couldn't tell what it was in roll . It didn't seem to be tumbling in more than 2 axes . That was ha.rd to tell . When I saw it , you could see the dipole come around . We couldn 1 t tell anything about roll, but it was not
38 tumbling in the other axes. The blanket was sitting _ r ight next to it . Cooper The blanket went out and was sitting ri1 sht by it. It went right on out with it . That was thi~ funny part of it . The blanket was between the REP and us . Conrad Yes. Cooper The blanket goes out first. The REP ha:3 a lot more mementum, apparently the REP had gone b;r the blanket: Apparently it had either hit it or moved it over or something because the blanket was betwe,m us and the REP . Conrad Yes. I don ' t know exactly what happenecl there . Cooper It was just a few feet outside of the REP . The REP went straight on out to 270 , radar was working fine , r eading out everything just right , lock1~d on, and went out to the point where it should have s·~arted s l owing down . Conrad This is where I had a mistake in the fl:.ght plan and didn't catch it . The computer was in PHELAUNCH and I was wondering why I couldn't get any digital readout . I t took me a few seconds to catch on to that one and I realized that I had to get the computEir into CATCH- UP. We had never run into this problem where we'd gone through a complete insertion checklist
39 which calls for putting the computer to CATCH- UP. I had gone through and zeroed 25 , 26, and 27, talcing the ascent routine numbers out of it . So that I knew that we were getting the right readings . I had put the computer back in PRELAUNCH, also had this discus sion at that time and that ' s when I didn't blow the cold IR doors until the REP was out . Cooper I've said it before, and I also said it after my Mercury flight ; that is , "If you continually shove things in on people very early in the flight, the quality of it is going to be degraded." You need the first two or three orbits to check the systems over, to get oriented , learn how to aline the platform, to learn how to use the systems , to learn where things are, to do these things before you start giving - people complicated tasks . You just aren ' t going to get the quality out of them unless they're flying exactly the same vehicle for the second or third time and they 1 re very experienced in it and they 're familiar with everything that 's onboard and there ' s no change in equipment , no change in control system, no change in any of these things . Then , perhaps they could leap right off and go right into the first orbit and do these things. But to put somebody into iottf ~~ •
40 a strange vehicle, with strange control systems tha t you've only simulated as about best you can , and no visual simulation available for doing anything out the- window; you just cannot expect people to stay right on top of things when it occurs ir. the firs t part of the flight . This is an ideal eYample ; we had worked and worked and worked and worked and worked to have our timing down just rigl:.t. If noth ing had happened , we would have had our timing down just right and everything would have gor..e just per fect . Pete would have been right on hi~ checklist and blown the cold IR doors right on tirre. Cooper I I d have been right exactly on time on g·etting the REP out and everything would have gone reach- keen . Just that one thi ng , the Hori zon Scanner failure , really threw the skids to the thing and caused us to be running s l ightl y late . There was added con fusion in trying to f igure out how to get t hings going and salvage the whole thing really threw the skids to it . Cooper The REP went out and it continued going out instead of slowing down as it should. It cont i nued to move on out at quite a separation r ate . The thing that still has us a little puzzled , instead of slowing
41 down and coming to a null out there , it appeared to s t art m oving s omewhat at the same separation rate to the south of us slightly towards a trail position very slowly. We tracked it f or a long t ime . We were track ing it straight out and then all nf a sudden , it be - gan to loop around slightly to the lef t . Conrad It di d something like I 1 d never seen before! Cooper I 1 d never seen this happen in the simulator, and it still doesn ' t seem quite f easi ble to us that this could ever happen. Conrad One possible answer, and it ' s r elated to something that we saw later in the flight , Gordo , where we alined the platform and had -yaw error couple into roll . Might not this have given us bad steering in formation as far as our radar needles were concerned if the scanner wasn ' t working properly? We didn ' t have the platform alined right . We went along 30 minutes , almost one- third of an orbit . I f we di dn ' t have an alined platform, that would start coupling up in some other axis like roll and we woul d be off in yaw. Then when we thought we were pointing at the pole , we reall y weren't. Maybe it didn 1 t reall y drift behind us , maybe it stayed out on our wing. W e must have put it out fairly well
42 Cooper Conr ad Cooper Conrad FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper out of plane , in that it hung around us so darned long. It stayed with us for 20 orbits ! W e saw it until the light burned out . I t was never f ar away from us . During five night cycles it was close enough that the flashing light illuminated the spacecraft . At the proper times, when we would get nodal crossing, when we turned around and actually s aw the REP it was very close . W e t hought we were going t o hit i t . It was bright enough t o illuminate the spacecraft and the flashing light r eally impress ed me . Did you take pictures? Ye s , I think we have some 70- mm Hassel blad pictures and I took 16- mm moving pictur es . That was the last of the REP exercise . I understand all t he movie film came out, too. So you ' ll have pictures of it . At this point , we wer e rapidly running out of cryo genic fuel cell oxygen. We decided t h io.t the only way we were going t o salvage the f l i ght waE to stop using it at this rapid a rate . We had to make the choice whether we were going to power down and con t i nue the f light , or whether we were gcing to end the flight very abruptly if i t continuEd going down we@t.tf 1!9l!l'it~~.
43 at this rate . Cooper We had a short discussion on t his and decided that we ' d better power down and forget the REP because we were in trouble . Cooper So we tearful ly decided to give up the REP and power down . Houston agreed with us when we got in touch with them that we had done the right thing. That ended the REP. We did see it for quite a few orbits later . Then Houston came up with the simulated Agena ren dezvous exercise , which they put on one of their computers . The three burns they gave us to do went off very satisfactorily, the thrusters worked very well . They would not allow us to use anything but the aft firing thrusters because they wanted to keep the cryogenic oxygen in the right position in the cryo tanks . Apparently the burns went to their satisf ac-· tion too . They seemed to feel that it put us right where we should be . Cooper We tried one of these burns with the Platform Mode . It did not work satisfactorily so I used Rate Command Conrad which worked very well . 1 We t ried to take the errors out and thats where we got into trouble . We had about a fo error left and right and a fo error up and down , so Gordo fired off the fo t G~~FIDE ► ,•♦♦ L .
44 FCSD rep Conrad FCSD rep Conrad left and r ight . We wound up wi tr. too much going forward and we started to back up and suddenly we remembered we couldn't back up s o then we decided well , we 'd j ust leave thEi errors on the burn and burn i t the best we could because no matter what happened He're going to translate i nto forward and what we should have done and we didn't think of i t at the time--but you learn--we shouldn ' t have burned all the forward--we should have burned down to about a foot of what we were supposed to have forward ancl then taken out the left , right , up and down and go ahead and burn the forward again. The updates that they sent you on- - That worked fine. There was no problem. We copied the numbers down , entered the computer. We had plenty of t i me to make the maneuver. We btuned r ight on the cl ock as advertised and we seemed to have gotten approximately i n the positi on they wanted us to get to . What burns did you s i mulate? Well, we did a-- I ' ve got them r ight here. @oM~lA Al
45 Cooper Conr ad Cooper Conr ad Cooper Conrad Conrad FCSD r ep Conrad co~~r,ocr~r,At , We did a separation burn and we did a cl osing burn and a coelliptic burn . Those the ones we did , Pete? Well , i t was- - We did not a standard coelliptic--it was a- - No , we did a maneuver burn , which as--wait a minute--we did an apogee adjust maneuver which was a retrograde of 20.1 feet , then we did a phase adjust maneuver which was a forwar d burn of 15 feet . No . Yeah. 15 . 8 feet , then we did an out- of- plane burn , yawed left 90 0 of 15 feet and then we did a reverse coelliptic burn- - We burned- let's see--we burned 16 . 4 feet forward and we di d four burns altogether. Aft thruster s for all? Aft thrusters for all- -on out- of- plane- and that was the only t ime that we did ever , ever f l y the translat ional l eft , right , up, down thrusters. We used them to take out some of the IVI readings there
Cooper Conrad FCSD rep Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper a couple of times. And they were very straight forward--left, right , up, down . We even fired the forward-one quick l ittle blip . We fired the forward one then we suddenly remembered we weren't supposed to . What kind of visual out- the -window did you see on these translations? In other words- - Left/right lights things up real w?ll- I could see the glow from the aft--they were- - J. B. is referring to visual cues )n the horizon and we were on the gages- - They were at night--middle of the night- everything we did was in the middl 1 ~ of the night--this spacecraft only ran in t he middle of the night (laughter) . I really don't remember making a burn- We never did anything in the day- - Yeah , I think one or two of them were on the day side--but by and large- - I never did so much night work in rzy- life-- EONFIDEt~ AL,.
47 FCSD rep Conrad Cooper 8 .3 RCS FCSD rep Cooper Conrad Cooper FCSD rep Cooper FCSD rep Conrad Cooper Cooper COt~FIDE~~TIAt OK- well , I don't think there is much we can add then--did you get all of these readings out of- - 8O- 81- 82- 58- 59- 69- Yeah, that stuff works just like the simulator. We got the readings . OK - On to 8 .3 - RCS. Let's go into the RCS - yeah , I don ' t think there is anything more- - This is all- - Yeah, this is all we can do on the REP. OK- RCS Operational Checks - We did just like we had planned in our little book. We a ctivated the RCS and Check Ring A and ACME and direct--al l three axis- Ring B - Check Ring Bin ACME and direct--all three axis and they worked beautifully. How about the pad checks--were they- Negative No pad checks? Not with the sealed system- - A sealed system - I'm glad it was- Control Modes - We used pulse and we used horizon scan- - tQEt◄ Ttl<L
48 Conrad We didn ' t even check reentry rate command- Cooper We used direct, UBed pulse . We uned the rate command . We used hori zon scan . Conrad I know what it was--why don ' t you tell them about this--and I ' m going to see if I can get the fuel f i gures- - Cooper OK. And they all worked very ade quately. I thought the rate command system, I mean the RCS system was an excellent system. It was really crisp and just really, I thought, it was a real good solid system. Rate command was much more- - FCSD rep What about the retrof ire - how did i t hold retrofire? Cooper Beautifully , it was just no effort at all - hold- - FCSD rep + 1 degree or less? Cooper Oh, yeah , easily. We had a little offset in number 3 and number 4. I could feel them offsetting us . I just cranked in a little bit of RCS : Boy, it just glued it right in there, it just wasn ' t about - - I felt like we could have had four or five times the offset we had--and never have ,.
49 GQt"EIDE~~TIAt FCSD rep Cooper budged it off there . RCS , I mean the rate command--One thing on rate command before retrofire and just after retrofire, waiting for retrojet , and then starting the pitch up to go up and roll over inverted and go to zero lift , the dual ring rate command is just mor e than you can handle. It ' s just a lot more than control authority than you want--you tend to over- shoot on things because there is just so much control tor que in there . As I had stated, after I f ired retro and jettisoned the retropack and pitched up to roll over then from ther eon I went to s i ngle ring pulse, and used that . Reentry rate command--we didn ' t use . Direct - used direct t o do the reentry on single ring direct and used the pulse mode from r etrojet to 400K. On the single ring direct reentry did you have--did you feel like you had all the authority you wanted? Yeah--until very late--as I stated some time down , oh, half way thru the reentry ,_ C~ J i Hl:EttT
50 where you really begin to get the high g , after your high g , in fact, along about .. coincidental with a real high g, when you begin to get some fairly good oe1cillations , very r apid rate, I had no problE'ms damping them at all but I didn' t have tt.e time to keep switching back and forth f rom rate to attitude and go back to rate anc. damp them real quick and then go back to & .ttitude and decide where I was on the guide and then go back to rate and damp them and go back to guidance , so I finally--they got to getting fairly good where I had to devote a l i ttle bit of time to damping them , and I f i nally just went to guidance and stayed on guidance andJust flicked over tc single r i ng rate command to damp the oscillati ons and then used the attitude control i n the rate command to steer the computer steers . Which worked out versJ well and there was--there never was really any oscillating-you never really--I could go to rate on there and you could hardly ever see the rate needles CQNftO Etsi:filA L - ..
51 CO t-ct FIDE t'<ITI AL jiggle--single ring was holding i t just as tight as could be . Retrofire attitude .. control - I had already mentioned on there dual ring. Rate Command, reentry attitude control-- I had already mentioned how we shot the reentry. No primary heater lights . Heater lights on the RCS - they were on practically--we had the heater on 99 percent of the whole flight. We turned it off, got heater lights on Ring A first, brought the RCS heaters on then rechecked-heater light went off and turned the heater off and about five or ten minutes later-fifteen minutes later, the heater light came on and then it was on Ring Band we turned the heater back on and this went on five or six times and finally we just turned the heater on and left it on the whole flight. I monitored the temper~tures f~equently throughout the whole flight in the RCS Ring A - temperature ran about 70 degrees or about 65 degrees and the RCS Ring B temperature ran about 70 to 72 degrees the entire flight . At <::.:.€0 ►~FIDE~~T I A L
52 FCSD rep Cooper one time I noted the RCS Ring B was up to 80 degrees. I watched i t quite closely for a while and then it never went beyond that and came on back down to about 70. And they stayed there essentia.lly the whole flight . I think you need thoee heaters on obviously the whole--all tt.e time--I'd never have any of them off at all now. Thruster firing colIDllents . When the RCS thrusters fire at night they clank out what ever you are l ooking at in the night side. The only way you are going to use any night attitude reference i s to watct. what you are doing, get l~ned up in a reference and then f i re a thruster and pl an on ws.iting a few seconds before you can tel l wt.ere you are at again . They really light t ~ the place . When you are firing them at night . How far does the flame stick cut? The plume goes out about-- appear s to go out about 4 feet and the plume is j ust the width of the outside diameter of tha.t thruster as i t comes out --it has a little bit of ex - pansion ratio as it comes out and it goes -'>►4 FlDEfi~Tfii:l' .;
53 FCSD rep Cooper b4~1DEt ◄ TIAw r ight up just about that size--it grows very slightly but not a heck of a lot and s o it's just about something i n the order of 4 inches diameter. Something like that--it has little expansion ratio--i t expands as it comes out the nozzle slightly, and the~ it just goes sort of like a column and it fans out very s lightly but it goes up something in the order of 4 to 5 feet distance from the thruster. Did you ever get any pictures of that? No, we didn't . We had all our cameras stowed at the time we got that cranked up . We intended to. Systems Shutdown - It worked just like advertised and we turned the prop valves off , very shortly then it rtms out of f uel and stops firing and you notice that there is a little burning around all the nozzles. There we got a little residual fuel--not much--just a little bit- - it dribbles and fumes after i mpact- -probably very neglible. I don;t really think we got them after impact , I think we got them while still airborne . But they were almost
54 8.4 ECS i o+◄ FtOEP◄ IIAl neglible-- you had to really b3 looking for them to tell they were t here . There was just a very slight m usty odor in there- - fume. Not sure-- I'm not sure that p~rt of this odor isn 't part of t he ablati:1g going on because fiberglass ablates with pretty high fume rates. Some pretty pungent fumes off - ab}ating fibe:rgJas s· The mobility of the suit is nJ better or no worse than any other suit . It--suit definitely cuts you down and iecreases mobility. In anything you do , i t just limits you i n what you can do, limits the movements you can make and I 1 :n talki ng about unpressurized mobility at thi3 point even . We didn't do any pressurized ·Nork in the cockpit but t o unpressurize t ·:1e suit definitel y cuts you down a gr=at deal in your mobility and where you cm reach and takes up a great deal of r oom. Pressure - Are they talking about pressu rized suit work here? Well , since you didn't do any pressurized , how about the und and- - €'01QF1 FCSD r ep
55 a@8t ◄ ftef~tJtl Cooper Yeah, when you are sealed up in it it gives you about a half a psi in pressure in there which doesn't decrease your mobility a great deal over what the regular suit does . Temperature in the suit, I certainly can't complain there. I had to sort of eat crow on that . That suit circuit ran consistently. We had to really shut it completely down to get above 55 degrees t emperature on the suit heat exchanger outlet and generally it ran around 50 degrees which just froze my rear off and I had my suit flow . . the general configuration we had was both of us f".ad the suit flow rates quite a bit back . I had mine clear back to almost a minimum position and we had the suit coolant loop shut down to where it was just about a half to one notch open from the fully OFF position. I really got quite concerned that they were going to freeze us to death. In fact one whole night side I had my suit inlet exhaust hoses off and laying down alongside the seat because e ~ as iust too cold in the suit . Humidiv. C ►fF 9Et-~,l'AL
56 The suit seemed to run pretty ,iry . I wasn ' t conscious of any great amount of perspiration in i t at all. A couple of tim1 ~s when we had fairly heavy work loads I 1 ;as aware of the feeling of cool air and folt like it was drying sweat . CO 2 . We got 2 or 3 indications of CO 2 on the PCO 2 gage . One thing, whenever a station nends you a calibrate, well, you get a big jump on that gage but there were other timeB when we weren ' t even near a stati on when that gage came up and began to give an indication and one time it gave such a poBitive indication for quite a period of time that we got a little concerned about i t because it was right when all this other stuff was ' going, on day 5 and we I d shut c.own control systems had failed and we were destined for 3 deys of drifting and the PCOr started up . ~ So we pulled out one of the ta;es , one of the CO 2 tapes that we had onboard . lt showed it was below 2 nun of mercury, below that anyway. It was this usually erroneous €:age . The suit comfort is no darn good. It is worse than any ~ mNffl>Et◄ llA ~
57 other suit but there just isn't any way of having comfort in a pressure suit . Darn thing gives you pressure points and bulges and gouges and cuts down, scrapes you here and there, prevents you from being able to stretch and scratch and have any comfort. There isn't a;ny comfort in a suit . I don ' t give a darn who says so . There just isn't a;ny real comfort in a pressure suit . In the configuration that we flew in from the time we got 6-4 GO , our helmets and glove s came off--were stowed in the footwell , and they were never put on again until just before retrofire . We ran the whole flight in just the basic _ pressure suit torso with the neck dam on and the wrist dams on and with the light- weight headset and I guess the comfort was as good as you could possibly have , but it still wasn't a;ny good and we cuffed the pressure suits plenty of times.
. 58 Cooper Humidity. The suit seemed to run :pre·;ty d:ry. I wasn't conscious of any great amount of :perspiration in it a t all. A couple of times we had fairly heavy work loads , I was aware of any :.ittle cool a:ir:' and felt like it was kind of drying sweat . CO 2 . We got two or three indications of CO? on the PC0 2 gage. One thing , when ever a station gives you a I cali.brate well you get a big jump on t hat gage but there are other times when we weren't even near a statiun when that gage came up and began to give an indication and one time it gave such a :positive indication for quite a :period of ttme t hat we got a little concerned about it because it was right when all this other stuff was going on , day 5 and we had shut down , control systems had failed and we were destined for three days of drifting and the PC0 started up . So, we :pulled out one of the 2 tapes , one of the CO 2 tapes we had on board and gave a check of the suit circuit there and i t showed that it was below 2 millimeters of a,., two milli meters of mercury was what it was .. . below that anyway. We probably assumed it was tr.is usually 6j@t4FIDE ►◄T IA-4 , •
59 ...,CQt~FH)Et~TIAf • erroneous gage . The suit comfort is no darn good . It ' s no worse than any other suit but there just isn't any way of having comfort in a pressure suit . The darn thing gives you pressure points and bulges and gouges and cuff dam scrapes you here and there and prevents you from being able to stretch and scratch and have any comfort . There isn't any comfort in the suit, I don't give a darn who says so, there just isn't any real comfort in a pressure suit . In the configuration that we flew in,from time we got our 6-4 Go, our helmets and •• • gloves came off, were stowed in the foot well and they were never put on again until just before retrofire . We ran the whole flight in just a basic pressure suit torso with the neck dam on and with wrists dams on and with a light-weight head set. I guess the comfort was as good as you could possibly haV@, but it still wasn' t any good and we cussed the pressure suit plenty of times . The controls were good on it . No problem there. The o Demand Regulator , as far as we could tell, worked fine. We had no real occassion to reall y stress it much or anything. The suit umbilical was Both my inlet and my exhaust always in the way. ~~9i ►,•f.A~ 2
60 • made my whole chest and rib area sor E • f rom the mainfol d , the end i nside the suit being gouged over , being cantilevered over and digging in side ways on me . So , it 's a real pressure point. It was the worst pressure point I had were from the suit hoses, and I had my suit hoses deliberatel y longer ,, than people said they should be so I ~ould get away f rom this effect . So, I di d have sla~k to prevent ~hem from getting drug over ·but even so they bothered me. Finger tip lights ·,1ere good and I kept one glove out and kep t it over on a piece velcro o,.l t he side to use in the event we had any kind of cabin light failures. When P(~te was asleep I frequently used my finger tip lightB on that glove to light up some of the gages to look around with. Cabin pressure sealed off high on our gage . This i s under s ection 2, Cabin. Our CE.bin pressure a t launch sealed off high a t about 5, 5, which it always did i n the a t titude chamber in all t he runs we made, in f ac t , in just exactly the same way. Then i t bled down slowly t o about 4 , 9 and never budged from there the whole flight . It stayed right there . We never saw one flick out of it a t
FCSD Rep Cooper all. Cabin temperature ran 70 to 75 degrees and humidity ran about 62 to 67 per cent the who l e flight . We have the figures somewhere here . We can get in here and get those ou t , but we have the figures where we mn daily checkr:i; H.:. 1,~i i ,1 t; once a day and generally t wo or three times a day ,of the wet and dry bulb readings . Okay. We have that back in the original check . Okay. CO 2 . The cabin, I thought was just really good. It was very seldom that you really got any smell in the cabin a t all . We thought the cabin would have a dark green cloud evolve out of it when they finally opened it, but I think the cabin, to the time we landed, was still a pretty fresh cabin. It seemed to scrub the odors, defication odor s would linger on for two or three or four hours perhaps , but it even scrubbed those out . You couldn ' t smell them at all . CO 2 ; we had no--any kind of co 2 . Comfort day or night . The cabi n ran too cold at night , particularly when we· were drifting and had some fairly high drift rates the cabin got quite cold and in fact even froze up the windows. The cabin fan we never used at all until we turned it on just before retrofire ;
62 about 45 minutes before retrofire we turned the cabin fan on and let it run for about 30 minutes and i t decreased the cabin t emperatu:ce about 20 degrees . Got it down about 50 degre,:)S and then turned it off prior to starting retrofire . Cabin pressure relief valve; never actuall;r did we . . . the cabin pressure dual regulator , the release side of the cabin pressure regulator was the only one that ever . . . . We never heard the cabin relief valve actuate after launch . During launch we were going up we heard it moan a couple of times . The cabin vent val ve . Th•? cabin vent valve, we actuated it on the way down once since we couldn't m aintain positive pressu:~e we actuated the vent and the snorkel. Cabin rep:~essurizati on . We never checked it because we didn ' t need to. Cabin air inlet valve . We actually never ran any check on it . Cabin air recirc , we had open the whole time . Fully open . Pri mary o 2 . System monitoring, system monitoring was ea:3y. Primary o 2 was very good. The only problem we had with it, it kept yawing us around when it was venting. Whenever it would get up to vent pre:3sure and vent, why, it would give us a bit of a yaw, left
FCSD Rep Cooper yaw. Build up to any rate you wanted to . Over a period of time , one time we got up to about 12 degrees per second. You just sit there, and drift it will build you up more , and more and more . You can really hear it pop off back there . You can hear i t "shhh". You see this trem endous big fiel d of stars go by. If i t ' s in the early or lat e night you just , the whole sky is just complet ely covered with this , just millions of stars.. . part icles, liquid gases ... I guess . ~uantity measur ing system; worked perfectly satisfactory. Flow rates were good. Pressure was . . . pressure was fine . It got up ; I don ' t think you ever need to use, unless you are doing something like EVA , I don't think you ever should consider ever using a heater on that oxygen system because i t all by itself fairly rapidly gets on up there to boil off pressures . Boil off temperatures I should say. How about BJC.Jp, UTE, Di d you ever use that? Used O Hi gh Rate when they were purging the cabin. 2 It worked f ine , reset fine. We used i t then for landing. Manual heater we never used. The controls ; we did very little as f ar as doing anything wi th
FCSD Rep Cooper • the Secondary O 2 . Mine was ope:1, Pete' s was closed the whole flight . That's the way they stayed, just like for the check list . Never saw one quiver in either one of them the ',1hole mission. Pressure stayed right? Pressure stayed right where it was on launch. CO 2 partial pressure . The gauge was some·,1hat erratic and gave us two or three readings that we had CO partial pressure~one of which we finally 2 checked and found we did not have and so then we disbelieved the gauge . . . : After that, although it generally read down at zero . Coolant : Coolant loops worked real fine . w~ were -running two coolant loops ON most of the time sin,Je we had fuel cells running . For 2 twenty- hour per iods we had fuel cell, section 2 of the fuel ,)ells shut off , and the coolant loops shut off. In one period of time we had ci rcuit breaker pulled on coolant loop number 1 coolant loop . Secondary cool ant 1oop , then we were running on pum:? B and with bYJ>ass ON. BYJ>assing it around so we were heating before bringing the section 2 back nn the line after long shut down peri od we bYJ)assed the cool ant loop , the secondary coolant loop , in order to warm -€8-t◄ FID[pqf 6tL_ ~
COt~ft0E~~TIA l up the fuel cell section and then went to normal configuration right on the line . Evaporator oper - ation: for 45 minutes the Oh , t his i s not the suit. Yes , this ie the water evaporator . 45 minutes after launch we got yaw deviati ons from the evaporator and after that they stopped. $ornewhere just slightly beyond 45 minutes they were gone . By the time we got around one or bi t anyway, I didn't notice any at all . Water m anagement . Well, we ran the water m anagem ent in t he normal mode all the time. In our configurat i on t he normal mode is the drink mode . We r an NORMAL, NORMAL , NORMAL and OFF the whole time . The only t i m e we went to OFF was when we went to over - board and the FLUSH position on the uri ne heater system and they all worked fine . No problem at all, and the water was excell ent water. It w as ful l of air. It had a lot of air i n i t , a lot of air bubbles , but they didn ' t s e em to effect us adversely. W e decided to go ahead and just ignore i t and drink it and i t seemed to w ork out f i ne . The wat er was really nice and cold the w hole t ime , so i t t ast ed good . No objectionable t a s te to i t at all. I thought the water was excellent . Humidity sensor . .GON£ Hil Et~TJ.il:s
66 8,5 Communications Cooper Yes, we took it. It worked fine . It dries out very rapidly; you have to refill it with water frequently, but that is no problem . The drink gun fills it very readily. I t seems to be pretty accurate . Stowage , of course , is always a problem and we obtained readings at least once a day on it . Communications . Interphone : operation and quality were excellent. UHF performance : cJuntdown was excellent , orbit was excellent, md recovery was excellent , except that nobody was receiving our transmitter in the recovery area. However, they were receiving it back here in Houst)n. Twice AIR BOSS finally shut up talking long enough, said "some other station calling : me, say"' , and then immediately he'd launch off int) another long spiel and I don ' t know whether he was just drowning us out or whether they just never got us. At any rate , nobody was getting us , except Houston, a couple of times. But the UHF perfonnance in gen eral throughout the whole flight was excellent . And even AIR BOSS received when we w,~re on our way down in the parachute. He got two steers to us on the way down . Voice tape reco::.-der worked w QOhU,IDEN+t1'<~
FCSD Rep Cooper fine for two cartidges worth and then quit. Was i t two or four? I don't lmow, it was some l ow number. Maybe it was four . Anyway, it quit fairly early in the flight . The tape recorder was finished. DCS . O k8iY , until the last 30 minutes of the flight , the DCS couldn't have been better. The updates were good , the ground coordination was f ine on i t . The things they gave us to put in the MDIU were given in a good manner and were put in. No problem. Pete got them all loaded in fine . No problem at all until that last up-date we got from Carnarvon which they updated us with our compu t er a~d reentry con figuration, after we wer e all ready supposed to have our last update from Houston and without telling everybody to look on his board and see what mode our computer was in, he sends this update which is just about ... blew our cork there . And which I think at this point right now, having experienced this one occasion of this happening at the worst possible time it could happen in, my recommendation right now to flight crews is that they fly the DCS circuit breaker in the OFF position. I concur. FCSD Rep ee~◄ F tDe~ Al~
68 Cooper That's a drastic move to make , but just that one experience was just enough to convince me that if you can ' t 100 per cent trust everybody and the system isn ' t going to work, then you just don ' t dare trust it at all. I wouldn' t even think of not flying again wit h that DCS circui t breaker ON . Conrad At least for reentry. Cooper At lease in crew ... . Conrad You couldn't have hurt us any better than by sending t hat load up . Cooper Real- time t ransmitter,delayed-time trmsmitter, fine . Stand-by t ransmitter ... . Conrad W e were out of fuel on Ring A. And we had 4.9 and 4. 6 left in Ring B. Which is good. It says that Ring A ran out sometime after Ring B ~ame on, which says we went around the world 1 1/2 ttmes and re- entered on Ring A by itself . That's :9retty impressive. 33 pounds of fuel It al so shows you how much fuel we used in Ring B. W e tested Ring B and turned it off and didn ' t turn i t on u1til sometime less than 70,000 f eet and turned it back off again at 30,000 feet so we used the majorit;r of the fuel on RATE COMMAN]) in Ring B from 65 to 30 which says it probably fired continuously all thi? way down , 08-~~FIDE~~T.I•
69 Cooper FCSD Rep Conr ad damping those rates . But it sure was steady. We used almost 80 percent of the , yes , 80 percent of the fuel in Ring B from 65 to 30 . 65 down. On this voice tape recorder. Didn't you say ·it broke after you got 4 tapes. Yes, what happened was that the thing worked j ust · 1ike advertised. Two minutes before the tape ran out you get the little flicker on the tape recorder l i ght which is now up on the caution and warning panel, and at the end of the two minutes the TAPE OUT light comes on steady and that operat es just as advertised and then one day I put a new tape in it and Gordo and I held a big debriefing on it , About what all our storage was and present configuration that we were in in the spacecraft , and what we thought the six, I mean , 'that the seven troops would want to know about how we were using our storage and we thought the best place to do it was in flight right there while we were using it and we really put down some good dope and we also had some thoughts on Apollo on the darn thing and I figured we talked at least an hour on the thing, and I couldn't understand why it hadn't run out and
70 FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper Conrad Conrad I looked down in there and I marked ·;he t ape , you know with my pencil , and put it back in the tape recorder and turned it on and sure enough it wasn ' t running. The motor burned ou·; in the tape recorder. Now, when I turned the tape recorder switch ON and OFF I could see a slight rise in the ammeter but I think what was happening was that we were getting the amplification part of it , but that the motor to the tape recorder was not running, tt wasn't driving the tape . That seemec. to be the f ailure . While we're here why don't you flip back a couple of pages while you were out and see jf there is anythi ng that you want to add. Okay. Yes ,. Gordo covered the h~ater operation on the ECS . Okay, they came on pretty early in the flight and we kept checking to see that it was truly working and it was . System check covered the fumes and we got fumes at 27 ,000 and we were very light because we did have the ... . Under EX:;S I covered how you loved your pressure suit for mobility and comfort . Yes , okay. I w on ' t say anymore on that . Finger tip lights . Listen, now there ' s a very in - .- o ►,fJOet>Jflltt
co~~FID EtiTI-A L 71 teresting thing. The finger tip lights were the only darn lights we had in the spacecraft that we could move around, which is ridiculous . We kept holding a glove up once in a while looking at lights all night because we Cooper They sure were ... . Conra d We had the gloves stowed a.nd I broke my auxiliary light because it was too ha.rd to hold there. When I pulled it out, the very first time I pulled it out I shattered it a.nd Gordo never used the one on his side because it's just not handy. What you really need in there is, we've got to quality one of those little pen lights . Cooper One of those little pen flash. lights . Conrad A g.zy- really needs one of those little pen flash lights up there a.nd I really wish that we had ta.ken the ones along but we couldn't get them qualified. They had an open switch in them a.nd we couldn't get them qualified for 100 per cent oxygen. Cooper You really need a little light that doesn ' t have a.n electric cord fastened to it that you ca.n just s tick in your suit or on a pieoe of velcro where you can just get to it and use it, you know.
72 Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper I There is plenty of time at night when you are flying. Now the worst thing a t all w a s a guy sleeping. If you turn on your instrument panel lights it only lights your instrument and the· thing is you are interested in most is that ce,nter panel with the cabin press and the secondary o and 2 all these things in it. So , the big thing is that you need an auxiliary light in t here, like a pen light. Yes, you did. The umbilicals: I had about the right fit on the umbilicals and all that s ort of jazz. The cabin press was great. .The thing locked up a little high on lift off like it was supposed to but then a 4.9 never moved. W e covered the co bit. Did 2 you c·over the comfort day night and how the high rotation rates that effect us? We m~ver used the cabin fan except just prior to l:Lft off w here it is cal l ed for in sequence SJ1d when we put the cabin cooler to the full cold po: :11tion and brought on the cabin f an and fl ew it through ' -re entry that was it. Primary o did vent quite a 2 bit. You covered that. Yes . .:i~ fid:DE~~Tl&Li
73 Conrad I'm sure that's all for now. It never bothered us, of ~ odor. The normal type venting system worked fine. Cooper I covered that on the CO partial press . . . . 2 Conrad Did you cover the coolant splashing all over the nose of the spacecraft just after adapter s ep . That must have been coolant, it's the only thing I can think of that wouldn't be frozen up there. But it was liquid and it actually splashed on the nose after adapter sep and retrofire. It ca.me around behind the spacecraft and I saw it splash and the marks are still on the nose of the spacecraft where it hit . Water management I thought was great except it had air in it. It did have air in it but pressures were good, the w a ter was cold, it tasted good, but we did have air in the water and it wasn't the amount that w e had at the factory, but there was air in the water. You could see it when you filled your darn rehydra table food bags. Cooper Yes. Conrad But, it was good water. Cooper I covered the humidity sensor, we used it ... com munications, I don't think you say anything but
74 excellent on that. Conrad They were great. Even the UHF worked wnll. I mean HF . Cooper Voice tape recorder. Then we were on. I just covered tha t . It didn't work. Conrad Did you cover the . .. the exact detail s on this DCS? How we didn ' t get the light. The only time we didn't get the light. Cooper No, I didn't cover the details on that E ixcept just that we had gotten DCS unforecast over Carnarvon after when we already had our load in from Houston, and then it came on unexpectedly, not ev-en checking to see what mode we were in here, W e we• re in re entry mode and sent us this DCS updatin€' our TR and updating our load, DCS load there, and just as he said he was sending, why rapidly then we switched out of reentry to prelaunch but never got any DCS l i ght on either the TR or the load. Conrad Yes , he s ent two s eparate commands, and theoretical ly the light should come on each time but I never got the lights, so I'm highly suspicious of what hap pened and I've got to have an explana tion why this load.... Cooper Which he verified to the cores and they checked out
75 ak 0tr4f.lDEt-4TIAL all right. Conrad Yes, it was address 03 and address 10 and they ver ified okay and that seemed to convince everybody except me that the load was correct and my mistake, in retrospect, I should have made them ,transmit the load and either satisfied myself that the DCS light had burned out, or that the operation did take place truly in the ma.mter in which it was supposed to and it did light the DCS light . He knew the TR was right because he had his TR clock synched in with the spacecraft TR. Cooper And he assumed the load was right because he got maps back on it, but ... . I'm not too sure I .. . . Conrad Yes, that's pretty dangerous. Pretty dangerous . Cooper I think this is it as I jus t pointed out to J . B. and we were discussing in the corridor here, my feelings on it are right now are real strongly, that my recommendation would be to piloia during really critical time periods, "I'd just turn the DCS circuit breaker off." I wouldn't even fiddle with it because that one violation that of everything we had agreed on has just completely destroyed my confidence in the whole set up. That's all it takes is that one time just to completely foul you up . 0'8HF+9E►.IW.L
76 Conrad Cooper Cooper Conrad Conrad Cooper Conrad ~ IDEtff Big Brother. Yes. sir. I do feel that way, I really do . O kay. Let' s see, all this real time, delayed time, s t andby, that all worked fine, I thought. Yes, we had real little trouble . The coordination with the ground really in general went excellent. Yes, the only guy that had any problem ,.,as Guaymas doesn't have a command system so , poor old Guaymas was stuck w hen he was first to pick us up coming into the states with having to call us a.nd tell us t o turn on real -time and ack and then th,~ Rous ton people would have to remind us t o turn :L t off again but the rest of the flight the command 1 3ystem ran t hat telemetry and dumped t elemetry and everything else just fine as f ar as I was concerned. W e were glad not to be bothered with it. Communications control and switches . The vjc . M an I tell you, that really w orked slick, e:ccept thos e darn rubber guards on there. Those havH got to go. Yes. The cabin is dry enough. The onl:r reason I can see they need them on there is in case you had a catastrophic water spillage which you do very easily have. ... £QMF-- 1De~JIA~·•
77 Cooper Yes , I pulled my ear plug and put the ear plug right in the bottom of my ear where it was barely hanging there and I could hear anybody calling then . Then I put the plug back in. I thought the quality of the communication.ewas really, as far as we were concerned, in the air a:n:yway, was excellent. Conrad Our beacons worked satisfactorily both adapter and reentry, C band beacons most of the time they were in the command position, the people used them as they wanted them. Cooper Let's see, the s l eep configuration, we covered that , yes, that worked fine . Conrad Antenna selection. I went to adapter and I really couldn't tell much different and then we decided we would go back to the check off list which called for reentry. Oh, I know how I got in adapter position. Cooper Somebody asked you .. . . Oh, it was that test. Conrad Yes, it was the UHF test that we pulled and we were switching from reentry to adapter, from reentry to adapter, and I finally left it at adapter one time and the thing was working just great as far as I could tell . Cooper Yes , it was there for a day or so. Cooper Yes, it was there for a day or so. I really
78 Cooper You could dUlllp OUZD or something. Conrad Yes, I ... . Cooper But the neoprene things are hard to s ee· through , you could actually push them up to the control knob to read what you got on there. Conrad Let ' s face it Gordo, once we got those controls set, we never moved them. Cooper Yes, that ' s right, Once you set t hem you very seldom ever set them from there on. Sc,, I guess it really isn ' t too bad. It's kind of a :Mickey Mouse thing..,, -..net iit works - , I guess. Conrad Those light weight head sets , Those PlEll'ltronic head sets that we had, I don't think 8J'tybody can argue about the voice quality and they are really comfortable up there. Cooper Yes, and they were really good reception , too . Conrad Just pull a plug out of my ear and l et it hang and turn the sleep switch on when I W8J'tted to sleep. Never took the think off my head in 7 or 8 days I don ' t believe. I'd sometimes take it off and hook it under here for sleeping, but after E1 'While I just got so used to having it on my head I just unpull the ear plug and let it hang ancl turn the sleep switch, and the sleep switch worted grea t ...•
79 c:.COM ElllB!PYM• couldn't see, we didn't have too much problem with that, but they wanted it back to reentry and I presumed that they will get the right data out of that UHF test to know what's wrong with the adapter antennas , if anything' s wrong with it. But we stayed in reentry configuration most of the time. Conrad E™ controls? Cooper We didn't have a:ny problems with i t . Conrad We had no problems there at all . -.;_COMFHDEffFIAA. •
80 8. 6 Electrical Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper C@ t l ~ l iE t ◄ T I A L Electrical system monitoring. Well , I can't say enough for the fuel c:ells, they really performed they - - They s ure did , boy those little rascalEt really work. The purging, I recommend that we changE i those purge switches , and I don 't think this is dar.gerous . recommend that we change those purge sw i tches to three position. Maybe guarded ones. Yes , maybe guarded ones. What you might do was put a little thrEie position guar d there. But that spring loaded business , that Bpring tension on those , so I tell you my fingers are still sore from doing that. I used my toothbrush ... • t hat's what I used all the time to purge them with. You had to j a ck them up with your tooth - brush because we've got them guarded u.nd they are spring loaded , and you just don ' t think about it but you just try and hold that spring :'..n that pos ition for two minutes , it' s like a :rear. Particularly under zero g. You don't have anything t o push against . E@t l~IDEWI1 h L I
81 ~'it l'FIOEt•l'fl P 1 ... Conrad So I recommend they make the purging switches. Well, I recommend that they either cane up with a gimmick that you can insert on the switches when it is time to purge so that you can flip them on and time it and then f l ip them off, or ~beyma.ke the s witches three position. Especially in that 14 day flight . You purge every 6 hours you know, and that's minimum. If you are running higher loads you are purging every 4 or every 2. So, that's quite a chore and it's like house keeping. Those fuel cells have to be purged and 5 minutes of s witching is what it takes, holding those spring loaded switches. Cooper 2, 2 and almost 1, Yes, 2, 2 and half a minute . 26 seconds. That's really hard on the fingers , hiding behind these guards we have, makes it even more difficult but the guards should be there. Let's see , monitoring electrical power remaining. Conrad There was no big argument there. Cooper No problem there a t a l l, just watching the hydrogen fa.11. Conrad They were either there or they weren't. Cooper Ground information required to complete mission.
82 eOl <U'IDEl ◄ T I At Well , that there again. Ti-ie cryos were really the only problem we had with electrical. The main bat teries ... the times tha t Pete touched them they were just exactly like advertised. Conrad Yes, they were 22½ volts every time we tested them , Cooper No problem at all. Squib ba tteries were fine , no problem. Conrad Squib ba tteries came down about, I would say 2½ volts during the whole flight. We s t arted out with a common ccmtrol bus t ha t had been 27½ vol t s and a t the end of the flight it was 24 . 7 or s omething like that, 24, 8 or something. It came down about 3 volts. But one thing that nobody ever tol d me, was man, when you fire thrusters and things like that you can s ee a l ot of t ransients on that common control bus. Tha t thing really gets to oscil l a ting up and down. I wasn' t sure s ome thing wasn't wrong at the beginning, SlJd I just pass t hat on as a tip to people who go later . 8, 7 Onboard Computer Cooper On.board computer, Conrad I can' t say too much for t he computer 6ither. It w orked f ant astically,
=€8t 4Flli'0@1 A 1 - - 83 Cooper It couldn't have worked better. It really did. Conrad The IGS Guidance was indicating everything that we did. We knew that we were going to loft a little bit and boy, it showed that we should pitch down at second stage and RGS did pitch us down, and when it pitched us down and put us on the IGS was centered up. I never saw any big needle deviations. I didn ' t see this big pitch transient at the end of the flight. I think it did wander just a little bit in pitch but none of this off the scale stuff. It looked like it was on the money all the wey , am I felt that if we ever switched we would be right down the pipe with it. Cooper Yes. I did too. Real good. Conrad In the insertion, boy, that math flow 6 ca.me up with all the right numbers. The numbers were just right. You didn't read the numbers. Where the ta~e began the numbers were on tbe money. Address 72 was 25,808. Address 94 R dot was plus 20 feet :pga 97 was plus 2 feet. 52 said we had a perfect :insertion that we had no apogee adjust . At perigee there was 00000 and then calculated , even though
84 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad -e 8 tsl □P Fls 1TIAL we didn't need one, the directions should be applied at 3,042 seconds and the nominal value io ?, 008 seconds and I just don't think you can ask for better computations than that. Okay . I think that everything that we did on it worked out quite well. Catch- up mode worked well . The .... tl:.e one thing it did though, there was one ancmaly that I saw on there and I almost had a heart attack at the beginning of the flight. Remember, we got into orbit and I don't know whether I did it or what, but I got in the mo::le where I got the darn IVI 's running and it wouldn't stop running , and the worked until I switched into pre- launch nav again a couple of times and I finally got the IVI 1 s to quit and then I was very careful about how I did any switching after that and I don't know what that was. I'll have to sit down and talk to the computer people about that. It seemed to me that what I did .... It happened once more. Yes, it happened one other time and we got out of i t by going to pre-launch and letting it sit for • @Ot ◄ FID E ► ~.tA I
85 c€~F,6 Ef~ fI Cooper FCSD REP Conrad Cooper Conra d Cooper awhile and it finally ran itself out and stopped. But it looked l ike the accelerometer bi as took off or did s omething that just made IVI 's run . I don't rea lly understand what happened but I wanted to note that an anomaly. I felt that the thing was running right and that this might have been a little glitch so I didn't report it to ground because, well , later on we didn ' t really have any need for catch up or anything like t hat and it seemed to operat~ okay. O kay , let's see. Orbit maneuvers. I don't think there was How about the powering down and powering up? It shut down and started up d~t as advertised. ON with the on s witch and 18 seconds it went through it's s elf check and the green start comp l i ght ca.me on green and it did it every time . Okey, Orbit maneuvers we have already covered that. We powered it up for all our updates and it accepted it every time, llO strain·. Retro fire, you got those numbers through , We gave the number to .. . . IVI's after retro fire . Read 269 aft and 10 left and 181 down.
86 Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper @@ I 4FIDEr4fliAll 10 left and 181 dOWl\, 269 010 181 . Yes . And as soon as those retro ' s fired the llght came on green and it went right into reentry ,5',lidance . . . reentry guidance Reentry guidance was right on the money when it came on, it came on exactly on time . Roll neeclle , roll bug . . .. Stopped a t 400, 000 feet , right at the tine Hous ton gave us our c omputed time to 400 K. And the 290 K steering commands came in ~ ust right. C ame in just where they should , the dir ection they should come in and everything~ At about the r ight magnitude • • • • And about the right magnitude. Then the problems star t ed. And tbat was the loos e nut on the ground and n ot in the air, f ortunately. MDU , t hat worked fine . That apparently worked fine . Com puter modes. Let' s see, pr e l aunch worked good. Ascent worked beautiful ly, catch up . . . . Ne didn ' t rea l ly do any ca tch up except the one . .. . :m O b4 F1 9 itL4il.Air
87 Conrad Now, there was one thing there, I don't know if it was the radar or the computer. But , the first time we flew over the Cape and locked up on the back up REP on the ground, it read out the digital millage to a gnat's eyebrow. It locked up at 248,66 miles and I don 't believe it will read any higher than that supposed to be 250 , but I had the same number at the other end so I suspect that that is as high as it will read out. And it tracked t hat thing right over the Cape where we got down to, I think we got down to .... our slant range at the closest approach was 161 miles or something like that, and everyti.me I punched it up to the range went do'Wl'l. and - - Cooper Man that was really beautiful, just beautiful, The radar itself stayed locked on for .. . . I felt like you could a lmost point out the tower it was right on the mila.ge mcxl e. Conrad But in the catch up mode it read out to 248 . 66 miles both at the start of lock up and the end of lock up , and I was really impressed with that. Then after that we always locked the Cape . The r adar locked on like it should on the REP , but we
88 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad a@Q t 4Ft9€NII • b never got it to read through the compute1 r now I Yes, but my analog read- outs read. Yes, but wait a minute, your analog readouts only go to 300,000 feet and that's 50 miles El.l'l.d we were never within 50 miles of it, so . . .. Yes, but they rea d correctly and I got Hteering, radar steering. Yes, but the analog couldn't have read correctly. If it read anything on your scale it wa. E1 wrong because it should have read only digital . . . . What I saw it was showing that it was getting a r eading. Oh, yes, well , there was no doubt that ue were locked up. The R dot was going right on out past there , you know, and then it came on past . But I don't know whether if the problem in the
89 digital read - out was a computer problem in the catch- up and rendezvous mode of accepting radar data or whether it was radar problem, but I ' ll mention under the computer becaus e I sort of suspect it was a computer problem. Cooper Eut I don't understand why it worked so well the one time and the other time it didn't work. Conrad Something gave out . Either in the radar or in the computer. Well, then we never did get ·to check '- a.ny thing in the rendezvous mode. Cooper No , reentry .... Conrad We dan 1t know what the problem was in reentry, but I think the canputer did a 40 job it did just what it was suppose to do. It just had bum dope .
90 8.8 Crew Station Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Okay, control s and displays, sequence telelights . The only comment I have on sequence t el elights is that the comp light on the comput~r is too bright. That 's right. We are going to have to have som e way of iimming that or put some tape over it or something, because That 's a comment for GT-6 especially. Because when you are running it at night with the computer on for rendezvous, that comp light darn near blinds you. Yeah, it I s really bright . That needs a dim f eatur e on i t. The other sequential telelights that are in there are all dimable, or turnoffable . Say, there is one thing t hat we didn't t r y through. I wonder if that thing is on the bright-d im sequence We never did put the switch to dim. I never thought of it in 8 days eibher. I'll bet you it's on t he bright- dim circuit, but we never used that swit ch. We ' ve never had occassion to ever use t hat swit ch. You lmow we always check sequence l ights bright . So, that is what that check is f or . (laughter) Cooper
91 Conrad Learn something new everyday. Cooper I didn't think about that. Conrad 1 1 11 bet baby it is. Cooper Well , that ' s something somebody ought to check out . This is just a comment. Conrad But we never did have any reason to dim it in the simulator. You never tried to look out the window. Cooper You don't have anything to look out the window at. Conrad Yeah. Cooper Okay, event timer - - W e stopped at 48 minutes after insertinn and never ran it again until we cranked it up at 27 minutes prior to retrofire. Conrad Yeah, that's right. That was one of those things they had ~s power down. We never powered it up in the flight. Cooper Apparently, it is a fairly good power consumer. Conrad But it worked all right. Cooper The IVI 1 s worked fine, other than the one comment Pete made while ago that they were continually run - ning there for a while. The FDI 1 s excellent. Range and range rate indicator worked good on the REP, boy, really, really good . It worked very good on the - - •
92 .. a ef ◄ FIE)l!I ◄ 'Pl~L Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad And the analog range was in close agreeme:'lt with the digital range when the REP was going away from us. Yep. The GLV fuel and oxidizer pressure gauges worked excellent except for the IPS . Stage two IPS fuel gauge failed to the full max deflect:i.on posi tion just shortly before POGO started, ancl stayed in the OFF position until after staging. It came back on and worked for about a minute and then went back off again. The altimeter worked just like it worked in the altitude chamber. Stopped at 96 800 feet . It was very jerky on the wa:y up. It was erratic going up . And I don ' t guess you ca.n expect a pressm·e alti meter like that to follow as fast as that booster is moving. It's r eally winding up. Coming back on reentry, why, we were apparently a lot slower on the other aide of it, because it unwound in a.n extremely steady manner and it seemed to be right with the barostat . It was right on the barostat , actually. And this is really the important thing.
93 Cooper Rate of descent - - you know, I even forgot to look at the rate of descent . Conrad Well, we didn ' t even worry about it. When the chute Cooper When the main chute opened as good as i t did - - Conrad - - out there, t hat we both watched the main chut e and I saw the water coming at the corner of t he window - - Cooper I didn't even think t o look at the rat e of descent . I knew it was good. Conrad Yeah, we didn ' t have a:ny reason to look at it. Cooper I forgot about t hat . Conrad No, we got busy doing a check there, too. Cooper Well, we were also having a couple of radio calls in there and it was int errupting - - Conrad Yeah, radio calls , and we knew the chute was good, and there wasn't a:ny reason to look at it . Cooper I ' m sure the rate of descent worked all right . Cooper Accelerometer i t seemed t o wcr k, f ine. Conrad We 'll look at it the next time . Cooper Y eah, okay. 1 111 make a not e. Cooper The accelerometer worked fine . The switches and circuit breaker panel s - - Conrad I t's still extremely easy to knock off a:ny circuit breakers - -
94 € 8 t J FIB Et 4Tl"'1L Cooper Anyt:iJlle you move around in there. Conrad You get in the habit of real fast checking that. Cooper I would strongly recommend to anybody in any crew that anytime they do any moving around o:: - turning around in the cockpit that they run a c:Lrcui t breaker check. Conrad we did. Cooper Because, invaribly, we would always find one off. Everytime we would run a check, somewhere or another we would find one knocked off. Conrad We usally found a reason for it though, t he over head ones we knocked off with the water gun so we stopped putting it up there. And the orni I thought I knocked off on the right hand side, I came to the conclusion that was one the o heater blnw out. It 2 just blew it off . Cooper And the mirrors worked excellent. I must say, Deke, you do need that in-flight repair occasionally to tighten those mirror - - Conrad You mean the postlanding kit. Cooper Whew! Gracious! I lost my head. The pontlanding kit to tighten up the adjustments on thoeie mirrors to keep them tight . Repair reticle, you know , things like that. ~J~ilE ► ttlAt
Conrad Cooper Cooper Conrad Cooper FCSD REP Conrad FCSD REP Conrad 95 - COtrt~IQitililil ·\ l Suit s. The first tlling that happened -- Pete's suit had to be repaired. Swizzle stick -- I used the swizzle stick for qui te awhile to punch off the DOS light when Pete was asleep, but, finally, it got to where it was j:ust easier to reach over there. I've got pretty long arms. I think most people would probably need the swizzle st ick t o get over there to punch it off. I never had the occasion to use it. That's the only time I used it. I used it once for turning on the ACME power over there. Before we go a:ny further, while I'm thinking about it, on the pad out here, you said you could see that umbilical tower when they started to raise it. No, the erector. The erector. Yes. You could take t he mirror out of the holder and hold it at the bottom of the window, and you could measure the distance . Now I don't know exactly how high we are above the road, but where the road winds up to the pad and makes a left turn in and drive straight into the pad, you could see the intersection of that road. So, I S83 that you can see the ground some tet-tPfOEtfF1'tl
CO~◄ F1 8 E~ fFh 't-l - ,.. 350 feet away from the booster . You can see ground level, and we were going to use that procedure if we aborted. W e didn't know if we were going to make a land or a water landing, but we f elt t hat we could use the mirror to see if we were over water or over land, at least within 350 feet of the space craft in the direction of the windows . J didn't use the mirror on the water landing out c~er Bermuda, because I oould see the water out of the corner of the window by just putting my head up and peering at it - - in the two-point attitude. I could see the water coming. I knew we were fairly low . As a matter of fact, that altimeter was just about on the money, wasn 1 t it? Conrad We were at just about zero feet when we hit the water . We had a good altimeter setting. Cooper Almost exactly zero feet. Conrad Th.is is what McDivitt said. Don't go on that 29 . 92 . They gave us a 30 . 10 altimeter setting, and when it read zero we were on the water. Cooper Yes, that was a real good one. Conrad So , I recommend they stick with this -- giving the altimeter setting in the recovery area be,~ause it can make the difference of a co~ le of hundred f eet . '€01'1FtDEl"~TIAt
97 Cooper Okay-, radar. Warm up time -- we don't have any comment on that? Conrad No. That was straightforward. Cooper Acquisi tion range - - Conrad It acquired in excess of 250 miles and read at 250 miles. Cooper That's that. Acquisition attitude -- well, at one ti.me I thought we were out of attitude, and it still was reading right on, locked up. Conrad Yes. Cooper Ease of lock on -- good. Capability of holding lock -- it seemed to hold lock very well. Flight display Conrad I t was fine. All you needed. Cooper Radar tests generally - - from our point of view it went very well. We never had any false lock problems at all . We didn I t really give these a fair shake, however. Conrad Yes. Cooper But, from the testing that we did, we encountered no false locks. Conrad We didn't get a false lock when we turned around and looked at the REP. Cooper No, we didn't .
98 Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper @ 0+4Fl !J! l ◄ if 1 1'L ,... We t urned around and we waited unt i l 1 mjnute was over , and banged on the radar and it didn ' t take t his 23 seconds or anything. I t just bammed . It just locked up on us right t here. Locked up instantaneously . There it was. No doubt in your mind. Lighting, indicators, and instruments. Okay, there's a def iciency here. You need to see that center instrument panel, and You need some kind of glow. You need some kind of a little glow down t hat center instrument panel to be able to see that t hing. That thing is really black . Without bringing that big darn I really don't underst and why those guys took that r ed center light out. Whil e we are talking about lights, let's see if we cover that. No, we don't. But there is a real safety- of-flight item in t hat cockpit lighting. That is, if you leave a:ny one of these lig·hts on, and, in particular, the big bright center light which is the landing light -- I think it is on ther e in the light solenoid area, the reostat, you build up a heat thing that is actuall;y- to the point of being explosive. I t actually gets to •eet*t8 i ~q;rw.L
Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper where it will burn -- Yes , you could smell paint. It burns the paint in the spacecraft . You can smell paint cooking. That's the first thing that we noticed, the first day. I 'll tell you what heats up. It 's the reostat . Well, the thunderstorm light th.at Gordo 1 s referring to doesn't have a reostat. That just flat puts out heat. It just flat puts out heat. You can burn your glove right off your hand on th.at one. Your under-window right and left lights -- if we ran those at great periods of time with the light dimmed down , th.at reostat gets so bloody hot th.at you can smell the paint cooking again. I felt that that was a real bad sit uation and we have comments on th.at -- So we kept rotating these lights on and off. We never did burn our lights too steadily unless we absolutely had to . The other problem there was that anything that generates th.at much heat is going to have a tendency to burn out, and I 'll tell you, you lose one of those cockpit lights, buddy, and you are screwed. You really are. ,QNFl9Et ◄ TIAL .21a 99
100 Conrad I had already busted my au.xiliary light a.nd if I would have burned out the light on the right i :'.lstrument panel, we would have had to rtm that center light a lot, and I don ' t think that center light would have lasted either. Cooper No . I think that whole center console area is a very weakly lit area. It could certainly stand a very, very faint soft light. When you are rtmning 1mder night light conditions you'd be able to see thn radio swit ches and this type of thing. Let ' s see, indicators and instruments- - well t of course t a pet peeVE! of mine is that we couldn' t get EL in the 8- balls . I still think the 8- balls could certainly be lit a lot better, al though they are satisfactory for what we ' ve got. I think the- - Conrad We really didn't use that except during lift- off and reentry, but it does shine. Mine shines in your eyes, doesn ' t it? Cooper Yes , there is a real bad f eature in the cockpit in that a:ny lighting at all, either one of the right or the left lights- say Pete turns his right light on, particularly- - if I'm trying to look through the reti cle, it just zaps. It's gone. Can't see a thing in
• 101 there with a.ny light on in the cockpit. In order to use the reticl e , you have almost got to dim out all the lights in the cockpit, and this is pretty ha.rd to do because you need to use some around. Conrad And , you know, they bad a light down on the center pedestal shining aft that was supposed to light up the water management panel, and everybody took it out. You have to do most of your work on that water manage m ent panel blind. I mean, you sort of put your hand in there backwards and everything, and , as long as everything runs all right , you only need that one switch to go from off to overboard. The other two switches stay in the normal position unless you have some sort of problem. But it would be nice to light up that whole area down there. There is no way, without a flashlight or pulling that auxiliary light way over there , to tell how much water you have in the water tank. Cooper I don't think you can tell with it. I took that auxiliary light and got back in there and practically crawled down in there. With that darn M - 1 experiment thing installed on t0p of the tank there , you can't see the water level bubble anymore. They i nstalled
102 - Pete's M - 1 experiment right on top of the water tank where the water level bubble and the mea3uring gauge is . It ' s built right on over it, so you can ' t see it . Conrad We used every combination of l ights in t :1ere that you could think of, depending on what we we:re doing. Sometimes we ran with Gordo--if one guy was sleeping, the other guy would run with his red lights on dim. And many nights, we ran with no lights at all . We had that much confidence in things like 1!abin pres surization and so forth, that we just powered down the lights and we would go through whole night sides without ever turning the lights on and never even looking at the instrument panel when we were in dri::ting f light. We would both nod or look out the window., Cooper Or sleep. Conrad Yes, and one of the reasons we did this Has because of this heating problem. I had a decided fear that we would be in real trouble if we burned ou·; any light . We had no way of replacing them. So , an;:r time I could conserve elec t rical lighting, by saving the bulb , I would turn the thing off. I didn ' t want to build up big hea t loads in them. We ran red lights , we ran white lights, we ran the center lights only,
-e@N Pl8ENTI 103 we ran the left side only, we ran the right side only; we ran them in a:ny combination you could think of, just dependent on what you wanted to do with them. Sometimes you needed lights in the daytime, sometimes you didn't need lights in the daytime . It depend s on what your orientation ~a9 and what you were doing. That was very interesting. It's an entirely lighting situation than in an -ai-rplane . Cooper Let ' s see. We checked out the one light that we hadn't mentioned here. I think we mentioned all of them ex cept the doggone docking light. We did check it out, and it really throws out a nice light out there . We didn ' t have anything to try it out on out beyond the nose, but it sure lights up the nose. As a matter of f act, on that onenlght side we kept wondering where in the heck that light was com.;_ ng from. Conrad I kept saying, "Hey, the sun is really shining on the nose for a long time . " It was the night I blew up the- Cooper We were pointing straight up. Conrad Yeah, I 'd blown up the shrimp and gotten it all over the right console, and when I was cleaning it off, I had inadvertently turned on the docking light switch. It took me about 10 minutes looking out there trying ..
104 -€0i'IFID Ef~TIAt - to figure out what the heck it was shinj ng out there on the nos e . It finally came to me in a. flash that the docking light was on. Now that is another thing- I don ' t know how they covered that REP with the re flective t ape , but, man, that thing w a s bright! Cooper All you could see was the light. Conrad No, I mean in the daytime. Cooper Oh yes . Conrad In the daytime with the sun shining on that thing, it almost burned a hole in your head. Boy it was bright! Cooper "{es, actually- - Conrad It looked like a little sun out there. Cooper Pete went into it deciding that he was n~ver going to see it in the daytim e , and I think he ha1 i a big sur pri se. I was determined that we were go :Lng to see it . Conrad .And we did see it in the daytime, several times after i t had gotten a fair distance away from us, I ' d say 2 or 3 miles away. Cooper It was bright. It was almost brighter on the day s i de than it was at night . In fact, it was so bright i t would blot out those blinking lights . Conxad Yes, that ' s right . The REP, itself, was bright enough and reflective enough that it would blot out theCooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper FCSD REP Cooper FCSD REP Cooper -ee,Nfl!) f!l!fftlrt 2 105 flashing light, but there were times when we saw it close enough in the dayside that we could see the flashing light. it didn ' t get that far away from us, and thats why I s t ill challenge this 375 miles- - You aren ' t going to see that dipole as long as we did. The last time I saw that thing, I was still seeing the dipole antenna. That ' s right. That's the last thing I saw. You aren't going to see that dipole at several hun dred miles. That ' s right, and we saw it in the daytime. Yes . And it was on the 5th or 6th orbit. Okay , utility light, interior lights , outside lights Talking about outside lighting from external- - We didn ' t have any flashlights . All we had was the gloves. It says glove . It should be glare. Gla.re--well, anytime the sun comes whopping in the window there, you are going to really have a gld,re And anytime you are sitting there watching the earth, tracking a target down on the earth, and you suddenly come back into the cockpit, you aren ' t going to see a zCOt'4f K)itsl11.,tfLP
106 @9 ► IEll;l Ii~ 1 11..\L Cooper Conra d FCSD REP Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conra d thing. You are completely blinded because when you have gotten used to the outside--sunlit earth--and you come back in ..the cockpit, it takes a few seconds to adapt to seeing things inside. Intensity controls--! think they were f:.ne . I thought they worked pretty well, and I must say 1 , as Pete mentioned, I did like thos e red lights very well . Fingertip lights-they worked out all r :.ght. A flashli ght would have been better, but t he fingertip lights are f i ne. Onboard data- Flight plan strip we r eally didn ' t use, We used our own checkoff list, because all we had on the flight plan strip was checkoff lists . You couldn't read it at night , and we just put something on there beca1::se it was going to be in the spacecraft . You didn ' t use it? I set it up in the proper places , but ar.ytime I really used a checkoff list, I used this one right here . And I think that one is going to be replaced by a clock. Yes . Checkl ist cards- - I can't s ay too much for them. They are really good. We beat them over the head and we reworked them and EO♦~ liiM-iJiO.L
107 reworked them. I lmow we drove thos e guys nu ts down there , but I ' ll tell you, there are darn few things I ' d change on these set of cards right now, after having flown the flight . They really helped us. And the experiments book helped us and the log book worked well , and I think we kept things fairly straight . Cooper In general , I thi nk the books worked out very, very wel l . Conrad Our big flight plan book worked out well , it didn't get in the w ay . Our reentry book, I t hink, could be made smaller. I would recommend next t i me that they put the schematics together like Neil did in the GOH Junior, which turned out that he had the schematics in a b◊Ok that was 10 inches high and 2 1/ 2 inches wide and about 1/ 2 inch thick. Just by folding them a certain way, and this you would put away and never pull out. Now, everytime we hauled out that reentry book to do anythi ng, we had all the schematics and everything. W e really didn ' t need to haul those around all the time. We could have found a proper plac e for them. So , I ' m not complaining against the reentry book and I wouldn ' t take anything out of it. By golly, we used everything in the books . We looked €O ► 4ft90tt 1 A 1,- -
108 at schematics when we were up there. Don't think we didn't with the troubles we had. We used everything in that reentry book . There is only one book that we didn't take out of its holder and that w~s the REP and that is because we gave up the REP, or we would have used that one. And this big flight plan like this, I'd recommend that you make it even bigger. You've seen how much writing we did in it. I recomment that you use the same procedure of keeping a log book and a flight plan, because two guys are working all the time. You put it down in the log book and then you write it down in the flight plan, and this helps you organize it . By writing it down in the flight plan is when we really recognized just what we had tc unstow and how we had to put it together to make that series pass work right. It took us three days to do that. We still spent a lot of time thinking about this . The maps--boy, that's another thing. If we didn't have that map, we wouldn't have known where in the hell we were. Cooper Yes, that orbital map- Conrad Those map updates were the greatest ! Cooper I'll tell you the map that was the useful one was the
109 Conxad Cooper -. Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conxad Cooper Conrad D- 6 map that Harry Kozuma had in there. Yes, we used this one, too. Yes, this big map that he had in here.was really a good one. Yes , that helped you even better find out where you were. Man that's a good map . For instance, over here , we were over here trying to find some details on some isla.nois . Where was it? Yes, you could go to this map and get an orbit and come down to- - Oh, islands or something off here. Let ' s see, where were they? Some of these little islands right here, off India- We could pick up these little tiny chains and these things . The Solomons and these little messy things down in here- boy,. and all this stuff out in here . Here is all that junk we kept passing over in there- Yes ! We were getting the New Hebrides, the Carolines, and the Marshalls . We were going over everyone of those darn islands, just like on our maps, boy. Just beautiful . And you could really pinpoint your location. That
110 ee1 <Wl" Er4TIAL r eally impressed me. Cooper Here is where we did all t he photographing. Conrad Yes, that' s right . Here is where we photographed Australia one day. (Much Laughter) Cooper We were photographing the hell out of Australia coming right down across here. Then we thought , well , that ' s odd. Never had noticed that. Where is that island off here? Well , that does look kind of like Sumatra coming across there . And there is another big island and I thought , well , darn, I know there isn't another big island coming off there, and it was B orneo , and ~ here comes Austra l ia. Fortunately , we had the time on it, so somebody can go back thro·igh and reconst ruct wher e we really were . Conrad I was trying to find where we struck out Australi a and wrote down Palestine. Cooper Pal estine. Dear me. W e had two cameraB going j ust as f ast a s they would click. You know, elicket y click click. Nobody had gotten aerial photographs of Australia before during the daylight . . Conrad Listen, I t a iLked to Paul Backer and he t old me the 16mm film came out great. So, maybe we got t he REP pi ctures , too . ,,.COMFfOtf
Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Cooper 11 1 Okay, maps and overl ays--they were really good. D-6 books and the data books were good and we used the star charts- - The onl y maps I thought weren't worth a darn were the Apoll o landmark maps. Yes , well you'll get to debrief on that through Apollo in here. But our straight data books and everything- - Yes , they were good . W e used .all of them . No comment on them. We took the experiments procedure book and the ex periments log book just like this , and whoever had the watch side put them in the Volkswagen bag. We ' d take the reentry book, which we had the PLA updates in, and the other book, and we woul d just throw the~ down between our legs. If you wanted to l ook at the f l ight plan you would just f lick it up , grab it , and read the thing, and throw it back down there again. There was enough r oom so that Pete kept them on the side of his left l eg, and I kept them on the sid.e of my right l eg, and we woul d just pass them back and forth. Okay, start charts--by gol 1 y , I thought they were
112 Conrad Cooper Cooper - r eally good, and I think anybody that wants to get lined up for a night retro, if they do :_t once and aren't convinced that star charts were pretty use ful they're - - Well, it gave us a great deal of confidence to go into the star chart the last day and pic:k out the right yaw stars, and then, as we were aJ.ining the platform, to see those yaw stars go right through the middle like they were supposed to. I think the star chart was very usable snd very neat, much smaller and neater in this fashion than it is in this great big mechanism thing we hav-e . I think they're very usable in that fashion. Stowage. Hah! What are we supposed to say about stowage? Boy, it's probably the most critical thing in a long flight . It has to be kept up on an hourly basis . Belts and harness-- I thought they were perfectly satisfactory, except for one set of bel ts I wanted to get out before the flight and if I were doing it again, I'd take my own scissors down there and cut them out. That is the knee belt which was put in there for pressurized ejection . I t is still in there, and it is in the way, and I hated the darn thing. Mine flopped and f l apped around in there .
113 I final ly took them and gouged them down in al ong side the s eat. I took my scissors and cr ammed them down in there , and that is where they stayed the whol e flight . Conrad Yes , I ' m not convinced they are necessary. Cooper That knee restraint belt was put in there so that if you were ejecting at high al titude and you came out in a pressuri zed condition - - Conrad I think the arm restraints ought to be l ooked at the same way. Cooper My arm restraints stayed in the down position , I l aunched with them down , I r eentered with them down, and they never came out of the down position. They could have s aved a good 2 or 3 pounds of weight on my sea t by taking my arm restraints out . I t old t hem that before and they said , "W ell, they woul dn't ever be abl e to get them of f . " You know the seat was out s itting over there and I coul d have removed them my~el f in 5 minutes when we were in Weight and Bal ance . They said the paperwork involved in re moving them would probab l y take a year. So,' those two items I f l ew with I thought were compl etel y worthl es s . And the lifevest - - I don ' t know what you are going to do better . I really don ' t
• 114 Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper • honestly !mow what you are goi ng to do better because of the ejection situation, but they are in the way. They are in the way of everything you do, and they are real little bearcats to get on and off---these little lifevests. We didn't have a place to stow them. Yes, we left them on the whole darn time just because we didn I t have anywhere to stow them. llut they are really in the way. They are a real pail'.. in the rear. Yes, it ' s all part of the suit combina tjon. Well, that's right. If you didn ' t have the suit, they wouldn . 1 t be so bad. Waste disposal- pack harder. Yes . Pack tighter. That's a very grave problem, in the f act that as you start getting defecaticn wastes of this type you want an area where you are not going to mix ing that with other items too much, and you want an area that you start packing right the first time so you don ' t have to keep dragging it all out and repacking. I don't !mow how you are going to do it any differently than we did~in keeping one area completely open for it, and just working and using that for your disposal
115 FCSD REP Cooper Conrad area. How about urine? The urine system worked just great . Except for one problem. It leaked on occasion, and I really attr ibute that to the fact that this rubber device gets covered with tars . I cover ed t his pretty thoroughly with the doctors . I recommend that you take new urine rubber receivers along, one per each day of the flight . We had four along and we changed t hem every two days . They get gummy and tarry and they don ' t have their holding power and urine tends to flow back. • eeft#AD E i< ITt,o ,L
11 6 C:@ l ◄ i IOLN IiAt - around the side . That is what i t amounts t o . Cooper Yes. Conrad We never had any t r ouble with them when w1~ put on a new one . The new one would l ast about a day before i t would start getting gummy . We t ried everything to keep them clean. Cooper It would get gummy. Conrad ... wipe on them and we left them unrolled so that t hey would dry out. Cooper The rubber gets so gummy you can put the t wo together and they j ust stick together. It gets all gummy and sticky. It may be a better material is available . Conrad I still think i ts the urine t hat does i t . Cooper Tha t ' s what I'm saying. There may be a better material available tha t the urine won ' t effect that w ay . The urine is eating into that latex--its late~ rubber , I suspect . Either carry more good ones al ong or get a better materi al to use . That should have been evaluated by CSD. They should have determined that urine does effect them and makes them go to pieces in a hurry. Conrad Yes , I ' m not sure they don ' t even wash then out occasionally. ..
117 Cooper Two other things we have is that you leave preheat on for 4 minutes prior to flushing. We got one t remendous big glob of urine ice that broke off sometime about the fifth day. Conrad Oh, yes . Cooper And, man, that indicated that it really bui l t up . It must have been as big as that box there . Conrad It looked like one of those sand castles you build . It was a conica l buildup of ice . The liquid had flowed out . It kept building up and building up . But it was still flowing out through the center like a volcano. The darn thing broke off one day ou t there , and, boy , I tell you that thing was about this big around and it was about 3 and 1/2 inches high. It just went floating right by the spacecraft and it was pure yellow. Ha , ha! It was about 3 by 4 by 3 or 3 1/2 or 4. About 3 inches in diameter and about 4 inches high . It was triangular , dribbled up, rough shaped, but you could see where it was smooth on the back side where it had actually s tarted to freeze. Boy , that scared us . We didn ' t want the urine system to freeze up so we went to 4 minutes . We used the recommended McDonnell procedures and we revised those slightly when we found out the tar was beginning .CO ~4 FIB l!r 4ih',I&
118 eO ►+Ft0E trff~ Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper 8.9 Biomedical Cooper to gum up the little valve too . The little relief check valve . We ' d built up a pressure in there when you would start to UJ1inate in that thing. We would open it up and dump for 30 seconds after we went through regular dump cycle and evacuated the bag. We woul d open it up to the cockpit and let it dump 30 seconds which is what MAC recommended . Then we woul d sit there and cycle it on and off a 1d have that vacuum suck around down on that valv,~. Open and close that valve dry . We cycled it three or four times rapidly with the vacuum opening and closing it and then we shut the system down . I don ' t know whether that helped or not. We had the impression that it did . It made us feel better about the whole si·;uation. At least the thing worked the whole time . Medical Data Passes--They weren ' t really too big a problem. They ' re necessary. I guess they are as minimum in interfer ence as you can get thEise medical data passes . They weren ' t too bad . I tal ked to Chuck Berry this morning about it. I thir.k that getting the food down into a better type i:.ystem where ~ 10E L •
€9~J f lil E ► ll bt, L , 119 you give the pilot more option in what he eats rather than t ry to give him meal A, B, C, D, E, F , G is goi ng to alleviate their problem as well as the pilots a great deal . It ' ll make i t easier and t ake a lot less t ransmitting. They were thoroughly confused by this numbering system. It made it more difficult f or them to keep track of what we wer e eating. The excersior worked fine . No problem at all . I n f act , I used tha t exercisor a lot of times other than medical passes . My lcnee s got hurting me . About the t hird day they really start ed hurting. So I started using the exer ci sor r egular and found that it helped . Pete did t he same thing l a ter when his- - Conrad I didn ' t use it as much as Gordo did , but I did use it for t he same reason. Both my knees got sore from being bent all the time . For some reason, I don ' t know why, it settles in your knees . I just found out that maybe once or twice a day with that thing in additi on to the m edical dat a pass elimi nated the whole thing. Cooper Yes, it real ly helped . Food and water evaluation. We have already evaluated the water . The water was excell ent . Having cold water is really a luxury . € O ► 4Fl&li ► 1 lhtll •
120 :ti 0t ◄ fl8Et ◄ T1)!(~ It i s sure different than Mercury. The food just boil s down to the fact that we quit eating the bite size food entirely. We had absolute ly no desire for it after the third day . I doubt whet·:1.er we touched a drop of that bite size food affor t he third day . We ate s t rictly the rehydrated food. If I were sitting down r i ght now to redo this flight, I would make up a recommendation ::or the food . I would have a number of bags made up just the size of these rehydratab l e bags . Bagi; that don't have to be folded, crushed , rolled, or steam rollers driven over them . I ' d make up these packets of eight , ten , or f i f teen or whatever the neatest package with a zipper or a velcro on it if:. I ' d put those in there and let the pilot pick out what he wanted for a meal. He could pick out one or two or three or wha tever he felt like he wanted for a meal. He could do the same with the juices. I'd have other bags in with just juices . We ' d have a grea t many juices all stacked i n there , and they don ' t have to be all folded and crumpled up . I thi nk they will probably package a lot neater this way. You just have two types of bags . You'd have
12 1 iO ► IE1Qfti&i food bags and juice bags . And then I'd have another bag just full of these wet wipes . I f somebody wanted a wet wipe they could go in and get a wet wipe . They wouldn ' t have to be handed back and forth , back and forth . They wouldn ' t be hanging all over the cockpit. And that way you ' d have a very neat set up . You wouldn ' t have a lot of food that is difficult to stow. The big difficulty in s t owing this food is the paper . This makes the bulk. All this tinfoil and other · things wrapped in individual plastic and then more foil and a great big package holding the whole thing. And When you get all this paper gathered up the best you can possibly packet you have at least equal volume to what you had initially with the food . I think that you can cut down a great deal by clever packaging and allow the pilot to choose his foods per meal . I think he'll be happier . I think the packaging of it will be neater and easier . I think you will get a lot more effective use of space . I think the biggest problem for GT-7 will be that they are going to have a 2- 1 factor . Everytime they pul l out a package of food, by the time they get that food plus the waste products back in and stowed it ' s going to be exactly @ot ◄ FtMl 5 ◄ 11xr
122 EO ► ~FH!Jl!m l twice the size it was when it came out. I don ' t believe there is anyway t o get around it the way the food is packaged . Conrad What are you going to do? Jim a.nd .l!:d at11 everything in the spacecraft. You and I hardly ate anything. If we had known that we were going to eat what we ate , we could have had twice the room in the Bpacecraf t . Cooper Yes. Conrad We lef t 10 packages of food there . We m•ver ever touched it . Plus we filled up the Jocker with another third of the food we didn't eat from the packages that we opened . Toast, apri cot cubes , brownie squares, fruit cakes , a.nd I don ' t know what all were stuffed all over that spacecraft . We didn't eat any of that . I couldn' t eat it if I had wanted to. I just didn ' t have a:ny desire for that stuff at all . Cooper I don ' t know what it was about, but it jus t seemed to be so dry, and chew and concentrated . Conrad The doctors figured we were running on ab)ut 1800 calories a day , and I don ' t feel that we were cheating ourselves . There is a big diffe::-ence between our flight and Jim and Ed ' s . They went a::ter this big extravehicular t hing, and I think tha·; it probably- - (@t 4 F18{MiWIL •123 Cooper Well, I ' ll tell you , a couple of days we ate a lot more . That third day we had a real full day . We were really busy. Man , we really had the appetite . We really gobbled down the food and we ate good . Those days we were just drifting were- - Conrad That makes sense to me because if I ' m wor king I eat a lot and if I ' m not working I don ' t eat much. Cooper Maybe our morale was low all over . We didn' t consume much food . I got hungry and Pete did , too . I could tell when I was hungry , and we'd say okay let ' s break out the food and eat . We really boiled down to just about 2 meals a day when we powered down and 3 meals a day when we were working hard . It was only about 2 meals a day powered down that we even wanted . The bite s i ze food tastes awful good when you just sit around and snack on bite size food . I t just didn ' t taste wor t h anything up there . I may have finished off maybe one or possibly two packages of it up t here just by having it sitting around i n •that little nook or cranny . Maybe once a day , I'd have one of t hem. Jus t an i n-between meal snack but other t han that i t was really a waste having t hem along. I think that if we had all bite size food we would have quit eating -eof'~kJelSt rrm
124 entirely. I imagine that would be an ea3y way to package the food. But the rehydratabl e ,)nes were really good. There is just no getting acound it. They are good food. The are nourishing and... Conrad Boy, I don't know what to say about the :3leep periods. Cooper The juices were good. They were really Hxcellent. We had some leaks . We had four bag failures on those plastic bags . I think it was the /unction of crumpling this bag all up again and having t o wad i t around to fit it -tightly into a diffe:'.'ent shape from the fold that it was in. I think tha.t those four bag failures could have been r eal serious. Pete had one that was worse probably- - Conrad I was eating merrily on the eighth day, r:hrimp creole, and it blew out the side , and it blew this itty bitty dehydrated , rehydrated shrimp all over the circuit breaker panel. It was red and i t looked like somebody had flashed their hash all over--Ha,ha! You can ' t clean it up in zero g. Everytime you wipe a shrimp off one place it would float over somewhEre else. I was snatching shrirap out of the ai r al l over everywhere. I was bloody mad at the bag. I was abou t to have a fit . ..ONPl9@11ff.,_L •
FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper 125 ~eMUAL Why don ' t we finish this sleep period? And we wil l be through with systems and pick up those questions . Start the experiments. O kay . Okay , sleep period . I think the schedule needs to be set somewhere around the normal s l eep cycle that a person has a l ready, in other words , I don ' t think that the s l eep ought to be set for mid- morning or mid- afternoon . And I personally think that the cockpit is small enough that you ' re al mos t going to have to s l eep both guys at the same time . I concur . I don ' t think you can be doing the ex ? eriments with one of them- - And have the other one asleep . Yeah. Pete and I both found that the times when we really slept the bes t and most comfortable and real ly got some good sound s leep was when we powered that thing completely down and turned all the l ights out and were down around the backside area of South America and there wasn ' t anybody to cut in and be flashing in to tell us all kind of things and they woul d leave us a l one and we just both power down and go to sleep and get a good s l eep . And that is the only way you are going to do it , becaus e if one guy is •
126 FCSD Rep Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad doing experiments or working, or if one in the spacecraft, or doing all this other stuff, the other one is just not going to sleep. This i~: pure and simple as that. How about mentioning about how quiet it is . The inside of the spacecraft is just as quiet as the inside of a very quiet office room . Yeah. Well now , the big thing here is ihat we had taken our helmets off and put these neck dams on so we had no, none of this suit air flow over the mikes. And when you get in that configuration so you are not picking up any noises, as a matter of fact , we had our intercom volumes turned down . Most of our talking we were doing was to one another. We were just talking in our normal tone of voice. And our radio volume levels were extremely low . We were carrying about 4 on our radio volumes . And that was more than adequate volume. I mean that guy came in loud and clear in the headset. You could hear a pin drop in that spacecraft . The only sound that you were aware of was a very gentle swishing sound of air which was flow due to the recirc being open . Right . Cooper •
127 Cooper And it was so quiet that you could hear a guy when he picked the book up and started turning the page . Conrad Yeah , I could hear in back in the adapter section after real ly getting adapted to this thing , we could hear the hydrogen vent , we could hear the fuel cell hydrogen purge . We couldn ' t hear oxygen purge . We could hear all thruster firing of the attitude thruster s . When we did our burns, we didn ' t even have our helmets on . Did we? We had our helmets off when we did the maneuver burns , when we did those perigee--and we could hear all thrusters firing . Aft firing thrus ters . W e bli pped the forward fir ing thruster s and we fired the up-down and left and right thrusters and we heard them al l fire -- all the maneuver thrusters and all the attitude thrusters . And I could hear many other noises working back in the--There was a pump package or something squeaking back there that squeaked for all through the test period and I was curious to see if I was going to hear it in flight and sure enough , it was loud and clear . It was back there behind my head in the adapter section. And you could hear jus t anything that was out of the ordinary noise . And that was what the pr oblem ee-NFlt:JfflTF-;1¥1_
128 .. @@:t 4FID it tTls-tt~ was , it was so blas ted quiet in there that when something did click or snap or that was not cyclic in nature that you got used to it woke you up just like that . And as Gordo says , turning the pages i n a book , or he ' d reach over and pull something off the Velcro , jus t a little food package and just that little zip of the Velcro sounded like it was magnified in ther e cause it was so blasted quiet in the spacecraft . He couldn ' t talk in the micro phone without me hearing it . Cooper I tri ed actually cupping my hands and talking into my mike here so I could make as little n)ise as poss ible . Conrad And I tried it too . We would wake each )ther up . So our recommendation - I ' m sure the spa~ecraft is safe. You may want to look at something - I really don ' t think you need this, but I think it should be looked at f r om an engineering point of view - what would - what are the catastrophic things that could bother you i f you were both asleep that ·,,rould need somewhat of a warning to wake you up and I real l y don ' t think you need any myself . Cooper I don ' t either . Conrad But I think that the spacecr aft - and we felt that
129 way in flight , and we did ; we both went to s leep at the same time . And I ' m sure if we would start losing pressurization our ears would have told us that we were as sensitive to that as we were to noise . Cooper Thi s schedule we have covered that , I think it should be in . Because invariably, we could get busy doing other things and have many interfer ences and it would wind up that we would both wind up sleeping during the normal Eas t Coast nighttime cycle . In variably, we just weren ' t sleepy at other times . Conrad Yeah, I think the other thing is that now in the schedule my naptime al ways took place when we were cleaning the spacecraft . This was too short after the stateside passes . That compressed the whole rest of the sleeping cycle . Although we tried to stick to it . Gordo woul d go to sleep for his long period which was usually 5 hours instead of 6 be cause we ' d slid into that time . We always ate our meals together and we were scheduled not to . We always took the vision test together . We weren ' t , this way we compr essed things down . And uh , then I usually wound up having about 5 hours off , but I never s lept the full 5 hours . There was just one ..
130 • night that I did . There was one night that Gor do slept maybe 6 or 7 hours and I let him Eleep that whole time because we were just exhausted. And that was the same reciprocal thing -- he let me sleep for 6 or 7 hours . That was the only time in the f l ight that we both real ly s l ept any long period of time . The rest of the time I don't t hink we ever slept longer than 2 hour s at the most -- And most of the time it was 50 minutes between s t ations. Cooper Well, that ' s the whole thing , that the -- on this schedule thing there are many , many, many inter fer ences to sleeping and these stations just calling in letting you know that they have TM sclid and are standing by, interfere with you-- they wake you up. Conrad They shouldn ' t even do that--on backside passes un less they got something to give you , they shouldn ' t even call you. Cooper And then too , when they start handing ycu a bunch of flight plan updates and they want yoi:.. to do this and that and one man is trying to be-- ttey ar e try ing to keep one man real busy whil e the other sleeps , just doesn't work out. Configuration , i,,ell , just close your eyes . The best configuration t o s l eep is to turn all lights off and s l eep . I will say one
131 thing right now that we haven ' t mentioned befor e , I believe the Polaroid window f i l t ers we took were the greatest things we had along. Conrad Especially when we got on that drift in fl i ght . Cooper I ' d real l y r ecommend thos e very strongly, W e put both of those up dim then down to where they com pletely block things out, turn the lights out , go to s leep and really have at it . Conrad One guy could open his up and real ly s ee the gr~'.ll1d well with them in the open conditi on , but i t was a circular hole that was small and with the filter on the other window it kept t he spacecraft r el ativel y dar k i f the other guy was t rying to sleep . Cooper Ri ght . What ' s this mission br iefing? Conrad I think that was supposed to be the t hing that we changed courses in midstream and we di d; we briefed each ot her and br ought one another up on what was going on and what we had written down . • CO~Ffl!J !PffM
132 9,0 OPERATIONAL CHECKS 9 , 1 Apollo Landmark Identification FCSD Rep Conr ad FCSD Rep Conrad FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper Conrad On these - let ' s try to get everything in that log on these --it ' s going to take a little m ore time? I think - - Well , you want to take each Apollo landmark separa tely? Is that what you want to do? Yes . As your list - - go down and call out the ones you did and whatever you have on your log there and we' 11 put this in one neat l i ttle packag(?. Well, the first one they gave us--you want to do this exactly fully like - time , rev? I ' d like to , yes , because we ' ve had an awful l ot of trouble . Okay, the first Apo l lo l andmark was 208 and it was on day one at 09 : 27 and it was covered b;r cl ouds . . .c And it was Cape Rhir and we didn ' t get 1 ,,. In fact , the clouds were right over the (?dge and we didn ' t see anything until just about off the land. And the next one was - - Gordo , why don ' -~ you talk about -- You took all these except--you -~ook them al l , as a matter of fact, so why don't you give them the business on that, I didn ' t even look at
133 60t H @ l8 Et tlh\L half of them . Most of them occurred during my sleep time . Cooper Okay, the next one was Sequence 212 . And that is on Lake Winemarka and it was a point out in the l akes in Brazi l --down in the Br azilian area, and it ' s a l arge l ake . There are no other l akes in the immediate area . The l ake was very , very distinctive . You could see it from some 6 or 700 miles away very clearly--big, heavy jungle all around the lake and the point that they selected was the finger of a little peninsula out in the lake in a particular point right on the peninsula . I thought the lake was easy to find , the peninsula was relati vely easy to find from quite a distance out . There was no problem getting on it . It was a fairly disti nctive landmark . The light was fairly low - it was late in- the- day type pass, and the light was fairly low over in the West , but no particular problem getting on it , holding on t he target , and ident i f yi ng it . Apollo l andmark--l et ' s see , I took 1 , 2 , 3, sequences of pi ctures over that . And Apollo landmark 213 was the next one , and I wonder if they want the magazi ne and sequence number s . Okay , on 212 it was magazine 1 and exposure 62 , 63 , and 64 . On Apollo landmark 213
134 • it was magazine 4, exposure 10, expo:rnre 11 . 213 was Lake DePoopo in South America and here again the l ake was fairl y distinctive although this was .. _ a shallow water lake - the other lake was i n the mountains in a fairl y deep water - crater-type lake, whereas this Lake DePoopo was a flat land lake fai r ly shallow , the lake was not the same shape as on the map that we had of it . In fact, the map we have is quite a poor map and the isl and that the point i s on , Is l a de Panza , is not the same shape as the island that is shown . It is the onl y i slanc it can be, i t is not exactly, quite different in reality than it is here on the thing. The island is changed in shape, but being a shallow water l ake you can see that the lake could very r eadily change with the water level - - change shape with the water level ; and these islands could very readily be modified fairly readily just by dredging or hacking away at them . It was obviously the only lake in tha t im mediate area that i t could be and it had the same general shape as this lake . And it had the river leading in. The lake was f airly distinctive, and fairly easy to find, the point was easy enough to get onto , and I got these two pictures of it . Light •
I 135 conditions were again fairly late-in- the-afternoon type light conditions, but they were good enough . don't think this lake was nearly as distinctive however, as the Lago de Winemarga . I don't think you can trust these shallow water lakes as being that definitive in that they may change a little on you and won ' t show up as good , particularly f r om higher altitudes I don't believe, as the deeper water lake perhaps . And the next one , let ' s see, as to time--days and times-- first of all , I was skipping that, day 2, 21 hours 45 minutes 39 sec onds was Sequence 212 which I covered, Sequence 213 which we just covered was day 3 , 21 hours 38 minutes and 2 seconds; these were all made at -- 212 was made at 1/250 at f/8 because of the quite low light value, and Sequence 213 was made at 1/250 at 9.5 and then one at f /8 , because here again, it was a fairly low l ight level. They were all made at fairly near 90° pitch down. Sequence 207 was made by day 5 , 7 hours 14 minutes 27 seconds. I made two pictures there. 57 and 58 are magazine 4, 1/250 at 9 . 5 and approximately 70° pitch down and 30 to 50° yaw. These were yawed off at some slight angle . And 207 was Canary Islands and it was the southern point •
«€~ E;fP9 1 Tl,•,L on the La Palma Island , and very distinctive ; how ever, one can get confused if there LS any l ittle bit of cloud cover at the isl ands yo·1 1 r e l ooking .. at . There are approximately five or six islands out in this group and with some of t :1e scattered cloud conditions, vou can get on the wrong island there fairly readi l y, particularly i .: part of one island , where partial l y covered by cl ouds , maybe just a point--you can very readily g1~t the wrong po.int . However, I think we got the :~ight point all right without any problem . And :: think the lighting condi tions were very excel l nnt , really , except for the scattered c louds on the water down there; the lighting conditions themsdves were good for these pictures . And on day 5 , 10 hours 25 min utes and 2 seconds , we got Sequence :)08 which was the one we had tried the first day and had had cloud cover . That was magazine 4 , e>:posure no . 62 taken at 1/250 at f/9 . 5 90° with about a 20° yaw right, and there again that was the 1,oint near Cape Rhir near Agadir and the commenis that I had to make on this one are that there are three points going down this same general land mass that are neither one a great deal more distinctive than the •
137 < Qt; fI Dflsl1\AJ; .. other . In fact, the one that is the most distinctive from quite a distance out is Cape Sim near Osaweira. It is a lot brighter, lighter colored sand and is more distinctive than Cape Rhir. However, once you learn the place , Cape Rhir becomes a little more distinctive when you learn what to look for , because Cape Rhir is at the edge of the mountains and just to the southeast of Cape Rhir , there is a river and a valley--a big, wide, green valley which travels up to the east along the edge of the mountains . When you once learn to look for it , this river and valley are quite a give- away , because look just to the left of it and that's Cape Rhir . I think , prob ably it is the most distinctive of these three. The three points that show up immediately from perhaps 800- -1000 miles out are Cape Hodad and Cape Sim and. Cape Rhir . You can see all three little points sticking out there . Neither one of which are particularly more distinct except this Cape Sim has brighter colored sand and begins to show up a little more distinctive, but once you learn where the land marks are , these mountains and valleys near Agadir give away Cape Rhir. I believe it is the best landmark-- in that immediate area. I ' m not sure that
138 FCSD Rep I agree , incidentally on all the Apollo landmarks landmarks we ' ve got here . I ' m not sure I agree , in general, with any of the Apollo landmarks that they havp . I think there are lots more distinctive l and mark features around the country. I think that their idea of selecting a point of land down in the water is good, but I think that there are numerous places around the world where , say a large river comes out and intersects with the ocean naybe at a point , at a point in a river and things ,f this type , would be even more distinctive or an inter s ection of a river and the ocean , or an intersection of something in the type of causeways i n Miami or the causeways here at the Cape where the;r cross the water with a very prominent water landma:~k . They ' ll give you a very accurate telescopic poin-; to sight. on , whereas the particular points of lancl that they have selected are not really accurate type sighting points for real accuracy, I don ' t feel . They're r easonably distinctive, but I don ' t thin}: any--nearl y a s distinctive as a lot of other areas around the country that could be selected. Okay, why don ' t you look through these things her e and see if there is anything there that you haven ' t covered. €ewfl~if>. f"pl,Ofl
139 Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper Cooper " Okay, let 's see, going down on the 9 , 0 Operational Checks - Acquisition . . That's Apollo Landmarks. All right, the--I think to find these landmarks, things of this type , one thing that I feel pretty strongly that you really need is a platform. You need a platform to operate from. You need pointing, something to give you pointing information . Now, you can find it approximat ely with the plat - form off, and by knowing about what BEF or SEF are , and by yawing approximately so many degrees , knowing what time to look for it, approximately what degrees to pitch down . Chances are, if it is fairly dis tinctive you are going to find it. But for certainly very accurate acquisition , you certainly need a platform up and some accurate pointing information, then you real ly got it pinned. We tried it both ways and there is no comparison. If you really want to make sure you get on a target, if you ' ve got a time and a t the time you are at this time, then the pitch angle and the yaw angle to be at, boy, you just can ' t miss it . If you go to those angles just a few seconds ahead of time and set right there and as you come up on the time ,
140 • there t he point is, right there . You just don't miss it. Updating, of course , you 've got to keep these times updated as you--depending on your ephemeris, and how you are sliding around on your original time. Ours, fortunately , was just right on the money practically the whol e mission , fairly late in the program we began to decay enough that we were changing times fairly significantly, but the weather is the biggest factor of all . Of course, if t he weather is bad in the area, you do:1 1 t get it . You just don ' t get the t arget . I f it exists , humidity l ike you find along the West Coast of t he United States then you aren ' t going to get it although some places out there like the point by Santa Barbara and Point Arguella and some of those poin·~s, even in spite of fog and haze , almost i nvariably Bhow up . These are the kind of things that should be taken into consideration . The weather is pr obably t he biggest factor on whether you are going to get a point or not . Sun angle is not so importcnt as weather, although it definitely is a factc,r in that very early or very late the sun angles ree.lly tend to cut down the visibility, particularly if you have the addition of humidity in the air . If you have "COMFfD~ •
• 141 the addition of humidity in the air. If you have high humidity and then low sun angles, you are out of luck . If it is a very dry humidity, the low sun angles don ' t hurt you nearly so much . The sightings --there again the ease of which you are going to get your sightings done, get on to them and get them spotted and so on , i s going to be dependent on the landmark itself . Those of them that we got, I think, are certainly reasonably landmarks , although some of the confusion things can be - - Conrad I just found out why the whip antenna didn't go up . It was my fault . Cooper Why is that? Conrad Because I powered down the common control bus. Remember, I turned off all squib batteries to save batteries later. Cooper You didn ' t turn those off till later. Conrad Well, I know I didn ' t, but I pr obably turned them off before we ran the antenna up though , or tried to. I ' m not really sure. Cooper I don ' t think so . Conrad Well, don't mind that. If it comes out , well , that was the reason. Cooper I remember when you powered those down. We had t
- •• 142 Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper already gone through all the sequences ~1d everything by then. Okay, let's see. Designated targets- - I think you have covered that pretty much. Yes , all the targets . The targets that they have designated versus what •• Yes . Okay, well the designated targets- - There are some al ternate targets right in the are1:.s here that I ' ve already mentioned. I mentioned a c:ouple of cases there that could possibly be bettnr targets than the ones that they selected, although there is nothing wrong, particularly, with thr, ones that they selected . I personally liked a little bit better than on target 212 , or Sequence 212 , this point of land . I thought a little more distinctive was the point of land that came out of a l ittl e town called San Pedro, just north of there on the same lake . That 's spmething to consider . It 's a point of land that is quite distinct because it is fairly heavy. A big mountain sort of c:ame right down into the lake and dropped off into it , and it · was quite a prominent point of land . ::t is very shear and precise, whereas, it is a l i ·;tle bigger point. Although, from a great distanc,~ farther out,
the point they had might have proved to be better. Maps--Boy, we ran the gamut on them, but in general, the Apollo maps we got were just stinking. They were lousy and they didn ' t give you any lead-ins to where you were trying to find these things, and if it hadn ' t been for Harry KazU1DA. ' s map over there and our regular orbital map , we never would have be gun to have found these places . We couldn't have possibly told where they were . And the Apollo maps that they have on here, these colored lithograph types gizmoes things, are just worthless . They are not worth the powder to blow them up with . There are several real typical examples of why these maps are so bad . For instance , right here, just on the better map of the group , they have the Canary Islands, but they don't even have all of the islands in the group. The island that you pick is sitting way up here at the corner of the map and you don ' t know what's leading you into there, or whether there ' s maybe another island just right by that one . You need a bigger scale map like this one . That was a little too big a scale perhaps , really, but that ' s the kind of map you need to really point out what you need coming into it, and s omewhat of a more reasonable
144 • picture . I think the prime example we had of any difficulty in map locat ion was not on the Apollo maps themselves , but i t is exactl y the srune kind of thing. What was that one that had the lit tle i s land? Conrad Lake Depoopo . Cooper No, no . It had one tiny l i ttle i sland right off t he coast and it wasn't on the Apollo mapB . It was the- - Conrad It was a D- 6. That was that thing off BrE,zil. That's all it was . It was a chart of water with an i sland in the middle of it . It turned out that right at the edge of the chart was another island . We took the wrong island first because , heck, it looked l ike there wasn ' t another island- - Conrad I'm just making this comment because it will apply to the Apollo map making, as well, and this was an ideal example of how t o really screw somebody up . Cooper We a l so got another isl and right up there . We got it and we were sail ing along thinking that was a good shot we made of that island, and we fooked down and I said, "Hey, look down there. What ' s that. That ' s another one." I swung over on it , and he said , "Let's get it , too ." So , we discovered
FCSD Rep Cooper 145 E~PID[NflAL that it was the one. It was just by accident that we got the right one. Okay. Detail--which of these do you think would be best? I think you covered some of this. Well, I think that coastline is the best, distinctive features on a coastline . Next best are rivers and mountains . Probably, if you can have combinations of the rivers, mountains, and coastlines, these are quite good. A river running into a coastline and into the sea, I think, is a real excellent one. Very good. And roads- -boy, there is just no getting around it that roads make an excellent landmark area. They really show up. And a road in the right area where it is contrasty will really show up for a long, long way away , like a white concrete road and darker background, a dark green background, really shows.. And then, I guess cities show up probably the least of anything. They tend to have enough vegetation and foliage and everything and they kind of blend in. They don't reall y show. Lakes are excellent landmarks. Airports are not as good as lakes and things of this type. Airports tend to blend in a little bit. L~t•s see, color contrast--I've already covered that . Readability - -
FCSD Rep Anything at night? Cooper Coastline . On a clear ni ght, boy, the best thing that will show up is coastline . The grnatest light contrast is between your water and l and .. FCSD Rep Okay, I think that ' s enough on that . 9 , 2 Cabin Lighting Survey Cooper I ' ll let Pete comment on that one . Conrad Well , it was very straightforward, and we didn't get very many of them, mainly because WE! wound up in drifting flight . We took the measurements as advertised , except there is one little ~:litch in the thing. They wanted you to take a light measurement out , the , window, and they wanted you to c.o it in either the heads- up, or heads- down. In doi ng thi s , that said the horizon was in front of ycu. Now the light meter reading looking at the black sky just above the horizon in the daytime , which was the total sky, was usually a number around 11 . 5 . But looking at the earth, or just below the horizon, the meter reading was about 15 . 6. So, I al ways recorded two readings , the reading for the horizon and the black sky, because I didn't really know which one you wanted . With the spot meter the thing just turned out that way . Okay, we made one at 01+23+10. Gordo
147 -GQMEilQEt{l:1 AI D ,. made one at 05+04+30+00. I made another one at 03+01+45+00 , and we had another one at 04+22+40+00. Out of those, two of them were in drifting flight, and the other two were heads-up . And I had this recording that 11 . 6 was equal to black sky and 16.8 was normally representative of earth background. That was it. It was straightforward. 9 , 3 SPADATS Tracking Check Conrad W e did it. We did it by turning our beacon on so they could just track us, but we , of course, didn't get into it with the REP thing. The SPADATS thing, actually, was supposed to take place during the REP operation, and it didn ' t. But we did turn on our beacon so SPADATS could track us one time over this Willia.mtown site, or wherever it was. That's all there was to it, so there was nothing to-- - 9 , 4 UHF Antenna Pattern Test Conrad Now, these UHF antenna pattern tests were done just as written in the book and the data is recorded . Do you want it? FCSD Rep Why don ' t you read it out? Conrad Okay. We did a UHF sequence 03 at 01+10+44+25, and the angles were 0°, 0° , 0° . We did a sequence 01 at 02+13+47+05, and the angles were 90°, 0°, and •148 eOt ◄ Fll'f fqTIJ(t .. 14° left . We did an 02+15+21+19 , sequence 02 , and the angles were 0°, roll left 132° , 0°, and they were done as advertized . FCSD Rep How about any updating on that? Conrad No , they just sent i t up and said to do it , and these were the angles they wanted . They set this up for us to do. 9,5 Thruster Illuminati on Checks Conrad Never did it . We were supposed to do it the beginn ing of the first night or something like that , and it was in a sleep period time and we were tired and we didn ' t do it . After that, we got into either a power down or drifting situation where we were un able to do it, so it was never done during the flight . 9.6 Dual Command Transmi tter Test Conrad That was never done. That had to do with the REP too, if I remember right. I think it was DCS light r esets . I think what they were trying to do was to f i nd out if our radar was on. They sent DCS commartds and we were transmitting or something--what could happen--We never got into that test . 9,7 Radar Tests Conrad Okay, Test 2, short range, boresight spacecraft on REP, no problem. We never got time to get into the 00►4 FtDffi~TlA! •
149 ~cONEIDftsl!IAL rest of it . We never got more than a mile from him, so we got that 3000 foot transient but we never got the 30,000, What was the transient at 3000 feet like? Do you remember, Gordo? On radar when the REP went farther than 3000 feet , I don't think there was any transient to speak of. Cooper I didn't notice any particular transient, or any noticeable one at all. I was looking for it. Conrad Yeah. We did the- - Cooper I had it damped pretty well . Conrad We never did get the radar to run for 3 hours, so we didn ' t get test 5, test 4, no correlation between range and range rate display and visual observations at short range, they all worked very well. Test 6, we observed the normal transients that you'd expect, just as advertised on here, and I also noticed that· the lock- on light cycled on and off, on and off, when I was in a standby mode after warmup. Radar test 7, stand by to ON, you have to get Gordo on that . Conrad Test 8 . We dashed over there the first time and as soon as we were within about 260 to 270 miles, the radar locked up on 248,66 miles . I got the first digital readout on address 69 and it read down to
150 Conrad 9 . 8 HF Evaluati on Conrad Cooper some 160 miles . I read the numbers out over the air. I ' m not sure that they aren't on t ape , too . The tape hadn't run out then . Then we tracked back out again and it pointed right to t his f-''.ILA area here at the Cape when we had the needles centered . Gordo was tracking on the needles, and it seemed to work real well. We are really impressed with it. As you know, we got it to lock on the REP everytime after that over the Cape , but we never g~t the range to read right . I don't know whether that was a radar prob lem or a computer problem . At that time , the voice recorder was working on the first test, and I thi nk there is some in::ormation on the tape . HF evaluation test number 1 . We transmi t ted all the way around the worl d. Then we gave i.:.p number 2, because it was keeping the other :Astronaut awake . Then we did the other HF transmission test which was l isten . We did hear Hawaii for awhile going away from them and coming back in - That was a ridiculous test anyway.
151 Cooper .. . .HF when they were playing music. It dropped out when we heard it, and we'd transmit once in a while to them and they heard us. It worked real well. £0Mftf>EMflAL
152 10.0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS 10.1 Powered Flight Conrad Wel l, everything wa.s straightforward up ·.mtil Fairing Jet. We told you about the problems we had at Fairing Jet . We want to take a look 1 :1.t that . Cooper I didn ' t see anything- - Conrad I did see the horizon come into view at 1 :1.bout 60° . Cooper Yes, I saw it just as we began to stage 1 '.>ver . I l ooked out over your window. Conrad That 's right. Right after staging in guidance ini tiate it ca.me down to about 80° on t he horizon and man , it looked great out there . Cooper And the only thing that I noticed at SEGO was a lot ·of debris. Conrad Oh, yes, it was stuff all over everywhere. About the funniest thing of all was Cooper Snow all over the whole area.. Conrad Yes, and just all sorts of glittering pieces of thi s , that and the other thing. Cooper Pieces and bits. Conrad Then a.11 these washers and goodies started floating a.round in the spacecraft, but the .. .. . 'llas the washer floating along - - Cooper That w a s three or four orbits later. He:t:'e we are ....
153 ~Qt~OOit IIIAI? = whipping a long at 17 , 000 miles an hour or so and I looked out and here's that washer floating right in front of my window. It sat out there and floated around a while. I pointed it out to Pete and he got over and looked at it and it floated on around and finally it ·just was drifting on off. Finally it disappeared. And about an hour l ater a bolt came off. 10 2 Orbital Flight Conrad We didn't see our own booster. We were too busy. We started the flight plan right away and we never turned around to look at it. Cooper We never turned around to look at it. Conrad We sure as heck saw the REP. Cooper We saw the REP and saw the REP and saw the REP. Conrad We saw the REP bl anket too. Cooper The REP blanket, I think we mentioned before, but the REP bl anket someway or other got between us and the REP. This means that the REP either went through it or tumbled over it, because the blanket was be tween us and the REP. Man-made objects in orbit. Let's see booster, REP- - Conrad Okay, now that satellite- - Cooper Satellites. We never saw any of the scheduled ones.
154 Conrad We never saw any of the scheduled ones but you ' ve got to have the platform to see them. They gave us angles like pitch 82° and yaw 45. You're looking at the black sky. You haven't any idea of where you're looking. You have to have the platform. One thing that we did find, if their platform point ing at satellites was actuall y the pointing informa tion they gave us for the ground objects, why we woul dn ' t have had any trouble finding them. Cooper The pointing information that we got from the ground was excellent. Conrad We hacked that time on the second and we were really pointed with the platform up and we were looking right down the pipe at whatever it was that they were wanting us to look at . The only reason we didn't see it is we couldn't make it out. But we were l ooking at it. Cooper Satellites--There was only one time when Pete and I thought we saw something and we didn't have time to identify it . We were in drifting flight and we never could identify it. I don ' t even know if it was a satellite. So many things are going by when you're drifting that it's difficult to say. Geo graphical--We saw millions of geographical details:
155 ESt◄ fJtlDEt◄ TIA f rivers, lakes, oceans- - Conrad I think all of that will come out in the experiments too . We saw all kinds - Cooper Towns, airports, railroads, roads, and all that stuff . Conrad .Airplanes. Cooper Airp-lanes . Conrad .Anything you say, we saw at least one each. Cooper I finally saw one and I nearly busted my rear end doing it. Conrad I saw the carrier. I saw an airliner. I saw con trails. I saw individual houses up in Tibet. One thing I didn't see for Gordo was a car. Cooper I couldn't find him a car. He was sitting over there asleep. I turned on the whole control system and turned around to show him one. This was the only one I could find during the whole stinking l ousy trip . Conrad We saw just about anything you would expect us to see. Cooper But there again I think you've got to have the con trol system to point where you have your windows right to make sightings . You just can't catch them in drifting flight . ee~~flOEt'ITIAL
156 Conrad One day we went past El Paso and the lighting con ditions were just right. You really coul d s ee the individual s treets in El Paso . You could distinguish the streets but this wasn't always true. The l ight ing conditions had to be right. One day we made a pass over the United States and I could 3ee the str eets, the airports, the lakes and eve:ry princi - ple town across the United States all on one orbit . W e started at Los Angel es, went to Phoenix to Tucson, Abilene , White Sands , El Paso- - Cooper You coul d see the details down there in Jlear Lake - Taylor Lake area--like you were flying over coming in to land. Conrad Dallas, Nashville , M emphis- Cooper It was clear as a bell , Conrad And when we went right out at Savannah and we were · looking right down the pipe at Jacksonville , Florida. You coul d see the bridges and the St . Johns R~ver and everything. Cooper When we came o~er. t~e Ca~e here you could see every one of the launch pads . Conrad I should have two 70-mm photographs. I guarantee you that I got a 70-mm photograph of the Cape one day l ike nobody ever took before. If i t came out , eet>tfl0 ENTIM •
157 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper it was the clearest picture of the Cape. Boy, that was beautiful. You coul d see every de tail. You could see every causeway and every street, everything that rode around the Cape, and buildings all over the Cape. All that was on the same day but it was another orbit . Celestial - - Gosh, we coul d see seventh magnitude stars- - Mercury never had a window. Our windows were filthy . When we l ifted off it just absolutel y unforgiveable how dirty they were. Yet there were many times the magnitude of visibil ity the M ercury windows were . We could see easil y seventh magnitude stars. Well, in Orion we coul d see all seven stars in the belt and we could see cl usters down the side of the leg .. I've never seen those clusters before . I have seen big bl owups of them, but you could definitely see two good size cl usters. Celestial - -We saw a lot of planets and we saw the moon under all kinds of con ditions. We saw the sun. We took Polaroid testings on the sun. We ran the Polaroid fil ters at differ ent angles. It looks to me like the sun has circul ar •
158 polarization. I just can' t find any linear defini tion of it. When the sun is setting you can get s ome linear polarity in a vertical plane , but other wise I just can't see anything different one way than the other. I took the filter out and rotated it a number of times. I took the whole filter out. We saw a Zodiacal light . We saw- - Conrad Yes, we really did a couple of times--just could see it where night vision was right . We had t he lights out in cockpit and everything. Boy, you coul d really-,: - Cooper Pete spotted an interesting phenomenon that he pointed out one night that I had never seen before. It looked like an Aurora. It was an Aurora type l ight and it was a very bright green . It changed in color and was in the airglow layer. It actuall y changed the height of the airglow below . It brightened it above where it -- but below it, it seemed t o cut it down and make it more definitive. Where it wasn't it was kind of fuzzy along there and then where t his glow was the airglow kind of jumped up and was sort of chopped off very sharply. This was very bright . I don't know what it was . It was apparently some kind of a Aurora effect. We saw a lot of meteorites
in Australia was a good example . Two different days it was completely clobbered in where you couldn't see anything on the ground in that imme diate area. This point Rhir was clobbered in one day. We were going to get an Apollo landmark on it and it was just back in under the clouds in fact. And Kano we were going to get a shot of the Kano air field, wasn ' t it? Conrad Yes, that was clobbered . Cooper Yes, it was clobbered, We got right up close to i t and there were these low clouds hanging in there just scattered to broken clouds and we couldn't see . Conrad Actually on the D-6 stuff most of the time the experimenters were up on what was clobbered and they didn't even bother to give it to us , or if they gave it to us it became clobbered before we got there. They usually were able to tell us that it was going to be clobbered and then many times they gave us that the weather was pretty good, but there's three tenths cloud coverage so you may or may not, It didn't bother us too much around the coastal regions.
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——— —_ a ——— |159 A Cooper Cloud Coverage . We had varied cloud coverage t hroughout the flight . Conrad Boy, I think we saw every phenomenon you could think of with t he clouds. Cooper Just about everyt hing you could t hink of. We saw typhoons , and hurricanes , and- - Conrad W e saw well defined eyes in thes e tropical storms and others without - -with such ci rrus cover t hat you couldn' t define an eye. We saw some of the most fant asti c thunder s t orms we have ever seen. Cooper We saw hundreds and hundr eds and hundreds of miles of t r ememdous big thunder storm lines with squall lines going across it . Conrad Near Sout h America. Cooper Had at times as many as 15 to 20 thunderstorms that were lighting up all at the same time . Conrad I think I have some good 16 mm camera coverage of t he thunderstorm lightning at night . Cooper And these are--then we saw--then we had great expanses over the same areas of excel lent weather, clear weather. We saw a lot of dust storms
159 B Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper < 0~4'1Dcl~TIM • in Arabia and Africa. Yes . You could see those desert storms real clear - ly. The wind picking up and moving the sand al ong. Other days we saw the same areas just as clear with no wind . Beaut iful weather. It was interesting in those deserts to notice that you could really pick up the prevailing wind t rails. Yes. You know from the sand flow. The way the sand dunes were- - And which as I sort of remember back e1 omewhere there was a lot of explanation about how the whole desert moves , you know, and you could r eally see these great --! mean for a hundred miles- hundreds of miles you could pick out t hese great obvi ous prevailing wind tracks in t he sand that just stretched for hundreds of miles . Yes . And again t his was in Egypt and south of Egypt - down in t hat area . Well, you could actually s ee by the c 1oud format ion--was odd, too . The t hing I noticed was,
Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper FCSD Rep 159 C you really could see the lower altitude prevailing winds in the cirrus clouds or the lower altitude stratus type cloud you all around and you really could see the wind pattern and one thing that r eall y impressed me, was the- - on cloud formations low altitude cloud formations--up in the Himalayan areas ,how t hat stratus- type cloud would hang- - would just completely define the land shape . You ' d see it hang in the valleys and swirl right down in the valleys and you'd see where the peaks were , i t would puff and was quite definitive of the land mass. And then coming in off the- - you could see the prevailing wind direction in the l ower altitude clouds . You could see the way the wind would come in and you'd get the wind shear where it would hit the mountain peaks coming in off the desert areas there and it would kick it up over the peak areas . Okay. Let me ask one question. Okay. Was ther e--as far as good pictures are concerned- how many pictures did cloud coverage prevent you
159 D co•lE.-laEhtllAL ~ from getting? Cooper Oh, well, a great many. Some areas--well , just in general let's just say that some areaB of the country would be completely clobbered in and we'd be traveling over an undercast for great long expanses of hundreds and hundreds of miles , and anything ·, that was in there would be-- anything t o do with any areas we desired to photograph in there whether they were specified immediate areas 01· whether they were just general pupose or S-5 , S-6 , were not available for photography, and yet the next day it might be wide open. The Himals.yas was an ideal example of that too. For twc, different days we traveled over that , you couldr..' t see any of the craters or any of the ice flows or anything due to the clouds . You could. see just occasional areas and some of the lakee would be open, so it was just heavy cloud cover- through there for about a 2 day period and then it just broke up wide open one day. Eut there were a great many areas that there were cloud covered to the point that you could not f i nd it. For instance, the Carnarvon or I should say the woodly side
®@r ◄ r1~Tr~t 159 E • in Australia was a good example. Two different days it was completely clobbered in where you couldn't see anything on the ground in that imme diate area. This point Rhir was clobbered in one day. We were going to get an Apollo landmark on it and it was just back in under the clouds in fact. And Kano we were going to get a shot of the Kano air field , wasn't it? Conrad Yes , that was clobbered . Cooper Yes, it was clobbered. We got right up close to it and there were these low cl ouds hanging in there just scattered to broken clouds and we couldn't see. Conrad Actually on the D-6 stuff most of the time the experimenters were up on what was clobbered and they didn ' t even bother to give it to us , or if they gave it t o us it became clobbered before we got there . They usually were able to tell us that it was going t o be clobbered and then many times they gave us that the weat her was pretty good , but there 's three tenths cloud coverage so you may or may not. It didn't bother us too much around the coastal regions .
160 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper The carrier was the one thing that it really bothered us on . Two different days on the carrier shots doggone it you could see one day-- for in stance we saw the carrier wake and- - But the sunlighting was such- The sunlighting and the- - You lose the wake and everything- - And then the scattered clouds, too were such that you were kind of hunting for him in and around the scattered clouds and sunlight angle was low on it and we lost him. The day we got him there were clouds b~ck there but gee we could see him for 500 miles out and we never lost t hem. Just the lighting conditions were ideal t hat day and he was also out in kind of an open area in t he clouds . Okay , horizons. The hori zons were of ~curse , a s usual , I t hink day and night were fairl;r well defined " except as you come into the- -as you go in out and out of the terminator . Just at that p,~riod of time where you ' r e going into t he l i ght or out of t he light through the terminator it ' s a ve:-:y f uzzy
161 Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad FCSD Rep ill- defined, odd area- Yeah, looking down the sun. Where you have no defined horizon at all. It's very--a real messy situation. The only thing I noted different about the horizons this time was at one morning, at one sunrise, when we saw those tremendous thunder heads out clear on the horizon--you remember that? Yes. Where we saw the horizon well-defined and these great big thunder heads with the handles on them sitting up above the horizon. They were those big thunder storms. I would guess that those things must have gone well in excess of 50,000 feet probably to be that well defined--clear out on the horizon some 12 to 15 hundred miles away you could see that profile of them. Do you have any thing more on horizons? No . One thing we might mention here while we're talking aoout these thunderstorms, you mentioned before the l ighting in the spacecraft from this lightning.
162 Conrad Yes, the lightning was bright enough io light the shingles on the spacecraft. Cooper You--the whole spacecraft could be li';. You would, even through the polaroid windows- -with the polaroid windows down full dark,some of these cig thunder storms were lighting the whole thing. Conrad Well , I tell you we saw some lightning· like I just never dreamed existed. I mean the lightning bolts must have covered a hundred miles. Cooper In general in this lightning- - Conrad Cloud to cloud Cooper In the clouds , in this lightning, in general,these clouds light up like they were a big puff of cotton with a light bulb inside, and the whole thing just lights up . But Pete md I both saw several cases where we would see a thunderst0rm a l ittle ways out in the distance , and I actually saw air to ground lightning bolts come right out of the clouds and right down just 11 cho,:,m". Conrad There was one storm we looked at for t :1em in the daytime where we saw air to ground lig,1tning in the daytime- - Cooper W e saw lightning go all the way from t he edge of e!Ol'If 10E~ITIAL ~
163 EiO t◄ Ftl?>et◄ TIAt ' FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper Conrad this big black cloud right down to the ground. Very clear. Another thing that was different that I noted that was a little different than the usual type of the whole big mass of clouds lighting up- - one long series of thunderstorms, I noticed where there was horizontal kind of a chain--horizontal lightning going over and you'd see it sort of travel along horizontally through the clouds like it was moving from cloud to cloud rather than from cloud to ground . Okay, thruster firing. You could see every thruster on the spacecraft fire in the middle of t he night- you could see the glow from it . These aft firing thrusters too? I don't know. I was just trying to think about the aft firing ones and we were so busy everytime we fired them that I wasn't aware of them. I don't know . We had the lights up in the cockpit when we were firing the aft -firing because we were busy- - It ' s unfair to say without pulling the test, you see, because when we were firing the aft firing
164 Cooper Cooper Conrad FCSD Rep Cooper FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper thrusters, we were also firing attitude thrusters and the attitude thrusters you could see all of them. I don't know whether you s ee the glo..;- off the af t firing thruster or not . You certainly can feel t hem firing. You can hear them fire . It's not annoying or anything. Somewhere we ought to say here--you said you could hear all the thrusters firing. Every one of them. Now, this is with the helmet on or off? Off . Off . How about with it on at separation? I bad the impression tbat at separati)n tbat I could hear them firing . The aft thrunters with the helmet on and tbat is- - Yes , I did , too . Simply because everybody said they couldn ' t hear them. I thought I could hear the- -
165 Conrad Cooper " FCSD Rep Cooper Conrad Cooper Conr ad Cooper Conrad Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper Conrad Cooper There's no doubt in your mind that they are firing. Yes . I think it 's almost more a matter of- - Did you fire t hem before you separated? We fired them just as we separated. We hit SEP- the spacecraft just as we-- Gordo counted them down 1, 2 SEP and I hit the SEP button and I don't know when he started firing. I fired just as you hit SEP. Yes. We came out clean as a whistle , I'll tell you that boy. We fired at the same second that we hit SEP. There wasn't any pitch or yaw of anything- -we just separated as smooth as a bell. And what I did , I--we held that on in there in direct and then switched over to rate command then a couple to 3 seconds later . Okay, how about the--why don't you describe the plumes a little bit here on the different thrusters and what you saw. Okay. Well, the only really- You don ' t see any plumes . You don't see any plumes off the OAMS and all you do is get the glow from them back there--you see CO ►~EIDE ►4TIAL
166 the glow as they fire . Conrad And it is pure white . Cooper And - - Conrad My recollection of i t --like white li€·ht glowing. Cooper Of the RCS Plumes? Conrad No , of t he OAMS . Cooper Oh yes. The OAMS . The RCS had a little bit of a golden color to them. Conrad Yes . Cooper And- - Conrad Plus you see on t he RCS t hrusters you see little bits of pieces of ablative material c)ming out like carbon. Cooper Yes. Right. The RCS plumes tend to come out of th,3 nozzle with a little bit of an expansion rat:lo and then just to come out in almost a column that doesn't change much. It just increases in si,;e. Conrad Yes . I was surprised t hat it didn't expand out this way. Cooper Yes, I thought it would expand out . Conrad But it just went straight up. Cooper I very much thought it would fan completely out .
167 ~O ►◄ t:IDfMflAL Conrad Like a nice candle flame. Cooper It just goes up in just a contained column almost - in fact the column appeared t o me to be no bigger around t han t hat saucer . Conrad That 's right, if it was that round . Cooper Some 4 to 5 inches maybe, in diameter at the most and just went right s t raight up for a period, distance of about 4 to 5 feet I guess where it faded, something like t hat . Conrad O h, I didn't really think it went that high. I really didn't think the thing stuck up more t han about a foot . That i t was visible light that would bother you. Cooper Well , it would bother you, but I could actually detect when they would fire, I could actually see from the pitch down--I could see t hat going almost to the t op of the window on something on the order of about a 4 foot dent where you could see any line a t all. I'm tal king about where it fades you lmow completely. And it's act ually only a couple of feet out from where the light is r eally bright. Conrad The t hing that I thought of when first I ever co~~FIDEt~TJM:
168 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad C QfqflDEt~TIAL" saw one fire was one of these 4th of ~ -uly fire cracker stand-up type bombs that you light the fuse, you know, and the thing sort of like ·;he Roman candle--it sort of spits out flame and a few sparks you know and then- - Yes, that's right . That really did it . And the other thing is that everybody's been talking about how bright they were at night and maybe again I was geared to see in the really, really brilliant light --I didn ' t really think t hey were that bright--now t hey do disrupt night vision and they did disrupt t he horizon, but they.'re not that brignt . Well , of course you 1 ve got to recogniz,~, too , that we saw them under different conditions and the fact t hat we were expecting t hem to be very bright and we bad cabin light ing up full bright. Yes . And they were by comparison with the full bright cabin lighting--they were not as bright as we expected. We also went around though with the lie;hts on red there when we were alone and you were firing only I CO~'4FIDEt~
,,,. in PULSE . Cooper That's right. We actually only bad it in PULSE. Conrad And really what it is--as a matter of fact , firing in PULSE and everything--you could always keep the ~9rizon in sight. Cooper You could keep the horizon in sight and we had the red lights on, and only we didn't have them down dim and firing just in pulse you could hold the attitude visually very well, but when you go into any amount of RCS thruster firing you've lost the horizon. Conrad Yes. Cooper Okay. One thing we have here on thruster firing both attitude and translation. I think we covered attitude pretty well. I think our OAMS was a very good attitude system to begin with. I think it was gradually degrading as the flight went on. Getting worse and worse and worse and mushier and sloppier so it was not fair to evaluate it later on in the flight because it was pretty miserable. But the RCS attitude was beautiful . It was really good. It was crisp and real precise and just a real pleasure to fly. Translation, we
170 Conrad Cooper Conrad COt~fHIDEt~TIAb used all the translation thrusters on:.y one little splurt of it on the forward, i n other words the forward firing thruster- the smal l forward firing thruster , but they were all very,· very positive and you got very defi nite die1 t i nct action out of them. And you really gc,t a feeling of real accel eration out of those aft f i r i ng ones, I thought. I felt l i ke you really were really had a big afterburner lit off when you lit those things. Yeah, man, I would have liked to have some more kinds to mess around-like turn off thruster 10 or something like that, and burn a couple of feet on one thruster because i n the s i mulator you can't hold it in Rate Command. I think you probably can in the actual spacecraft. Well, I don ' t know whether you can or ~an ' t but t hink that the difference between 2 thruster operation and 1 thruster operation is going to be apparent to you just like that and the3e guys i n F0D are making this big deal about :1aving to burn after separation from the booster and maybe only have one thruster or anything and I think anybody who has flown that thing once :L s going I
Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad FCSD REP Conrad Cooper FCSD REP Cooper Conrad Cooper FCSD REP 171 to have a good feel for whether he has two aft f i re thrusters or one because boy, with those aft f i r i ng thruster are firing you're just like you're flying an airplane and you put the throttle to it. You really feel i t. You really feel it . Yes , it's really got acceleration. And you can hear i t --it was that high speed water jet type sound , it wasn ' t an explosive sound or a r oar or anything like that . I t was more of a :i swishing sound. More like a big hose. Like a couple of big hoses firing back there . Okay , you say you did fire the forward firing- you checked out the forward firing? Just a bleep . Right . What did you see here? Oh, man. You really see t he flames off that . . Yes , well, you don ' t , I don't really think you really see the flames , but it throws a grea t deal more light . It's a l i ght rather than flames--alight more than flames . Could you see a distinct plume?
172 Conrad Cooper Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper 10 . 3 Reentry Conrad COl-4FIDE~~TIAL No . No , not a plume as such, but just it reially lit up . You got a lot of lighting from it . Much more so than you did the-- It was distinct ive enough that it really made an impression on us . Let ' s see, the side f iring was really-- the thing that ' s surpri s i ng about the side firing w a s j ust as I-- you might anticipate, if you really stop ar.d thought about it but you don ' t get this in the trainer or anyt hing when you fire a side thrust- - A side thrust-- Yes , that was really weird. You really could feel that . It fired down , then up , then left and right then you raise up in the seat or you slide down in the seat or you go left in the cockpit or right in .the cockpit . You know that you real l y going to do this and you- And you can see all the debris and evecything coming t hrough- - swish! Yes , everything starts going sideways . And it ' s pretty funny . Okay , we ' re at paragTaph 10 . 3 reentry. Number 1 adapter separation. No doubt . Yes , there was no doubt but t here agai11 one of those ~t◄ FIDEblTIAL
Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper 173 things where both Gus and John and Jim and Ed said , "Man, that thing really went out there with this horrendous bang," and I was really spring loaded . I was waiting for a 16 inch gun to go off in my ear, and, therefore, there was no doubt that it fired , and there was no doubt that it left, but I didn ' t think it was that loud-- but then again, I think, it's what you're anticipating, and they had both said that they got quite a-- I think there again , you and I were keyed up to i t being a tremendous explosion--when it went off-- But there ' s no doubt about it that it is loud - There is no doubt about it--it's loud and it really gives you an acceleration--a delta accelera tion . I actually heard SEP ELEC and SEP OAMS lines squibs and I don ' t know whether you want to say whether we felt them or heard them fire, but we could hear a definite "kerplunk, kerplunk" back there when you push both of them--not loud-- Just like the trainer. I think the trainer is very realistic of those sounds . Yes, the trainer is very realistic. And the trainer sound is really pretty realistic r EO~~FIOEt.'4Ii.L
174 e@NnDEf~TIAL Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad of the adapter sep now . I think they're all three fairly realistic of the t rainer. And now in adapter sep you get a little acceler ation force wi th it , and you feel that . You really feel that- - W ell , it shudders the whole thing as you come off- as you separate . And re t r ofire to me w~s a big surprise . I t was a bi g surprise to me , too . I remember in Mercury tha.t everybody had different feelings on what retrofire felt like , a ~d I didn't f eel that they were that distincti ve or th~t great a t all in my previous flight, but in this one I felt like we were on the front of Stapp ' s rocket sledo Yes . Everyone that fire. We were pretty G sensative by this point , 8 days of weightlessness. I t fel t to me like we were just hanging on the- - Yes . Gordo said he thought we wound up going in the other direction and I had the decided foeling that we pitched up and did a loop everytime one of them •
175 fired, I had the feeling that we pitched up another 30 degrees and went streaming up that way you know, and then another one would f ire , and I really thought we were going around a big circle . That was my physical sensations although the gages said we were right on the money . But, all through retrofire those darn re tros did not overlap . Cooper That 's right . They didn ' t . Number 1 . Conrad Especially 3 and 4. As a m a tter a fact, there was enough of a delay- - "
176 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Let 's go through these now. Number 1 fired exactly on time. Boy, right on the money with 'I'R . W e were right on the money. Every clock we: had in the spacecraft was just reading right O when it fired. No delay or anything anywhere. Just beautiful. Number 1 was still firing when number 2 started to fire. That 's correct. And there was no off-set whatsoever from. number 1 and number 2 . That's right. Then number 2 had finished firing for a definite delta time period before number 3 fired. That 's right. Then number 3 fired and had an offset to the left--to the left--yes to our left which was not bad and I think they had r times that am::runt of off- set it had and still hold it with th~ RCS , no with the rate command. No problem at all. No doubt in your mind. You were way more t han over powering. You must keep it glued right t here. But then number 3 finished firing and then there was an even greater delta time- -
177 Conrad Cooper Conrad FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper Conrad That was a period of time that I - Before number 4- - I thought we weren't going to get number 4. What would you estimate the time? Well, I'd say it would have been a full second . Boy, I think it was at least a full second. Time up there is going to seem like- - Time--yes . I t may have been shorter than that--but there was a definite delay. I 1 m sure that our time sensing mechanism was overly tweaked at that period of time and we probably were overly sensitive to it, but there was no doubt I don't believe there was any doubt , and we both arrived at this conclusion independently too- - that number 2 came in at the right sequence on number 1 and then there was a short delta time and then number 3 fired and then a longer delta time and number 4 fired. Okay, how about the visual sightings duri ng thi s. Ma.n- - We were I FR completely the cockpit lights up full white, pitch black and- -
178 Cooper And the whole window area was completel;r obliter ated by flames. When the retros go off you're just in a big barrel of flames--because the whol e thing is just covered by flames. Conrad I wasn't even aware of that. I didn't (~Ven- - I 'd have said that we didn't see any flume at all. Cooper Well , we had everything at full bright-•• Conrad I guess I had my eyes locked on the instruments- Cooper Well , I did , too , but I also was going to look and see what it looked like out the window there and I noted that everytime one of them went off you got tremendous flame coverage which surprised m e because I didn I t think you would . I thc,ught maybe you'd see the glow from it but I lad a distinct feeling that the whole- - that tl:.e whole flame expanded to the point where you felt like it- - maybe you just felt like it was so bright it just lit up the outside that much, but I had a distinct feeling that you really had flames all over when they went off. Conrad Really that 's the high light of the flight in my mind is going down through that-- watching that TR clock count down and going through TR - 1
minute to TR+45 seconds throught retro- jet . You know seeing that sequential system go amd everything work- just like it was supposed to, and the checkoff list go and everything: B())y, we were really spring l oaded on that. Cooper I know Pete had made some comment , "Well , things have continued to fail and I just hope that is one that doesn ' t . " Conrad I had lost faith in sequential systems s omewhere along the way. We had all the emergency systems out though, and we were ready to fire it any way we had to . Cooper Yes , we had gone through our little emergency retrofire and our emergency SEP ADAPT and all this. We were all set to go on those , and I think we'd have been in rea l good shape even if they hadn' t occured . Retro- pack jettison - - Conrad Straightforward. Cooper W e held retro- attitude , waited on the light , armed thereto- jet and when the light came on Pete toggled them and off they went 11 KapJunk 11 • They sounded just like in the simulator . Conrad Again we didn't see anything. It was pitch black. Had cockpit lights up full white . FCSD REP Now, you turned around, and you saw it burning up. ~ CiQ~4fiOD~TlAi
180 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad No . No . After we During us , but I started reenter ing we- - the reentr y and it was way , way behind did see it--now , I say the retro pack- it could have been the adap t er burning up . I don ' t know which one it was , because it was so far behind . There was some object way behind . It was some object , a large object , ree:~tering behind but it must have beer--what would you say? 5 , 6 , or 10 miles maybe? Oh , yes! I t was way up the path . I'd guess a good 5 or 10 miles . And it was up in the--let 1 s see, I was upside down , and it would have been--coming heads up--it would have been in the upper left- hand :lide . I n other words , it was reentering to our south and above us . It was entering on the south side of the orbit , and it was sli ghtly above our en•;ry and you could see our trail clear back to it . You could see our plasma jet went way , way back there . I
EOMFtDEl-~Tt~l don't know what it wasp'whether it w a s smoke or what it wasn't fla.rne--you could definitely see it trailing right along side our trail just like we were leaving a con . Cooper Yes , you could see our con--it was kind of a light color . I wouldn't say it was a flame color--it was kind of a light color. compared to everything else. Conrad We were looking at this in relation to what nobody else hadseen it to . We were still looking at this down sun relatively nebulous horizon that you have. We were looking at it ourselves , a trail back there in the terminator. Cooper Into the dark. Conrad Yes . And that ' s another thing. A very important point here-- no kidding, saying this spacecraft's i n s unl i ght doesn't • mean anything? That ' s ani ght retrofire. And we didn't have a definable horizon to fly on until we crossed the Mississippi River• . That 's way in the heck down the pipe on retrofire, because that terminator is nothing. Cooper One thing I ' d like to add here - -I really think a l l .of us always sweat~d night ret rofire and it w a s a pi ece of cake.
182 Conrad Cooper FCSD REP Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad It really was . However , if you don ' t have full instrunHmt panel, I ' d recommend you forget it . Because i:~ you don ' t have an 8 ball and rate gyros and a clarn good rate da.mping--well, that ' s not true.if you've got an 8- ball and r _ a te gyros , then you could fire them just as well in .Jirect system as well as Rate Command; although , think , you could hcndle them in direct with no problem. Do you think you nee~ both the rate gyrcs and the platform? I do . Yes . I would strongly recommend that for a night retro you not try them on purely rate gyros because you just--even the little- - And the reason- - The RCS a ttitude system disrupts your night vision so much out there that getting all squar =d away for i t-- j ust about the t i m e you I re getting right in to retro attitude there if you have to f:ire a thruster or two you ' d completely lose you attitude- I think the other big thing is tha t that is absolutely the world ' s biggest "vertigo gi.ver" , because you are really g sensitive and when those retros go off if you don ' t hav 11 the whole smear of 00MFIOE~~TIAl'
183 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Conrad instruments- -like I said I was watching the i nstruments and they were sitting right dead center. ]ordo had that t hing pitched down 30 degrees and we didn ' t hardly over 2 degrees off that darn retro attitude.,and I w a s convinced we were doing a loop-- even watching the gages . That is the worst set of vertigo that I ever had in my life . And I had the dist inct feeling that I had just lit off the biggest after-burner I ' d ever haa a h0~d of and was going back straight west juat as hard as I could hold on . That's exactly the feeling. And everyone of them had fired . Yes,-. Yes . All over again and I really- - if you were doing it on just rate needles--well , doing it on rate needles wouldn't be as bad as doing it just on the ball without rate needles . Listen , boy doing it .- .... just on the ball- -that ' s just bad news . I always felt even in the trainer t hat bad news . °€:ON filD E ►4T IAL
184 Cooper Wel l, I don't know . You could do it on the ball . I t hink if I had my choice between ball and rate needles I ' d rather have the ball . Conrad Would you really? I'd rather have the rat e needles, I think, because I could understand them even with this crazy sensation ; where I might try to int erpret the But , you see, Cooper But , you see , our rat e needles never ven-;ured off the middle . We never go t a rate on the :rate needles . Conrad Yes , well that ' s fine. Then you know yo·1 1 re staying right where you want to be. Cooper And the ball--to me the ball i s the real good i ndicator. If you keep your rates down ·;o zero you still coul d actually get off slightly in attitude and still have almost, you know , essentially negligible rat es . Conrad I t hink the point is it, it ' s pretty comforting to have a whole bag of instruments . Cooper Ye s , i t sure is . Conrad I ' m not saying i t can' t be done, but rea lly there was no sweat on night ret rofire. Gordo ' s ri 15 ht about that. I mean, we went through that, turned the lights up bright- - matter of fact, it's just likn you're back in t he si mulator. ~lrl9i •
Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper 185 Like doing it in the s imulator. Until re t ros fired . When they fire , it's quite a sensation . But , we went cl ear to 400K--we went almos t t he 14 minutes before we had a horizon . We had the ground in sight pr evious to this Well , not much previous to this . But we were looking at that scr ewy gray- - Well , I 1 11 tell you , we fired them at Hawaii , and White Sands was the first thing I s aw coming out of the termina tor and that 's looking straight down . It w as still black r ight behind Whi t e Sands and no horizon looki ng at the nose . But looking straight down , White Sands was the first thing I saw . We still had a rather nebulous horizon about 45 degrees out the window when w e crossed the Mississippi River , I had the decided feeling that we were right on t he east coast , but by this time the plasma was so bad tha t I couldn ' t really tell . I had the decided feel ing that we were crossing into the Atlantic Ocean by the time that we had a full horizon out there . Well , now I think our windows on this flight --! was
really pleased. I think our windows w~re real l y stayed rel ativel y cl ean . We built up a slight coating on them, or something. Conrad I think everything we built up on them was on there at the beginning, Cooper But most of it was there to begin with. Our windows were s o much better than M ercu::-y. There wasn't even any comparison . The thingn you coul d see out of them were just fantastic. \/e 1 re going t o have to crank up the pl anetarium stars much higher, in fact , because we saw so man~, more stars t han we saw at the decreased Mercury values in the planetarium, It was very confusing, which was very pleasing. I think it's really groat . But , even with thi s better window definition , when you crossed the terminator from day to dark or dark to day there's a very decided confusing area in there where you have absolutel y no attitude reference at all out the window. In fact, I tri ed E , couple of times when we were going through the teirminator , to be compl etel y blackened down, to have r..o lights on in the cockpit, and nothing to refl ect outside; yet when you crossed the terminator CQ~,FID~f}.~TIAL •
187 you can see both stars passing under you and the earth passing under you. I can't figure how you get all these odd refl ections in there. There's a period of time when everything just gets completel y jumbled and it's a real dim gray area there you ' re going through just for a few seconds where you have absol utely no visual reference at all . You ' re doing beautifully on a night horizon on the airglow and al l of a sudden "zunk" you're into this cottony i ll-defined mess, and you ' re getting all kinds of odd refl ections and all kinds of odd l ight patterns, and then "zoom" here you suddenl y have day reference on the ground . That period of time is a very poor time to have to do any kind of out-the- window atti tude control . And it obviously is a very confusing l ight period because this is what confuses the hori zon scanners, t oo. The times when you do get the- when we had that one horizon scanner that was really screwing up . It was overl y sensitive , of course, and it woul d just drop out . Every terminator we went through it would drop off the line. And even our no. 2 dropped off, initial ly there, a few times going through the terminator. You get a few ignores
188 Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad FCSD Rep going through the terminator . Okay, r~tro-pack jettison , we covered . Reentry--our re~ntry was exactly like we had planned it. W e f l :w single ring pul se down to 400K. At 400K- - 400K came on the time that Houston gav: us, the computer 400K guidance came in wit hin a second or two- - The roll bug came in right on the second. Right on the money. At 400K, then , I switched the attitude control sel ector to Rate Command . The RCS Ring B came already off and Ring A I took to Direct- -so it gave me singl e- ring Direct . I flew single- ring Direct then on down through the- - I think we covered the horizon adequatdy. Let's see- - Spacecraft was- -boy, I never even saw-• What do you recall on visual sight rings? co~~FlllEt~IIM:
189 Conrad Cooper FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper the updated blackout at 16 + 14 and end of blackout at 21 +20 . He updated reverse bank as 19 + 25 for a bank lef t 54 , a bank r ight 68 , which was a change of 1 degree from 53 and 67 . He gave us drogue at 22 + 05 and main at 23 +48, That was the l at est updated quantity after retrofire . Okay, spacecraft oscill ations- - Could you tell anything visually? Man, that thing was like a rock coming in! I 'd been hearing about 40 degree yaw oscillations and the drogue and everything else. I f we had anything over 5 degrees- -maybe it is jus t me , but I don't think we had anything over 5 degrees. Let's start farther up in the reentry. After we got to 280 K, I was switching back and forth at this point from r ate to attitude. I would switch back to rate, and when I ' d see we had a little rate build up , I ' d tweak it , and then back to attitude and hold my attitude on the attitude needles. Then I 'd wait just a few seconds and switch back to r ate and t weak out the little rates set in, and go back to attitude- back and forth in this f a shion. On single-ring direct, I had more control authority, initially,
190 than I needed. I had to be very careful to just put a little teensy tweak in to damp the rates. Later on, as we got on down, maybe half way through the g pulse area, the rates began to in crease in amplitude and in frequency . J still was able to handle them very adequately. No problem at all on tweaking the rates out on pitch and yaw. However, at about this I1 eriod of time, it began to take so much time t o switch back and forth from rate to attitude and get the rates damp that I was getting concerned about the math flow guidance in here and making sure I stayed on it. At this point then, probably half way through or somewhere on down through the l atter part of the reentry, I just switched over to the ACME position and allowed the RCS rate command t o damp the rates . Then, I wouli reach over and check the rat es once in a while to see how it was damping. But, then, I could concentrate on purely attitude .and just fly this same single ring attitude control. It left me plent,v of attitude control . Never once when I cheJked the rates were the rate needles ever off zer). It
was just keeping it damped to zero. W e -weren 't firing thrusters too overly often. You could see them fire now and then , but it wasn't a great task for them to fire at all . I really thought the whole reentry was quite stable and at no time did we have a;ny real oscillations . Conrad Somewhere in there Ring A ran out of fuel . But I am almost convinced that- - Cooper Well , let me say r ight here now Pde . I way flying the thing . Ring A didn't run out of fuel as long as I was flying. W e still had control . Now you are talking about down after drogue deploy. I ' m talking about during reentry. Until the time that we went to dual-ring RCS , we still had fuel left in Ring A. Conrad Yes, I know we did . Cooper Okey, I just wanted to make that clear on the record . Conrad It ran out somewhere below 65 ,000 f eet . Cooper Yes , by those f igures you got yesterday, it looked like we still had fuel in Ring A sometime af t er we br ought Ring Bon, which was at 60 , 000 . Right?
192 Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad C:et<tfilf)Et ◄l l.._ 4 That's right . You get an idea of how much fuel you use because Ring B was tested but never used until below 65 ,000 feet; we shot 80 percent of the f uel out of it on the drogue. So , it iB no surprise to me that Ring A ran out of fuel . There is no doubt about it that Ring A ua.s still running, unless somebody shows me otherwise on a traces , at least past drogue deploy. It was run ning until at l east we got Ring B running. I really firmly believe, based on what we tried on here and my feeling on the thing, you could shoot two or three orbits of attitude control and align ment and the whole smear of r e ~rofire ar.d the whole reentry and everything on one rin€' with no problem at all . Now , let's look at another thing . When you are at drogue deploy , we were on rate command and there was a high frequency, low amplitude oscillation, but it was well outside the r ate band. So , those thrusters went to steady- state firing . Yes, they did . They were firing full blower all the way, trying to damp . And they did. They did an excellent
.193 job of keeping it damped . W e were steady as rock coming in there . Cooper Of course, this is the way to do it. Conrad They were firing all the way, and it doesn't surprise me at all that we used all that fuel out of Ring B. But Ring B, I know , wasn't put on until the drogue was out. And I know t hat Ring B had no fuel taken out of it except to test it two orbits back. There are some 33 pounds in Ring B, and there was 4.9 oxidizer and 4.6 fuel left in Ring B. So, we shot almost 25 pounds of fuel on the drogue. Cooper Which is fine . You might as well use the fuel up at that point . There's no sense in saving it. Conrad Again, this tells me that up to drogue deployment you might as well take that reentry rate command and throw it away because the pilot i sn't going to accept four degrees per second anyhow. He is going to d.Q.mp before that. So , you might as well use the wire for something else . Use rate command, and if you fly the reentries just like that , you've got more than adequate fuel in Ring B to poop it away on the drogue and insure
194 Cooper FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper yourself a nice steady ride. We never :Jaw a:ny thing that approached over 5 degrees oscillation. The nice thing about the control system is that i t is a simple matter to switch back and forth between direct and rate command in the uystem that we had set up . If you are damping and the damping gets to be t oo much of a t ask, or it gets more than you can damp, all you do is switch over to the ACME position on this one switch and i t will damp in the rate command . In that rate command, you have really good damping. You might as well have a system that will damp it right down to a gnat ' s eyebrow, and then you can switch back into direct , concentrate to what you are doing , and switch back and forth if you want to . Let's see , drogue- - Di d you get enough of an oscillation dw·ing reentry? If you looked out the window .._•as there enough trailing you that you could pr obc,bly damp by looking at this? Was there any possjbility to do this? I don ' t think the spacecraft is that un~table . W e didn ' t have that much oscillation .
Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper • 195 I don't think you have to worry about Lt , to tell you the truth. I really wasn't aware of any oscillations at all. Gordo says he was damping. For all I know we rode in there free. He speaks highly of my damping. The first time I really noticed anything was when we got on the drogue , and I didn't have a whole lot to do. but to look out t he window. There would have been some oscillation, but it would be kind of interesting to ride one down and not damp it, to see how it would do. I really doubt if you'd get very large amplitudes or very much-- Not until you get down there below a 100 ,000. I don't think this is true of a rolling reentry. That's why we never were in favor of a rolling reentry. O n the simulator the thing goes wild on a rolling reentry. But , I think, a s long as you hold a steady bank angle , whether i~ is full left or 90 or whatever you hold, I think the thing is really stable. It sure felt that way to me. It felt to me that it is a good stable vehicle. · Now at drogue deploy-- I very deliber ately deployed the drogue at 70 ,000 feet. 60► -•Ft&tt<!T~AL
196 Conrad You might put down that I was reading t:1e check list off, and I called stRndby for 70,000, which is our point to put the second ring on HCS rate command, and we were going to put Ring Bon . I s aid stand by for 70,000, and away went the drogue. Cooper I reached down, uncovered the cover on :.t, and punched it out right at 70 K. I might Hay here that the drogue went out beautifully, it squidded a couple of times--a typical supersonic drogue f ashion. No hard squidding. Conr ad I ' m not sure that it stayed reefed. Did. it? Cooper Yes, it did . Conrad It did a couple of gyrations up there . I wasn't really sure what it was. I don ' t think it stayed reefed for 16 seconds. Cooper Yes, it did. It stayed reefed for 16 seconds. Conrad It looked to me like it flew out and opened. Cooper It came out and opened in the reef condition. That was that squidding you saw . I t opened in the reef condition and then it squidded 3bout three times in the reef condition and then dereefed fully opened . It was as stable as a roc:ce. And I fully anticipated some of the lines we:c-e .,§Q±!f lDEt ◄ TtAL •
197 probably booken, and I began to look at them. They looked good. I decided, well, it wasn't really any problem, even if I had broken the lines. All I had to do was reach up and deploy the emergency main deploy if it departed, and we were still in good shape, so--no problem on it. As a matter of fact, the combination of when the drogue went out and the RCS left us as stable as a rock. W e just came right straight down t he glide slope and I don't think we had any oscillations of any kind all the way down, other than these very very minor little higher frequency ones t hat felt like vibrations off the drogue lines. Conrad There seemed to be more interaction between the spacecraft and the drogue lines than anything else. Cooper Right. At the time that we came to the main chute, when I pickled off the main chute, it came out completely straight; we didn't oscillate or swing on it at all. Conrad Let 's backup one second . The best calculations of m:ic.e and men were completely wrong though . At 50 K we went on with full repress and o high 2
198 rate . And past 27,000 feet that cabin :lndicator hit zero fas~er than you could say Jack Robinson. That thing came off the peg and I had to go back to the old procedure of- - Cooper Snorkel open up . Conrad Snorkel vent open , and recirc at 45 deg.eees. We didn ' t seal it up again until 2,000 , so that didn't work. Cooper Then, at 10 . 6 the altimeter and the barostat light were exactly right together. I punched the main and it came out reefed. It held rnefed for approximately 12 seconds . We were nxactly straight, no oscillations or swings or gyrations on the chute at all. I n fact, we were flO stable on the chute that in the reefed condition the skirt was exactly symmetrical arou."1.d thn bottom. There was no breathing to one side or anything. Conrad I think that is another thing that speaks highly of this rate command business, even through we shut it off at 30,000 feet. By that time, we were well slowed down, and there was no big os cillation, left on the drogue . So the 1•est of the ride with no system was free . Now, when that .,
199 chute deployed we weren' t even swinging or anything. Like Gordo said, boy, when tha t thing came out of the reefed condition, it was perfectly circular around the bottom. We looked at movies of these things and we've seen them collapsed on one side, billow out, and collapse, and everything. It didn't do that . That chute came out, stayed perfectly circular. Whenever the number of seconds went by, and the thing dereefed, it dereefed per fectly circular. It never breathed, never oscillated , never swung or anything. Cooper And we never turned on it either. Conrad W e never turned or anything. The only oscilla tion we got the whole time was when we went to two-point. We got the see-wawing action. That was it. We went straight into the water. The chute almost landed on top of us. Cooper Okay, on Rand R separation--we might cover that after drogue deploy--it is just exactly like it looks in the sequences . You see all the whole smear trunneling out there, the great long Rand R section going out, and all the lines feeding out , and then the main opens, and the Rand R COMFIDEfa~TIAL •
200 can goes on off. It looks just like it does in those sequential drawings . Main chute deploy- we ' ve already covered. We anticipated the landing attitude as being kind of a jar. It is kind of a whip action there, more than anything. As long as you are braced for it, it is no problem. And then on landing-- to me that was a su.l'.'prise, because on landing I could hardly believe we had hit . It was so easy. We didn't go under water, didn't splash water, or anything. The windows were clear when we hit . I could see the water as we hit . I could see the chute. When I pur..ched the chute jettison , the chute just floated c- ut in front of us and slightly off to one side•. The windows were clear . They had some conde• nsation on them but not bad. W e could see out of them very clearly. We condensed them over a little more just breathing on the inside, I gue,ss. But when the frogmen got there the windows were still clear enough that they came up anc. got up close to the window and we gave them the, thumbs up . They visually got our thumbs up signal with no problem. The only abnormality was that after we got on the water AIR BOSS apparently was not 1 '"CO~ ◄ FIDE~4Tt"L
201 receiving us. We were transmitting coming down on the chute, on the main chute. We made two steerage transmissions and counts, and AIR BOSS received these and acknowledged them and got the clears on them. After we were on the water, he apparently was not receiving us. Conrad Okay, now, I found a mistake, and that is my fault on the HF antenna. I went down through the check list but I read this one item wrong. I had all three squib batteries off. I should have left the No . 3 squib battery on. The antenna goes up on the common control bus, so that is my fault that the antenna didn't go· up. Cooper But, I thought I remembered when you put those off was after we had already gone through all this. Conrad Well, I'm not sure that you are not right there, but I still made the mistake of turning all three squib batteries off. I'm sure that if it doesn't go up with the squib batteries on, then there is something wrong with the antenna, but if it goes with the squib battery on, why it was my fault . Cooper But , in defense of Pete on this, I 'm almost sure that we had already gone through all the sequence
202 • and said, okay, let I s go through and re1:,lly see what we can power down here now. W e had. gone through to really see wha.t we could powE • r down here now. W e had gone through a sort of s econd power down checklist when he turned the squib batteries off - - Conrad Yes, you are right . Cooper .And we had tried several transmissions prior to this and had gone through and rechecked t his an tenna switch location. So, I'm kind 0f inclined to think that was not the fault of the Bquib bat tery being off. Conrad I really don ' t know. Then, we powered t he whole spacecraft down when we left it, so the1~e was no telling what was going on. I can•t speuk too highly of this checkoff list. As many t imes as we went over things in the simulator, boy, if you don't check these items off item by item, in the height of the excitement and the way it goes you are going to miss something. That is the way we went through these checkoff lists. We Ghecked them off by the numbers . .Anytime back here where I didn't do an item--where I left it op1 m for some CO~~FIDE~fR'AL •
203 reason like right here, suit fans 1 and 2--I made a mark out to the side, "faceplate closed", so we would go back and pick them up later. You've got to do it that way. That's all there is to it. It sure did make it easy. Cooper Very briefly we would like to cover post-landing. First of all, we had ideal conditions. It was early morning, the air was cool out on the water. The wave condition was, at the worst, 2 to 3 feet easy swells. Almost calm conditions, low wind. Conrad Let me add one thing on that. We sat there for 4 or 5 minutes in these 2 or 3 foot waves, and every once in a while a wave would wash over the top of the spacecraft. I think you want to be real careful, and I still say- - Cooper Not over the top, but they could wash into your window. Conrad Right over the window. Cooper Your window was the down window. Conrad But it looked like it would roll up on your window. Cooper That's right. That is a good point. C9:HFIDE~~t1Ab
204 Conrad Even on as calm a day as that, boy, don't ever open those hatches unless it is a dire emergency until they've got that collar on there. Cooper I agree. Conrad I could see that thing going right straight to the bottom. Cooper I agree. Pete and I both were in complete agreement on this. Conrad It was as calm as you could get out there. Cooper It was a beautiful, calm day. And even so, his point is exactly valid. I think that if you open up even the left hatch, which is the higher hatch, there would be an occasional wave which would throw water into it. I think opening those hatches out there, even with the splash curtain, is a real bad situation, unless you Just absolutely have to. You are risking really filling it. Of course, I think you can get them closed and shut down if you start taking water on board, but there is no sense in getting the whole inside all smeared with salt water. However, we were perfectly cool inside with both suit fans operat ing when we got the repress off, the o 2 high •
205 rate off, and both suit fans back on the line. We sat there and we were perspiring vecy lightly, but the spacecraft was cool; we had cooled it down prior to reentry as cold as it can go. It was 50 degrees cabin prior to retrofire and 50 degrees suit loop- - Conrad We had thought when we hit the water if we were going to have any wait --and it was apparent when we got down there we were going to have a wait- the smartest thing to do is to get out of the suit. It became real apparent that the smartest thing to do was to stay in the suit and get the snorkel open, get the both fans running, and the cabin fan running. Cooper And this was the answer, because we were really cool in there. There was no problem. We got our helmets off, our glo-ves off, and our neck dams on so we could recirc through the suits good. It was nice and cool in there. No problem at all. We could have sat there for hours on end if we really had to . No problem. Of course, there again, we want to emphasize t hat we were there under ideal sea conditions, and I am sure that
206 Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper @OMFIDEl>~TI-Al that little spacecraft could get mighty nauseous if you really had rough seas. We did have just a t winge of RCS fumes in there . We had sealed it off at 2, 000 feet and it had only bui] up to a pound by the time we got en the water, so that secondary o flow rate ar.. 2 d o 2 high rate is just not putting out a hecli: of a lot of flow. But it helps. I think you really had t o really sniff to--you had to be hunting for it to smell the fumes. Once we got the snorkel open again on the wat er and had the cabin fan and the two suit :~ans running, the smell disappeared shortly thereafte::.- . Yes , it was nice and fresh. I t got to be nice and fresh in there. As Gordo says , we wer e perspiring lightly but ou~ best bet there was we were getting good flow in the suits from the t wo fans with the snorkel open. I might recommend at this point for later crews that this~ a good point to take that doggone bl ood pressure bulb and pump up the water system and drink all the water you can drink right there . .,
207 Because once you hit the carrier, the medics aren •t going to let you drink for about a 3- hour period while they run all their little diddies on you. They don't care how thirsty you are or how bad a situation it is . So, I would recommend that you just fill up with water right there. Conrad The most uncomfortable and the hottest we got was in the nelicopter ride back, which was 35 minutes. It was hotter than blazes in that helicopter. We still had the suits on. We could have gotten out 0£ them, but we had gotten out fairly dry to begin with, and we just decided to- - Cooper W e decided, as a matter of principle, we were going to arrive on the carrier with our suits on. Conrad We arrived in uniform on the carrier rather than in a bathrobe. Cooper Besides that, we didn't have patches on our bath robe. Conrad Right. Cooper Okey, thatls all I think of. One thing, after we got out--just to cover briefly- -when the swimmers got the flotation around the spacecraft we decided we would open my hatch. We opened the hatch and
208 FCSC Rep Conrad I climbed on out over onto the nose sec·;ion. I felt no ill effects at all. I was kind of watch ing for it, being careful about it so I didn't f all in the water right off. We wanted to keep our suits dry. I climbed out on the no.3e section; and they wheeled one of the bigger raft·:i over around the flotation collar and I stepp~d on off over into the raft. Pete stepped on out. The only dampness we got on us was when the chop·per ca.me down pretty low. He was sitting there " blowing spray all over us . He had a heck of a time getting the horsecollar over to us for some reason or other. He finally got over. Pete took it and went up in it and dropped it back to me. I took it and went up in it . We had no ill effects in the horsecollar and no ill effects from there on . Did you crawl out of the left hatch too, Pete? Yes, Gordo got out and I powered the siacecraft down and turned off all the batteries end the rest of the switches and got out on the left side, and then with the flotation collar on, I climbed back over the right hatch and stood on the right side because it was plenty stable over there t'f?~~FtDEMTIAL' "'
209 once they got the collar on. A frogman and I closed tlm.e left hatch. I hooked up the little gizzy on the wa:y out so that we could close the hatch and get it started--~ne lock release. Cooper Incidentally, was that hard to close? The little lock release? Conrad No, once the hatch was open and started open, then it was free. Cooper For some reason or another--that is the first time I've seen it like that when you couldn't get it open. Conrad I checked mine and it worked okay. Cooper But mine was hung up for some reason where it wouldn I t open. But mine was hung Conrad Once we opened the hatch it went free. Cooper O kiey-, so much for that. C
210 I 11 .0 EXPERIMENTS 11 . 1 Visual definition of celestial objects (D-1) , nearby object photography (D- 2) , and terrestrial features(D-§l Conrad Okay. D-1, mode 01. These are going ti) be real straightforward. D-1 mode 01 was done :ln con junction with D- 4 and it was done photogTaphing the moon. It was done as advertised at 01 days 16 hours 30 minutes , and we took the mo()n with magazine 11. We took 4 pictures at 1/30 of a sec ond. We took the moon on magazine 9 at 1/60 of a second, 4 pictures. We took 4 picturHs of the moon on magazine 10 at 1/125 of a seconci, and all at that time period or shortly thereaft«?r 16: 30. I n the meantime, we were making the recording IR measurements of the moon, so we have 12 pictures of the moon on the three camera backs , :> 400 film , 3401 film, and 8443 film. That W HS sequence 3 with the Questar lens , visual acquisi tion mode. Now, we did not track with t he peri scope. We found that the boresight was good enough, and we didn ' t want to screw anything up. So Gordo did all the tracking with the r eticle . Cooper I think we have mentioned it bef'ore, but we might e6t~[JDEb4Tl.iJL ,
211 mention right here again that when the reticle was exactly boreaighted on some object, like the moon or a star , so was the Q uestar lens. It was right on the moon.
212 Cooper Reentry--Number 1- - Adapter Separation . No doubt . We set the Magazine at l/60th of a seccnd - - 4 pictures We took 4 pi ctures of the moon on Magazine 10 at l/120th. Conrad At that time period shortly, thereafter 16 :30 . In the meantime we wer e making and r ecording IR measurements of the moon so we have 12 pictures of the moon on the three camera backs using 3400 film , 3401 f ilm , and 8443 film . And that was sequence 3 with the Questar lens, visual acquisition mode . Now; we did not track with the per iscope . We found that the boresight was good enough and we didn ' t want to mess anything up so Gordo did all the tracking with the r eticle . Cooper We m entioned before, but we might menti,m again that when the reticle w a s exactly bor esighted on some object like the moon or a star so was the Questar lens. It was right on the money. Conrad Yes , r eally good boresight . Cooper And t he radar was also right on . Conrad D-4/D- 7 , 422 was done at the sa1J?~ t.i;ae . Do you want ·to cover that now seeing they wer e done together, or do you want to wait until w e get over into D - 4?
213 FCSD REP Conrad Why don ' t we wait? We did that portion of D - 1 that was.. . . Then the next D- 1 we did was Mode 2. This was done on Venus at 02 days 13 hours 00 minutes . We took 4 pictures of Venus at l / 30th of a second on magazine 11 which was the 8443 IR Film. It was taken through the Questar lens visually with reticle tracking. Let me check the book to see if that is all . D- 1 , Mode 2 we did at 02 days 13 hours 20 minutes, on Alpha Centauri using magazine 9 which w a s 3401 Film. We used the Questar lens , took 4 pictures and that completed the D-1 Experiments. Let ' s run through the updating techniques and communications procedures that ar e used with the other experiments and I ' ll only cover them once and that ' s this time . We send up the title of the experiment , the GMT of the experiment , the sequence number if required , a Mode number if required and then any other require ments went in the remarks section. Things such as pitch , yaw , up , down , filmspeeds , and delta times or anything else went in remarks . I think that this procedure worked extremely well . Ther e was never any confusion on our part as to what Gelat,JOENltAt
214 • experinent or how it was to be done . Cooper The only caution that we might throw in is right here- - Conrad Stick to sequential times. Cooper Ri ght, stick to sequential time exactly so that you have running sequential time. You can :{eep track of all the great number of things that they are sending up . They might also consider w i1at--equipment set up and stowage problems you have wh,m they ' re sending these things up. We had a great deal of equipment shuffling to do there. In general , it worked out fairly well. All the equipm,mt worked extremely well except 35mm camera which jammed several times on . . . . Conrad Okay, now the reason it jammed was that photo event indicator,,which st.raps on the film tran:,port adapter cable,,was too long when t he trigger was squeezed . That had a tendency to jam the camera mnchanism , and I had to back it off out of the thrnad zone so that it wasn ' t tightly in there. In zeJ~o g it would continue to back itself out. I woul d gtit a couple of pictures and then it wouldn ' t take a picture and I woul d have to reach down and screw it in. I215 cCQMAO£MIA L would screw it in too tight so I would get one more picture off and then it would jam, and I would back it out a little bit. We finally got to where it worked pretty good . Cooper But this still is an equipment discrepancy that should be- - Conrad Yes , and equipment discrepancy and it a lmost cost us a couple of good pictures . Especially, when we hadn't found the ship about four times and all of a sudden the camera was jammed.... wall light fit in there . I might say here that this is D - 1, D- 2 , and D- 6. D-1 we got, D-6 we got quite a bit of , and D- 2 we did nothing. What we are t alking about is the camera equipment associated with D-1 and D- 6 . Cooper Acquisition Techniques-- They varied. Acquisition techniques varied depending on whether it was a celestial or ground target . Again we can' t emphasize ~nough to do experiments where you have to point to certain places to find things the only way to do it in a professional manner is to have a plat form up and use the pointing angles. It makes the task a thousand times easier and it eliminat es all
21 6 this sloppiness . If these experiments are worth taking platform time and power to do . Conrad We've got to say here that there was so much diffi culty in finding these things and getting organized that we made onboard decisions to drop this track ing technique and we used only one method . We both looked for the target and when we found it, if we found it, I got Gordo pointed in the right direction and he put the reticle on it. From then on , he did the tracking and I took the pictures . I 'd coach him if he was off at all by looking in the lens . We never t ried the technique of me flyi::ig and taking the pictures at the same time . W e didn't because the majority of pictures that they asked for in D- 6 were Questar pictures. I would never have been able to find it if we were off the leas·~ little bit because the pictures that they wanted f :l.lled the whole Questar l ens . We found that the lioresi ght was perfect so rather than mess things up and we - - Things were getting worst . To make 11ure that we got the pictures , we dropped thes e different track ing modes and we used the same t echniquEi everytime . Gordo tracked it in the r eticle and I coached him if he wasn't right on fo~ he picture. I told him c_Qb4f10Et'4TI L
217 Cooper Conrad Cooper Cooper F<;SD REP Conrad t'CSD REP Cooper Conrad Conrad where to go and I took the pictures; and we used that consistently . Now that's a switch from what they wanted but I think it bought them some. It still proves that you can do the job. The telescope has too small a field of view . I recommend if you want the man in the right seat to track and fly them he should have a reticle on his side . Then he can track with the reticle and not the telescope. He tracks with the reticle and he looks in his view finder just to make sure that he's got the picture where he wants it in the view-finder . Comparison of operational modes . We covered that. Voice recorder usage. We used it while we had it. What about your D- 6 logs? This D-6 log is pretty long. Do you want it all? I can give you the time - - Why don't you just go through it? think it might be better to reproduce. It 's not that long. It's S-5 and S-6 . At 01 days, 15 hours, 33 minutes, we had a Sequence 053 which we didn't get . Target obscured by clouds. 02 days, 13 hours, 41 minutes , we had 012 which was CQMfi,OENl~Af I
218 Monterrey, Mexico. It was covered by elouds , so we took Tampico instead. We took two pictures. 02 days, 15 hours, 16 minutes, 59 seconds, they asked for 020 which was James Connally AFB at Waco, Texas . It was obscured by clouds so I t hink we got the Dallas Air Naval Station and it wan sort of hurried but I think we got five picturHs. The next thing they asked for was on 03 days, 11; hours, 37 minutes , 28 seconds , we got our fir11t missile. I got five pictures. I won't guaranteo whether the missile was in it or not. Shortly aftHr that time , we got seven of Holloman . I was so tickeled to see the sled down there that I shot 6 pictures instead of four. At 03 days, 16 hours, 44 minutes , we took five pictures of Bergstrom. On that same pass, we t ook four pictures of the Cape and tha·; 1 s when we were tracking with radar . Cooper Yes . Conrad Then they gave us a target on 04 days , 12 hours, 08 minutes, 13 seconds of Los Palmos and we got four pictures in the mode that they wanted. On 04 days, 12 hours, 24 minutes , 02 seconds, we got Mozambique . I 1 m not sure how well we got it, but I took six pictures down here so I guess we got it
219 pretty ~ell. At 04 days, 13 hours, 29 minutes I got Savannah. Municipal even though they were asking for something else and that was covered and then I t r ied to get them a picture of this Blantyre Airdrome at 04 days , 13 hours, 58 minutes, 50 seconds and all I got was the terrain around it, because i t was covered by clouds . I t ook a couple of pictures down there anyhow, because this was IR film , and I thought they might want to look at Africa. At 04 days, 15 hours, 56 minutes , 53 seconds we got W!iite Sands again on a 424a. I got 5 pictures . Then we got the best one of all 04 days, 15 hours, 04 minutes, 40 seconds . We got 6 pictures of the USS Lake Champlain. Cooper Let me interrupt one thing here . I think you said 15 hours on White Sands . Conrad Did I? White Sands was 14 hours , 56 minutes , 53 seconds . Then we picked up the California missile on. the .next one. I don't think I got any pictures of that. We saw the missile real clearly but Gordo didn ' t get on track so I don ' t think we got the missile in the picture- - Every one of these pictures that I mentioned are Questar except the Savannah Municipal which was on a 200 mm. Then we came up ee ►◄ rlDE~~TIAL
220 Cooper Conrad FCSD REP Conrad with object 65 which was this small island off Brazil and that was 04 days , 16 hours, 51 m inutes, 25 seconds and we have four lovely pictures of the first island which is 120 miles above the corr ect island . We have four more pictures of the correct island . We finally found it . Here is the map problem that we remarked about earlier . Here then i s the only one that I really messed up. 05 days, 11 hours , 43 minutes , 41 seconds was the Cape radar test, and I had the darn lens on l/250th and I should have had on l/30th. I don ' t think those 4 pictures will come out. And that ' s it for D- 6. You m i ght mention here the tracking of these missi l es? No strain. You ' ve got to get on them right away. When Gordo finally saw it the second time it w a s just to far away to get him in PULSE, When they come r ight of f the pad you can see them all right . It gets harder the higher they get. Especi ally the second stage. I got the first missile al l the way to first stage burnout. Then I was behind hi m. I kept seeing a piece of the contrail here and ther e but I really didn ' t catch up with him until he passed our altitude . Just about that time he
burned out again and then he was gone . We could have t r acked him through second stage. If you are going to get hi m on IR you better get him coming off the pad because after that you can ' t follow them very well with the naked eye. We had two entirely different lighting conditions . The first day we had them against the clouds and the second day we had them against the land and water. Cooper We had him against that one string of clouds. We lost him going against those clouds . If you had a solid land water background I think you could fo l low him the whole way without any problem . Conrad The f irst day he didn ' t come up out of the clouds but he did to us. You know it was clear at Vandenburg but the clouds were close enough to cut off our angular view. First , we saw him when he- - Cooper But we had good lighting conditions in spite of his being above the clouds. The lighting w a s such that we could foll ow him real easy. Conrad But the second day I was looking right at the pad , and I saw the engine light . There ' s no two ways about it, I saw the engine light or whatever the fire was coming out of the hole . I don ' t know how they fired them , but f r om the time that flame was ~ l'~EIQ6~,TIA1s
222 above ground or wherever it was , I saw them come off the grormd just as plain as day. You really could see them. He really stood out tt.e second time against the sand background. Cooper You extended your eyes on that. You didn't save them for the visibility targets . Conrad We ' ll t alk about those visibility t argets . I told you, before I went, I didn't think t hat was the way to measure eyesight up there. Cooper I don't ei ther. I think, that the problem- - 11 . 2 Celestial , Space , and terrestrial Radiometry (D-4/7) Conrad Celestial space and terrestrial radiometry , D - 4/ D-7 . I think , what I'd better do is just go right through t he log. C.Q;t-4fIDEMTIM.
223 Conrad All right we started out on D- 4 on 01 day , 11 hours, 40 minutes, 15 seconds wi th Mode 410. Let me just read them and look them up for you. 410 was a star measurement . No camera was required. I have down here 410 and i t was done so i t must have been Deneb. Anyhow it's annotated on the voice tape and it was a 410. Pitch angle was 70 degrees. The yaw was O degrees and t he location was Carnarvon , Austral ia. We put 4 m i nutes of D- 4/D- 7 data on the onboard tape . Okay at 01 deys , 11 hours, 48 minutes , 00 seconds we did 411 whi ch was a night. land m easurement , 90 degree pitch down. The experiment was made whi le over an experiment station. No camera was required. And it was done pas t . Sydney·. It was done for 3 minutes . Okey, at 01 deys, 14 hours , 14 minutes , 00 seconds we did m easurement No . 420 . We started to do measurement No . 420 whi ch was an I R cloud blanket swee~ and the place they gave us had no cl ouds. We di dn't do i t . So at 01 deys , 14 hours, 42 minutes , 00 seconds we did 410A. That was Vega and I have it marked as Vega. We got some recorder time on i t . It should be correlated. I know what i t was . It wasn't 410 . This w as
. 224 done in conjunction with D- 1. The firsi: measure ment on there was a REP, don't forget that. The first twenty minutes of tape is the REP .. Now at 01 days, 14 hours, 53 minutes, 10 seeonds we did a 405 and I have the notation "boreBight okay." And that was where we calibrated our RAD gages. They were all right. -At 16 hours, 03 m:.nutes, we di d 422 which was the moon measurements . We got 2 minutes and tape recorder on that .. Then we go to the next day. On the second day , 14 hours, 06 minutes, 00 seconds 420 wh:.ch was a horizon to nadir measurement and back again, and I believe IR cloud findings sweep. You'll have to correlate what pa.rt of the worlcl that was in. I'm not sure that it wasn't over Ancension. 03 days, 12 hours, 50 minutes , 00 seconds we did a 408 which was a black sky measurement and void black space. It was done over an Hxper iments station . It was done over Carnarvon. ~ :hen on 03 days, 16 hours, 02 minutes, 00 seconcls we did a 409 for 4 minutes over Carna.rvon. This was Zodiacal light measurement. At 03 clays, 16 hours, 07 minutes, 50 seconds we did a 41013' which was Alpha Signus or Deneb. \le got
two minutes of record time . On 03 days, 16 hours, 37 minutes, 28 seconds we got our first missile , 423 Alpha. We have about a minute and 30 seconds of record time on that. 03 days, 22 hours , 48 minutes , 17 seconds we did 425A which was a Hawaii volcano measurement. I did Monique. It is the only one I could find sticking up out of the cloud. That's not active , but it 's a volcano . Maybe they will find something. On the rourth day, 14 hours, 57 minutes, 33 seconds we did a 424A which was a White Sands engine measurement. I got one minute of record time. It should have been a good run. 04 days, 16 hours , 28 minutes, .07 seconds we got the second missile, 423E. I don't think it 's on the .track. I don't think Gordo was looking at it. We may have been pointed at it right at the beginning, but I doubt it. On the fifth day , at 10 hours, 27 minutes, 00 seconds we did a 414 in East Africa, correlated with some 16mm magazine film. 414 was a desert land. It was done in the area of the Sahara Desert. On the sixth day, 08 hours, 43 minutes, 00 seconds I did a 417 in the East African/ Mediterranean. 417 was a water land measurement. f€0t'4 f:lf> Et\lTIA b
226 It's on the recorder, At 06 days, 08 ·tours, 44 minutes , 40 seconds I did a 418 whic.h was mountains . Those were desert mountaine in East Africa. Again I got some record time. On the seventh dey, 09 hundred hours, 00 minutes , 00 seconds 419 I got the Ascension cali bration except it was done in drifting flight over Carnarvon if I'm not mistaken, And that is the end of D- 4/ D - 7. Updating techniques and communications procedures were exactly the same as covered. Equipment set up and usage was very straightforward. The checkoff list was good. The cooled spectrometer checks worked out fine over Carnarvon. We had a go the first time. We never did make the alinements. The only thing we looked at with the cooled spectrometer was the REP. The REP measurements were mad3 1 hour and 50 minutes after liftoff. We had a go at Carnarvon. I went to PROP GAGE-EXPIDRIMENTS, RAD- 1, Cold I R- ON, IR- ON, power-ON, transmitte::c...oN, ·recorder-OFF. Shortly thereafter we had trouole wi th the scanner. At 2:05 we were still having trouble with the scanner. We were having trouble wi th the platform aline. We were in th,~ process I
227 of turning and I missed Agena BUS ARM EXPERIMENTS and I missed jettisoning the door on the cold IR. That's my fault and I jettisoned the door on the cold IR at 02 hours , 16 minutes, 15 seconds after liftoff. I started taking the first REP measure ments and unfortunately it was at 2500 feet. I felt that it was still readable so that is where the data starts. We got some black sky along side the REP with the cold IR. The radiometric and IR spectrometer alinements were r ight on the button . So was the cold IR. We had no trouble with the power down procedures. It was very straightf orward. We never did get to do the cryogenic gas lifetime updates . We never got the Milky Wey with that cooled sensor. We did get the void black space with the cooled sensor. We got the Zodiacal light . We got most of the star .measurements . We got the moon. We got the night land measurements. No, well,· we got the numbers that I mentioned. I just don ' t remember all of them. I did not get a:n:y cloud illumination with lightning. I did get dey land measurements . I got the Ascension calibration. I got an IR cloud blanket sweep , but I did not get the cumulus clouds . C~ ►4EIDEt◄TIAL
228 ~ 0t◄ FIDEf~TIAL ' I did get the moon measurements. I did get one m i ssile measurement. I did get one volcano measurement. I did not get the sun measurements . W e were in drifting flight then and we never drifted into the sun. The equipment tape recorder shoul d have had by my calculations, which were generous and I think there was probably more left on it than I had calculated, 12 minutes and 40 seconds worth of record time left on it . This says we recorded some 41 minutes worth of data. The voice recorder was used until it broke down. The flight control proced~res were straightforward and we did most of our tracking with the reticle. I ran the equipment. FCSD REP Did missile coordination turn out okay: Conrad It couldn't have been better. 11.3 Synoptic Terrain and Weather Photography Conrad I could sum up this synoptic terrain photography. We have over three hundred photographs. I'm just saying that I think we got some tremendous geological shots. I think we got some great weather shots. I can't say anything al>out it until I see the pictures. We've got them all
229 logged. We should be able to dig our way through them. Some of them were done on 35 mm film which was not requested by the man. It was done on the extra 35mm film that we carried with the 200mm lens so we may have some great shots. The relay of data was good. The voice recorder was used until it br oke . All the equipment operated. The Hasselblad camera operated fine. It never jammed. It took every picture and I think they were all good pictures. The tape recorder quit somewhere in the third day. I've got a log over her e that says voice recorder tapes. We had a tape that ran from launch to 01 days, 09 hours , 25 minutes , 00 seconds and we picked up the next tape at that time . It ran till 02 day , 13 hours, 10 minutes and we had another tape that we picked up at that time. It ran till the third day, 13 hours, 47 minutes. Tape 29 ran until the third day 17 hours , 15 minutes . There was another tape in there and that was the one that quit. We don't know how much we got on that one. That was the fifth tape. We ran 4 tapes and it quit on the fifth one. That fourth tape takes us through third day , 17 hours , 15 minutes . We took
pictures of Betsy and Ibre.en and we got a couple of typhoons, also. We gvt them all marked down.
231 Conr ad Let me just maybe gi ve you a synopsis here of some idea of what we probably have down here on the log, and , just looking at the pages here -- started out pretty generally, lot of Ba.ha California, few in Mexico , Island chains, sunrise , couple of shots down of Saigon, Tibet , Tibet , China, Japan , Arabian desert , Tibet , Tibet, China, Arabia, Hanoy, Phillipine Islands , desert dunes , Oasis , African continent , hurricane , coast line , Cairo , Gibraltar, Tripoli, Apollo landmark, Mexico , U. S. California coast, Cape , large storm on an S- 6 at 01 day 17 hours 12 minutes , Florida, large thunder storms over Antigua, Ba.ha, California, Islands and coast, large circular swirls and clouds , river mouth in Shanghai , Japan, typhoon by Japan , Tibet , Tibet , Formosa, Cairo , an S- 6 mode 07 , Florida, Cuba (if I can mention the word), Guaymas clouds , Houston coastal weather, tropical storm - Central America, Lake Titticaca, Arabia, China, earache , North Australian Islands, Africa, Cairo, Tibet, Pete (laughter) , Apollo landmarks , Cyclonic clouds , Hawaiian Islands , Hawaiian Islands , Iran, Turkey, Tibet, Glazier, Tibet , Hong Kong, Nile , Florida, Cuba, West Coast, South America -- gee , hes I got a lot of pictures of m e in here -- Pete -- tropical
232 storm Doreen, West Coast , South Americ a , Andes , Formosa, big Islands of Japan , Tibet mountains and clouds , Tibeten geology , Tibet village , China coast , North Coast of Australia, Australia, China, New Guinea, North Coast of ·Australia, Cairo , (got a lot of Cairo - - we really liked Cairo), Central Australia, clouds at Cape Rhir ( oh, I got a reall~r spectacular cloud shot at Cape Rhir of a cyclonic cloud f orma - t ion -- a minature one) , East Africa, Canari es , Dallas , Fort Worth , Jacksonvill e , Houston, U. S. , Carribean, Getmo , Baha, California, Mexico , storm Doreen, uxine i ce, Amazon , Hawaii storm, coral r eefs , Midpac , tropical storm, coral reef , urine dump , Tibet, Ji'ormosa, Africa, Arabia, weather, Crete'., a string acros:3 the Meds , l arge something, Ind_ia, Isl and s , Arabia, Palestine , Rev 87 - Australia, East African geol0;5J' , African l akes south of Nirobi , east African coa,st north of Tananarive , Madagascar , clouds in the [nter- Tropical ' Convergence Zone , Jacksonville , Florid. 3., aircr aft carrier West Coast by Windowhec , Afric3., night photos , clouds , Baha, California, South Mexico , South America, Zodiacal light , moon , cloud formations in the Pacific , cloud formation Hawaii, Sout h American geol ogy, West- South American weather phenomena Jf sunrise in
FCSD Rep Cpnrad 11.4 Visual Acuity Cooper FCSD Rep Conr ad 233 Japan, Japan weather, night pies , stars, Milky Way, thunderstorm and lightning, something village , China, something Shanghai , Marshall Islands , tropical storms , oil well fires in Africa, geol ogy in India, Tibet, Solomon Islands , sequences across Arabia, New Guinea, China coast, Islands due west of someplace can ' t • I read it -- West Coast Africa, I cant read any of Gordo's wr~ting, some other islands , 102 Rev Austral ia, Canaries , S- 5 no . 48 -- wonder what that was -- East Africa, very hazy, African geology, Cape Kennedy , ice particles , and that's it . Pretty varied (laughter) . That ' s a lot of film there , I ' ll tell you. Greed on Tibet? No , that was Gordo -- he real ly goes for that Ti beten country up ··there -- that I s where he sees all his goodies . It's pretty clear and pretty· up there . and As tronaut Visibility (S- 8/D-13) and Vision Test (M-9) Okay . Why don ' t we go - - Okay -- updating techni ques and communications pro cedures. Again remain the same as before . Equipment set up -- the thing we had there , of course, was a CE1NFPDE ►◄lt>6.i:
234 vision tester and photometer and the f :Lrst thing there on the photometer -- I got t he firs t day measurement with the photometer which required a 30 degree sun angle and this was really -- had been given a loca tion to put the sun on ,the -- Gordo 1 s nide of the instrument panel to assure that we had the right sun angle - - okay, we made that measurement. We had the photometer in the window whenever we went by the S- 8/D- 13 target -- we got t hose measur Eiments , but we didn. 1 t get the last day photometer mea~iurement be cause we were in drifting flight and di dn't have the fue l to set it up. But I don 1 t think the wi ndow changed. Cooper I don ' t either . Conrad Yeah, okay. Cooper Let ' s see , ·the vision tester , I thought worked very • well. No problem on it - - everything "·orked just as advertised and we did run it just as we had agreed to run it and was scheduled to run it . I n fact, in creased our numbers of runs on it later on. Every thing went fine on it. I sure noticed a variance from day to day in our perf ormance back and f orth, back and forth -- it would seem to me like we -- and I think thi s is probably a function of how much we •
235 ~Ot~FIDE~◄ llAL have been looking out the window - - Conrad Yeah, I think you hit the nail right on the head with that one - - Cooper Because once you have been looking out the window for a while , if you come back in and do anything for a while until your eyes kind of got settled down was very difficult . The M - 9 -- it ' s not the M - 9 vision test -- it was the M - 9 vestibular functions tests of we ran that just as we had said we would run it we held our heads alined with the headrest , as straight as possible, and turned the thing on - - I took mine in my right eye, Pete took his in his left eye , so t hat I could read along the side of his and he could read along the side of mine . I alined with the top of my instrument panel which is offse.t by some 30 degrees, or so , and I assume that Pete alined with the top of his also. And we would spin the dial and then while looking in there , aline with what we thought was the parallel alinement with the top of the panel and then say read, and the other man would read their reading or would record the reading down then, and we di d this five times to get the readings -- enough said for that . I just will say that I -- my personal opinion on this thing ct>J\,FK) E ►~T I,._.
236 Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad ~ t◄ FIDE ►4TI~ is that it was put in here politicall y , that it was ill planned, ill defined , and is a worthless experi m ent . I hope someday somebody will have the courtesy t o check some of these things out more thoroughly . Ground observati ons - - we can't even say about the Austr alian site - - the Woodleigh sit e because the weather was such that we never got a look at it - - t wo times we could have gott en a look at it, t he weather was very bad over the area and one - - We saw the smoke so clearly though ,~ and the weather was so clear that I could sort of put that in a category with Yuma, you know, I just wished we had seen i t Yeah, I do too . That darned Laredo site -- even w hen we saw the smoke - - the contrast ratio was down so much on the· target outlines Yeah That we had a great deal of difficulty finding the target . Now Gordo found them a couple of times when I didn ' t even f ind them even looking right at the right spot and I -- when I 'd find them , why I 'd be too late -- I mean we'd be already at the Nadir and going away from i t and by that time , we 'd usually be
237 co~~FIDE~~TIAL in rolling flight because of the tracking involved and the couple of times we saw the marks , you ' d be messed up trying to decide whether it was the 1 , 2 , 3, or 4, just from orientation. Cooper Well, here again, we were trying to salvage a little bit out of drifting flight and I realize why we con tinued that experiment where we could and doing what we could, but it ' s almost worthless to try and do anything of this type if you don ' t have attitude control systems - - Conrad And a platform Cooper And a platform because you have got t o be able to get powered up , you have got to be able to have pointing information, be able to get on the thing at an early enough date to get your angles right and to get all set up and to be able to control the· spacecraft so that you can take the right look angle . When you are trying to climb all over one side of the spacecraft, peer out the back corner of the other window and one in one another ' s lap, one peering out of one window and one out the other and there ' s just a mess and it doesn't do the experiment justice and it doesn't do us justice . If the experiments going to be done at all, it ought to be done right and @0 ►4FIDE~~TIAL
238 here again , I say I realize why we wer,= trying to sal vage what we could out of a bad sit1 1ation but it didn 1 t really do justice to the expt=riment . W e never r eally once really gave the expe:C'iment as far as the ground observation, a really fa:Lr chance. And the one time when we really did give it the most fair chance, when we did have attitude control , was extremely bad weather -- the haze was ·)ad -- it was j ust about like the day when we went over it in the airplane trying to do those observations , it was a low sun angle and haze and the vis:Lbility in the area was not real overly good . Pete ' s already covered the window measurements checkli st . I think that t his whole _ experiment was very well laid down and very well prepared for and that the people con cerned with this experiment did a real fine job of • it - - Conrad I have to make one comment though , I think that the target size was small enough such that the target itself , although it had the high contrast ratio with the surrounding background , that they were looking for , you know so it would stand out, was lost in the acquiring -- in other words , th3.t thing was designed for our close overhead work to see it , and therefore,
239 EO~◄ FIDE~◄ TrAt besides the smoke there was nothing else to - - in a contrast nature - - to attract us to the target area Cooper That ' s right. Conrad And that - - the problem was acquiring it - - we were always in the process of acquiring but by the time we acquired it, we were already overhead where we should have been making readings . Cooper Yeah, I think that they might do ~ell to put some big colored panels out or some type of something that would be more distinctive Conrad Let ' s (Say this - - the times that we saw the ships, the time we found the carrier, we had the carrier wake in sight for 500 miles even though we didn ' t have the ship in sight and we were bor esighted , tracking, ,spacecraft pitching down keeping track of that thing when we got close enough to actually see the aarrier with our naked eyes, why it's because we had been tracking and looking and focusing right in the right spot all this time . You can ' t do that with that type target , and this was the thing that I was afraid that was going - - they've tried to control everything in this S~S/D- 13 experiment measure the atmosphere , they have measured our eyes, they have made the targets the right size , but they
240 left out the one thing that reall y made -- just like being in the desert -- you are flying along out there over the desert and a very , very small ·;hink road s t ands out and the reason it does , is because it ' s got the r i ght contr ast ratio . You can put a 6 foot road in brown in a brown field and you ' r e not going to see it from 100 feet in the air. And t his was . the whole trouble. The targets were to small that their contrast ratio didn ' t help us acquire. I feel the experiment was really a good one . I re~lly feel badly about not getting the data , but ~1 opinion hasn ' t changed from before flight -- I ·,ras worried before flight that the contrast was gob.g to be such that we would never locate it and that was exactly what our problem was . Now the W oodleigh s i te , I feel might have been a little bit different: We had such a good sighting cue in that Sharksmouth Bay, and there was no doubt in our mind where the target was the one time we saw it with t he smoke and in relation to Sharksmouth Bay, and eve:cything that if we had had some fuel up there, we ve:cy well may have seen those targets far enough out t o acquir e the s i te and start t r acking and then we might have gotten them some useful dat a . No doubt in our mind that we'd lu€0MFIDE~fFJAL
241 ~F.IDENT!ts# - Cooper FCSD Rep Conrad have had a heck of a lot easier problem if the visual acuity targets had been located up in Yuma and not Laredo . Everytime we came over the West Coast , if I didn ' t see Yuma, why I was surprised because I think!I acquired Yuma every time - - it ' s real easy to pick it out of the desert and there was many clues to lead you right where those vis targets might have situated if they had been in the Yu.ma areas, and I felt that you would probably see them. And I still think this is a real worthwhile experiment . I think it ' s good for 7, but it ' s got to be revised considerably . They have got to move that Laredo l ocation , Okay. Have you got anything in the book ther e that you want to put in? Wel l, yeah. Let ' s just run by it real quick. What · happened on each one of the I have several passes l isted and I have on the first day 00 hours 00 minutes that we took a vision test , well, those are all in the flight plan and they are all marked on the cards so that ' s not necessary to record . It was on the f i r st day, 18 hours 26 minutes , when I did the window scan. The Laredo siting we did at 1 day , 18 hours, 34 min utes , 38 seconds and we didn ' t even see it. Then
' 242 t:€ 0bt~IDEt ◄ TIAL • at 18:25: 05 on the second day, Gordo s~w the targets and I didn't . On the third day, 13:32:40 we saw the smoke -- no targets bad sun angle -- then the third day, 18 hours, 16 minutes, 14 sei::onds, we saw a 1 in the first row , and a 4 in t :'le second 1 in on the second row -- then on the 3eventh day, 16 hours , 40 seconds, we saw the smoke , saw the targets on Gordo 1 s side and he scored :1. 4 and a 1 in the first two boxes and the window measurement was made at that time also. We had to, you know, had the photometer and that's the only S- 8/D- 13 data I have down. 11. 5 Electrostatic Charge fuse :.1l.. Cooper We did that just according to the flight plan, I I I Conrad Yeah , well, lets see -- Ive got - - I 11 give the · readings here , if I can find them. MSC- 1 -- We had .... an MSC- 1 at 01+21+52+00 which ended at 01+22+44+00 and another one at 03+07+40+00 that encied at 03+08+40+00 . And another one at 04+05--50+00 that ended at 04+07+00+00 and another one a·; 06+05+24+00 that ended at 06+06+24+00 . Another orni at 07+05+24+00 t hat ended at 07+06+25+00 and another one at 07+20+50+00 and that got cut short by a thruster
243 f check and I didn't record the time that it was turned off , but I turned on again -- but I ' m sure it ' s on the tape somewhere.- So much for the MSC- 1. 11.6 Zodia,5e.l Light Photc-- gra.:phy (s 1) Conrad Why don't you give them the word on that. Cooper Equipment set up and usage - - we didn ' t have any problems in sett ing up the camera - - all set to go by the procedure that we developed for using the Southern Cross and pointing up towards Alpha and Beta Centaurus with the top part of the reticle worked out all right . We don ' t know yet what kind of data we got , but we followed the pre-agreed method for where we put the reticle and for turning the camera on and how long it was held on there and then proceeded on around to Gruis , pointing up towards Fomalhaut and held on there and we didn't thrust any during the film . I think there was one film sequence we had to - - we still were doing a little thrusting to get into attitude on one of the longer observations and we recorded this on the recorder and should be on there as to the times and everything. 11 . 7 Inflight Exerciser (M -3} ' We used it extensively for both medical passes and
244 for regular exercise through the day--both of us used it. There was no noticeable changes in physiological condition. I think if anything, it i~ easier to use inflight than it is on the ground, und.er lg I mean. O ne thing I might recommend is that ii have some little better method of rolling up in maybe some kind of velcro strap fastened onto it to be able to roll the thing up into a stowage type configuration. This is one thing w hen you start to stow it anywhere , it tends to keep unrolling and getting all over the place. But i t worked very well--no problem. 11 . 8 Inflight Phonocardiogram (M-4) Cooper As far as I know, it functioned all right. It was just like any other sensor, it itched and was trouble some as far as another sensor~ It was not comfort able, but i t was not overly painful, but it certainly was very noticeable just like other sensors. 11 . 9 Cardiovascular Ref lex Conditioning (M-1) Cooper This worked for some 4 days on Pete. :3:e was the one that had this on. There were no procedures or operational problems--it was turned on and left on for all this period of time in whic:1. time it ran out of air and quit and the cuffs ·~ere itching him very much under his suit, and we p:,:-oceeded to get his suit • tEEot.◄ EI DEf',Tl;iill
Conrad FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper Conrad 245 off -- enough off that we could cut the cuffs off and throw them back in the trash box. The cardio - vascular conditioning bottle valve was very objection able . It was extremely noisy. It YOke both of us up everytime it actuated -- with a loud thud and hisses of air-- and I don ' t care what anybody says in a very quite room, it was very defi nitely objectionabl e and I won't change my opinion of it one bit ! It was too loud and my recommendation woul d be if they can ' t decrease the noise of this valve, that it be eliminated from any flights . Your M - 1. My M - 1, huh? Yeah , that was a crazy one. Let me ask one question on this. You didn't say here . Did you feel anything? Yeah, let's go into that . I very definitely felt that after we finally spent many hours down her e with Gene Tuggs and rebuilt the cuffs -- yeah , they were doing the job that they were designed to do. They were cutting off the venous flow and I could feel that in flight. Very easily in my f eet . So I thi nk it was working correctly. It was a shame it ran out of poop -- gas , air . I'm glad it did! YesCOJ)iU•IDEf>fJJicL
11.10 Cloud Top Spectrometer (S-7) Cooper Here again , there weren't a:ny problems in the hard~1are in the flight that we didn ' t know about before flight. There were two occasions where the spectrograph I s shu·;ter was re leased inadvertently e i ther in stowage or unstowing and the main shutter had not been -- just as we knew- this is a very weak point of the mechru1ism because all you have to do is bump it against some·;hing and the spectrographic shutter was released -- which ruined the whole -- that particular exposure •·- you had to recock the whole thing. As far as the procedur es of using it, it was easy enough to use , it was a ld.ttle bit cumbersome in shape but we used it holding i t -- the lenses upright up high so tha·; they got out t he window. I think we got them some good data if . Pete will get the log out here he can r ead over that . We recorded on the voice recorder as long as we had any tape . W e recorded comments on t he clouds, their appearance , and all that while making ·;he photographs . Conrad N ow, all the photographs taken were specific photo graphs requested at a specific time . '.:here were some that were requested at a specific t ime that we didn ' t get. I think the experiments pHople have those
247 .. Cooper Conrad G©t'<IFIBE ►~TIAL down or they can correlate it real easy if I give you the ones that we got . So we had a -- and we alwrors took two sets , one at an eighth and one a t quaYter, so we had a set at 1 day 20 hours 2 minutes and 30 seconds, and we actually would up with four pictures . Apparently they requested four. Then / we had another one and that was cumulus clouds wherelver the location was -- Gordo took the pictures I and another one on the second day 21 hours 33 minutes and 02 seconds , four pictures of a tropical storm. On the third day, 6 hours 32 minutes and 46 seconds we had four pictures taken over the Philippines of clouds in the Philippines . Then the next frame , number 13, was exposed accidentally. And then on the third day at 21 hours 20 minutes and 8 seconds , it doesn ' t say what the picture was made of -- but~ set were made -- of an 03 , mode 03 -- that was , let me look and see here . Right , I think that was S- 7, 03 Eastern Pacific and then we had on the fourth day at 3 hours 20 minutes and 25 seconds , we had a Philippines/Guam area set again, then on the third day, 20 minutes 35 seconds, you had one taken there Gordo, whats t that white something -- oh , that white EO~~FIDE~TIAL
248 Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper 11,11 Miscellaneous Cooper Conrad calibration card--that was frame number 18, Then on the fourth day 16 hours 37 minutes 00 seconds, you had thunderstorms over someplace---is that right- thunderstonns? Yes , the tip of_ Florida, up right off-• - Yes, thunderstorms off the tip of Florida--that's right, they ask for that. And then on the fourth day, 19 hours 44 minutes 02 seconds, we had another Eastern Pacific for_two pictures. Then on the fourth day, 21 hours 09 minutes 25 seconds, t ropical storm 'Doreen--two pictures. Twenty-seven wHs tripped in the spectrometer again--the twenty-seventh- - That's right. Then on the seventh we had seventh day, 4 hours, 18 minutes 21 seconds, we had another Philippine/Guam area. Right Two pictures. Yes, and that was it for the cloud to1> spectrometer. Celestial and External Observations. We saw the Zodiacal light . Quite clearly--twice.
249 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Clearly. We saw the air glow as usual, always around everywhere - - around the night . We did see streaks in the air glow that they talked to us about -- the dark streaks in it which ' Jim and Ed mentioned. They are really definitely there . Right -- banded are~s . And we saw this one in the southern Aurora down on the southern celestial pole which was quite - - pretty unus~al. Reall y hard to def ine at f irst too -- just what it was. Yeah , it looked like a part of the air gl ow, but it was actually an Aurora - - i t changed the It changed the air gl ow thickness too Changed the air glow thickness and it changed the smooth curvature of the earth -- it put a halt in the black outline of the earth - - Right. And i t was a very green band of what you'd -- what kind of Aurora do you call that where it is sort of like a sheet Yeah the stri a or striden - - somethi ng like that . Yeah. Then one other - - the only other observation other than we did see a lot of micrometeorites and I saw
- 250 one large meteorite enter underneath U3 Conrad Observed quite a few underneat h us- - Cooper There was ver- ✓ seldom a night went by that you couldn't watch just for a few minutes to see a micrometeorite or two of them enter. One meteorite came from a l ong way out burning and went in under neath, There were two other si gnificant things. One was the observation of the m oon. The moon was rising out of the airglow . We had about a quarter moon and you couli seo the entire m oon lit partially and then t he one part o:f i t lit brighter . It r eally appeared in t hree dimensional wlth the sun back over back off the horizon light: L-1 5 it . This was quite spectacular, I thought . I bought .i.t l ooked very unusual. The other observa.ti0ns in t :'le vicinity of the Magellanic Clouds, and actually in t he vicinity where this Gegenschein Li 1 sht is- - i t appeared to me to be two to three a:~eas that looked like M agellanic Clouds, only mu~h smaller. .·, ! There were two or three other little Magellanic Cloud-appearing thi!lgs, 'l'hey weren't elusters or anything. I think you noticed them several times too over there when we we~e fiddling around the M agellanic..Clouds, I never could decid•~ what they
251 Conrad Yes, we kept looking over the area of Gegenschein to see if we could see and I don't really think it was the Gegenschein, but- - Cooper There was one area right almost in the immediate area of the Gegenschein, but not quite . It was very near that area by maybe five degrees or so though. There was this one area which appeared like the Magellanic Clouds . Conrad Like a real small one . Cooper Yes, it looked like a small Magellanic Cloud. That's really what it looked like. I t was quite near the area where we had been told the Gegenschein should appear; but, then there were a couple of others of these that similar types back over closer toward the other of the regular Magellanic Clouds . So , I don't know what they were, and I didn't notice these before on my previous flight. These were something that were new to me. We saw a l ot of planets. We did try taking the polaroid, the two sheet polaroid filters , and rotating them to all different positions to see if we had circular or linear polarity coming out of the sun. I tried the sun both while well up and while setting. . . ~19E►~:JtA b,
252 FCSD Rep Cooper Everytime while setting, it seemed to have linear polarity, somewhat vertical , but I never could pin this down to anything well- defined. While the sun was up, well into the sky, I could rotate the filters and rotate them within themselves to any degree and couldn't discern anything but equal polarity coming out of them in all directions. It didn't seem to have any linearity to it at all or any well-defined specific axis of linearity. never could see anything from the sun other than with the polaroid filter in . After the sun had set, you could see quite a glow with the polaroid filter in, but at the same time you could see it without the polaroid, too . A couple of times when we got the Zodiacal light quite strongly- - Can you see the stars down through this airglow? Oh yes. You can see the stars right on down through the airglow. The Gemini window is much cleaner in general , apparently, or much better visibility out of it and night visibility than the Mercury window, because we were seeing down to about seventh magnitude of stars . We saw the clusters in Orion and we could see seven stars in the belt of Orion. We saw a great many stars which we couldn ' t "'-=eOMFlf>El'4TIM. ,> I
Conrad FCSD Rep Conrad FCSD Rep Conrad FCSD Rep Cooper Conrad begin to see in the Mercury flights . In f act , on the basis of the number of stars we've seen, our recommendations are that you crank up the planetar ium at Moorehead and increase the brightness of it over the l evel at which we were studying it be cause it was, to me, rather confusing when we got up there due to the number of stars we actually were seeing. Didn't you think we needed to up the number of that you actually see? Yes, very definitely. You see quite a bit of the sky. Did you get any pictures of opportunity of something --something that you really remember-- that wasn't scheduled? Pictur es . You mean photographs? Yes . Oh, I think we have some outstanding photographs in there if they came out . I mean something that m~be you wanted to take a picture of that wasn't on the- - Oh , yes . \.le took a number of pictures because- - We got some real good pictures coming across the states , with the clear day we never expected to see, where we got two or three of the big major cities
254 Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper FCSD Rep in the middle of the States , like Dal l a s , For t Worth , and J acksonville . I tried some nighttime photographs with the 200 mm l ens on high speed film with s ever al different speed setti ngs just to see i f they would come out and what they would come out like- - Of what? Oh, of Orion and s everal of the constella tions- several celesti a l fixes--once of some airglow , I t ook a picture of that aurora that we saw over there and , of cour se, all kinds of su~set s , sun rises , and the moon coming up through the airglow, and things of this type . A l ot of di:n light stuff we took with hi gh speed fil m. It m ay or m ay not come out , I don I t know . We were gues,3ing at some of the exposures . A gr ea t m any thi ng:3 on the ground, of course, we took pictures of tha t w1 ~re unexpec t ed things tha t we just thought were real t arget s of oppor tunity. Okay , that' s the end of the experimen·~s .
255 12.0 PREMISSION PLANNING 12 . 1 M i ssion Plan (trajectory ) Cooper On these l onger flights you have to be prepared for more real - time mission pl anning, which we were . And we had planned on this perhaps being the case and we hel d al l the flexibility that we could in our pl anning. You need to get all of the key things that you ' re going to do planned and trained for as well as possible, but the way you fit them together has to be flexible . This applies more to the flight pl an than it does to the over- all mission plan. 12 . 2 Flight Plan Cooper Flight plan almost invariably winds up being l argely real-time planning. 12.3 Spacecraft Changes Cooper Spacecraft changes has al ways been a sore point with me and stil l is . I can ' t emphasize enough to give the crew and everybody el se a fair shake by hol ding spacecraft changes to a real firm, hard freeze date. No more changes should be made after a certain date because it adds hardship to everybody invol ved, and does not allow the crew time to train. Some changes are going to be necessary because of what you find out on the preceding flight, but I think they should Jl
256 ~ WFIDel>~TIAL 12.4 Mission Rules Cooper Conrad 12.5 Experiments Cooper be held to an absolute minimum. I think that the mission rules were i n general very heal thy. I think the attitude of the FOD toward mission rules was very good. It was obvious that just as we have seen many times before, that FOD uses the mission rul es as guidelines and certainly wil l deviate from them to keep the f l ight going, but keep everything as safe and as smooth as possible. I real ly can ' t quibble with the mission rules we wound up with at all . I think they were very good. The mission rules on the fuel cells were the best things we ever had, they were written real opera tionall y. I would l ike to compliment the people who wrote those rules . Experiments is a sore point with me b< ?cause I again feel like the flight crew get trompled on all the way down the l ine. There is no polic;r that has ever been held to or ever backed up on adhBring to an experiments cut-off date. Very obviously, there were a couple of experiments thrown in on a politi cal basis and nothing else . I feel that this is not fair to the experimenters and to the flight crew, I
257 nor is i t fair to the operations people when ex periments get cranked in past the experiments freeze dates . I feel that these freeze dates shoul d be establ ished early, agreed to by everybody concerned, and shoul d be hel d very rigidl y to . Unl ess a safety of flight or a significant development occurs warranting a spacecraft change, the f r eeze date shoul d be adhered to . If you don ' t , ,you affect hardware, you affect al l the previous and subsequent training a..~d planning involved , and you compromise everything as well as the experiments which did meet the agreed- to schedul e . 12. 6 Training Activities Cooper We were extremely short on time to do adequate flight plan training. Although we had it pretty well in hand, but it was still very marginal . I guess it was just as well since circumstances re quired considerable real- time pl anning. It woul dn't do much good to get timing patterns down real pat on these things anyway. Usually it boil s down to doing them real time. There were s everal experiments that I would have liked to have had a l ittle more time to run practice on the simul ator, or, at l east sit down and lay out exactl y how we were going to
258 Conrad Conrad Conrad do it . Although experiments worked ,)ut r e l a tively we11 , we could have used a 1i ttle mo:c:-e time on them. Concerning mission planning. I would avoid wiring ,:. experiments such as MSC-1 . They clo·:iber up very critical time phasing in the mission. For instance, arming the Bus Arm Switch at SECO added an unneces sary step at an extremely time-cri ti,::al time, which is just pure lousy engineering pl anning. That door could have been blown by any number ,)f circuits. It didn't have to put i t on that one. The next thing is the laying out of t he flight plan . It became obvious that we were crowd,3d , So , I think they should take a more objective l ook at these quential aspects of f light planning, particularly in terms of how long it takes t o complete one ex periment. This business of being pitched all the way to the nadir, going backward, th,m having to pitch forward again to pick up t he next target , is time consuming. Neither the flight plan peop l e, the crew, nor anybody el se for that rnatter picked this up until we were flying . Sleep cycl es, On the long flights you have to plan for dual s l eep cycl es. Stations shoul d monitor and not transmit . The crew shoul d sleep at the same '
259 Conrad " Cooper Conrad time for a period of 6 hours , at least . I am firml y convinced the first three orbits shoul d be devoted onl y to wringing the spacecraft out . There was a tremendous mistake made in the pl anning on our f l ight. We assumed that everything was going to run correctly in the very beginning. We didn't even test anything but the thrusters and that was a mistake. We had the time to make several systems checks . You have to do a good platform check. You need to check the scanners . You ought to have a de tailed procedure laid out in advance. If we ' d have done that, we'd have lmown that the primary scanner was no good. You should have a computer check, which con sists of going into Catch- U p mode, hitting Start COMP, maybe inserting a few numbers and see what they read out . We ran into one computer anomaly where the com puter kept running and running and I still don't lmow what that was. Had that occured during the REP exercise we would have really been up the creek. That's right. In pre- mission planning we should lmow what the most critical systems are to be checked. For us there was the Platform, Computer and Scanners . One of them bit us and that was the Primary Scanner. We
260 were forced into being p11t all the wa;'{ back into the first orbit, and it was a mistake. 'Th-e--mis s i an \ rules ,.were goud.and I agree with the comments Gordo had on the experiments and the training activities.261 13.0 MI3SION CONTRO: 13. 1 GO/ NO GO Cooper GO/NO GO ' s--I think we ' re fine . I don ' t s ee anything wrong with the GO/NO GO's. 13. 2 Pl~ and CLA Updat~s Cooper Conrad 13 Consumables Cooper : :.,onrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad .. I thought those went all right . Do you? Yes , we had a hip pocket place to go on every or bit . Consumables--In general we had a pretty good handle on those. The oxygen, the OAMS- - We had one anomally on the OAMS . I still don ' t think we lifted off with the right OAMS propellant . No , I don ' t think so either . We had 87 percent- - 87 percent on liftof f and they never answered that question for us . We did ask why we had this r eading rather than 100 percent and we never got that answer . We asked this shortly before liftoff . This may have had to do with the fact that we had full fuel but not a full load of oxydizer based on that 1 , 25 mixture ratio. My understanding was that we were supposed to liftoff with 100 percent on the gage. I ' m not saying that wa s correct but it took I us by surprise when they blew the Squibs a couple of minutes before liftoff and had 87 percent «e~FIDi~il.l;<L
on the gage. Cooper Electrical--1 don't think there was a:ny problem on the electrical system. The problem Wc,s in the cryogenics rather than the electrical. I should say in the cryogenics and in the water product of the fuel cells. These were the limiting things rather than the electrical power we were using. As long as you could run the fuel cells there was no limit to the power you could pull off of them. Conrad Let I s put that to bed right now. The GPO fluffed powering up those fuel cells after thny ' d been powered down . If our electrical prob:.ems didn't do anything else, we got to cycle electr:_cal loads all the way through the flight on those fuel cells . As far as I'm concerned , those fuel CBlls are flight proven. Every fuel cell in every spa<!ecraft that goes off should carry the maximum loacl of RSS supply so that he has all the electrieal power that he wants to use. He can run that pla·;form, computer , or any combination of electrical gear that he wants anytime during the flight. The same ·;hing with the experiments. You ' ve got to have that platform. We kept pinching electrical power and pinching electrical power. I think we proved that the fu< ~l cells can take @ ~,FIQ~t,.~TIAl "
,.,, Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad • Cooper the load . It shouldn I t be any problem to fix a couple of things like that . There ' s no doubt about it, those fuel cells can go up and down, and up and down under load and they will ha.ck the course. We sure gave them a beating. Especially that Number 2 fuel cell . Can ' t say enough about the fuel cells . I just think they did real well. I was extremely impressed at the end when we kept loading them down. We loaded them down even more and the doggone thing began to come up rather than fail, go down or poop completely out . That thing stayed on sixty o~ seventy hours of the whole flight . That ' s a lot . It must have been sixty hours at least . I think that the fuel cell really goes into a hybernation period when you cool it down . I think it almost hibernates like a storage battery. The way to bring it back to life is to load it down to get it warmed up , and then to purge it . And I would have liked to super purge that Number 2 cell a couple of times to see if I couldn't have brought it up higher. Yes , I think it probably would have wor ked. The
I Conrad We didn't always agree with Mission Control. One example--! would have l oved to argue with them about the heater circuit on the OAMS. I was against turning it off . Cooper On fuel cell- - do you want to go back tc OAMS. We ' ve already gone by it. Conr ad Yes , I ' m a curious person by nature and so is every body else that flies one of these spacecraft. When you s end up something you ought to tell them why you 're doing it . Especially when we get into these screwy conditions . We didn ' t have any choice when t hey said shut down the fuel cell but to shut down t he fuel cel l. It wouldn't have cost them another t wo words to s ay what they were trying t o do. I think i t was obvious to us what they were trying to do . I tell you , they made some decisions down there on t he ground t hat I 'll still sit back here and argue wi th them about . Cooper Yes , you are right on that OAMS heater . Conr ad OAMS heater was one of them and another one is the manner in which they conducted that solenoid warmup idea on the OAMS system to unfreeze i t . That was a poor way of doing it.
265 EeJNFIOEr-qTIAt That was a very poor plan. Cooper Conrad That wasn't thought out very well. I think, in that particular case, we had all the time in the world to discuss that with the ground . We could have gone a couple of revs talking that one over and it wouldn ' t have made a hill of beans . Cooper I think the time that they chose to do it was ill planned . Every test that they laid on us wound up to being a test in the middle of the night . I don ' t know why. I ' m sure this wasn't planned that way, but that is the way it turned out. Anything else on the fuel cells , batteries, or mission control? Conrad No . 13 . 4 F'light Plan Changes Cooper Flight plan changes--I think here is one thing that we want to say about mission control. I ' m well aware that the flight plan people were kept extremely busy having to do this tremendous amount of real time flight planning. I think in general Flight Planning back there did a fine job . I'm sure there were a lot of the people coming in and adding this and that and changing this and changing that. There wasn't enough thought given to the crew. The crew was extreme~ co,.u.romised throughout the whole €0NFl91!1'~ 1-1Ai.
266 flight in the way the flight plan changes were made . This was unintentional, I'm sure . Conrad We had to blow the whistle on it. Cooper They did things like trying to keep one m an busy a l l the time , just to keep him busy. It was obvious that was exactly what was being planned . Certain experiments were put on one man when th,~ other man was asleep then the other man whe he wa:, asleep without any thought being given to who had what or which side of the cockpit. Conrad I think , that we documented this \vell enough, and I don ' t think the 4 crew emphasized it enough; but, the people on the ground don't realize how long it t akes to perform these other mundane taf,ks that aren't scheduled such as : hygiene , food., etc . They did allow long time periods for focd, but there were other things that they didn't allo~ the time for such as : garbage , cleaning, etc . Cooper That's r ight . General housekeeping and cleaning up the spacecraft . Conrad I think we can straighten this out with them. Cooper I do to , but we are talking here about flight plan changes in mission controlling. I don't m ean this as critical as it sounds . I want to say I think
" 13 . 5 Systems Cooper 'l@ Ot~FIDE ►~TIAl they did a fine job . I think they made a good effort to salvage all we could ou of a poor situation . . I think they really did a fine job . As a resul t of what we found , and we didn't know before we got into the real time situation; we discovered that the people compromised are the flight crew. They wound up cutting into sleep periods and certain functions were performed at the wrong time for each one of us. It could have been better planned as for as who did what when. Mission Control for syst ems . I think the biggest handle you have on systems is right on board , and I still think so . I think we had a good handle on what was going on. The things that presented a real question were the rate of decay , the rate of dwindling, some of these cyros , etc . The ground got a good handle on them and began to give us some good informat ion on what we could expect. Although , I think some of them were new enough that the ground wasn't aware of what was going to happen. For example, they didn't know when they would vent and when they wouldn't , what the rate would be when they vented , etc . £:Of4£10E~~TIAL
26s ~EIDE~~TIAL 13 . 6 Experiment Real Time U pdates Cooper I think these worked out pretty well . We mentioned about needing a platform before and abcut needing attitude control . And our OAMS system got worse and worse where we had no attitude cont rol t o speak and weren't allowed to use any, I think, a great many of these things that were put in ~ust hoping we might drift through. They were sort of wasted . It was a waste of time . They could ha.v-e saved our time , theirs , the writing time , and. everything involved, because trying to get some of these experi ments while in drifting flight i~ completely imp.ossible. Conrad It was really funny. It couldn' t have been better planned to work out opposite. They'd say get a D-4/ D- 7, like the Milky Way--You ' d expect to drift through the Milky Way long enougr. to get it . Anytime we had the gear fired up we nev-er got anywhere near the Milky Way. Cooper No , we would always be pointing at the ground . Conrad There was one time when I tried to do it . We were pointed at the Milky Wa;y. By the time I found out that we were going to drift through it and the t en minute warm up time for the gear passed, we were ct> ►,FfDE~~Th*lll. I
269 ... Cooper COt◄ FtDEt-ctflM: out of it again. I'd leave the darn IR gear running for a while and we would never get near anyt hing we could look at . We never did get that end of the sun picture and yet the sun w a s in our eyes every time you would turn around. When t hey would give us some of these locations to photograph and gave us pointing informa tion, it was good. When we had a platform to use , I think , their pointing information was extremely accurate . I was well pleased with it . I thought it w a s right on t he money, We never had a plat form to work from so w e couldn' t evaluate the air-to-air, The air-to- ground was quite good. And you need this . COl>4FIDE ►~TIAE
270 14,0 TRAINING 14.1 Gemini Simula tor Procedures Cooper The procedures that we went through in-·it- and our t raining was pretty accurate. I think that we used the right procedures in the development of our checklist . In going through the procedures we should have ""tad; our flight type checkli~;t at an earlier date in order to get a little bii. m ore famili ar with them and to iron them out a little more in the GMS. W e should have had them j or 4 weeks earlier. System knowledge--I didn' t feel we were t oo bad off system knowledge wise , did you? Conrad No . Cooper We were pretty well on top of everything, We had a great deal of confidence in knowing the systems . The systems training that we got in the GMS on the fai l ure analysis a long with the lectures we got by t he systems people , both the GMS people and the McDonnell people , put us in pretty good s·1ape sys t em wise. We were in excellent shape ,:::oncerning launch t raining. I might say tha t i f the::-e is any changing to be done we should emphasize the nominal launch more. We ran through al l types of emergencies . We had some good sessions on the DCPS . We had some eot-~FIDE~~T1At
271 creo~4ffDEMftA~ wasted time down here trying to crank up some of these launch failures that take quite a while to reset on the GMS . We should have gone through them on the DCPS and let them go at that. It was a waste of valuable time during the last few days. M any precious hours were wasted cranking the program into the GMS to go through some of the failure modes that we could have done in a tenth of the time on the DCPS . Due to the shortage of time we cut way back on nominal training. We could have had more nominal launches, nominal insertions , nomina l insertion checklist, nominal preretro , and nominal re t ro, e tc . Conrad The best day we had was the day before the act ual flight . The day after we had scrubbed . We ran about 8 nominal launches . About 4 reentries all the way through to the end and that really put the frosting on the cake. Cooper Yes , we should have had another day of t hat before the first attempted launch. As it turned out we got into reasonable shape because of that one scrub date . We really put it to good use. Conrad We got a chance to go over the books some more and
272 learn things that really helped . Cooper We were short on nominal time . Conrad I can ' t say enough for the way Deke schEiduled the things when he asked for t wo weeks . He was right on the button. We could have used a couple more days. Cooper Yes. Conrad A little more nomi nal training like that to polish it off. If we had, I don't think Gordo woul d have put the drogue out at 70 . And I don ' t t hink I would have left all the Squibb batter ies off. We shouldn' t make those kind of mistakes . Cooper We would have had more time to run through the nominal procedures and get them down. Con.rad We ' re the first ones to admit that we maie them, because we just di dn't have the f light checklist . I finished all the time . We didn't run· ~hat thing that many times . Cooper We ran very little orbita l training othe:r than the REP . I think we spent a great deal of t'ime on the rendezvous and the REP, because it was the first priority. Conrad One thing that slipped by us , too, was that it took COt-c!FIDEt◄TIM.
273 us a whole day and a half in flight to realized that these experiments were going to run so successively close t o one another. The one thing that we were not prepared for on the ground and had to learn in the air was how to organize a series of di fferent experiments to run them in a row. I ' m not sure we coul d have figured this out on the ground . Cooper One thing we could have done if we had had the time , we could have taken one of these Stateside passes that we knew would really be cluttered and run through it in real time . Conrad I think the recommendation here is what should be done in the future for a flight that had experiments like this one . I ' d run a sim-net- sim with Houston. We had individually er ected and taken down and put up every experiment enough times that we had no problem in assembling anything. We had no problem in knowing where everything was, we knew where everything was in the spacecraft and we got it in the shortest amount of time as possible even in the f light . We didn ' t have any trouble in that way. The one thing that we did miss was, and they have a sim net sim of '90NFtoENll,_, "
274 eoM EIDEt◄ TIA • revs 15 and 16 . It might have been a good idea if we ha.d listened to it in that we might have picked up the fact that the sequential ,::-unning required just a little bit different opnration. Again, I'm not sure that you can practice this on the ground, because at the times we ha.d the gear out we wouldn't have been able to load any spacecraft on the ground the way we wound up using it in zero g. I had lenses floating on the floor and film magazines hanging by just a couple of little velcJ:o t hreads on the overhead which you couldn't have done in a 1 g horizontal environment. You couldn't stow your gear around the cockpit like you can during zero g. Maybe you might compromise here. You m j_ght consider a sim net sim to get some idea of how things are going to run into one another , and then if you're up for 4 days or something like that, yc,u might take an orbit to lay out a series so y01:.. can learn how to stick stuff around the spacecraft. . It's not apparent to you on the ground exactJy how you wind up storing that stuff. We really ca.me up with some new places to stash gear as the re~ult of being in zero g . ..
275 Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad FCSD REP Cooper Yes, that's right. Okay, rendezvous is not applicable . If there was one area that we were pretty well trained on, t hat was retrofi re. Yes. I think we were in good shape for retrofire . We had our checklist for a long time for pre-ret rofire and retrofire . We were in good shape , well-trained, and we went right through it like clockwork. I think this area we were sitting r i ght on top ot No problem at all . We were in good shape in SECO, too . We went through those SECO procedures in dandy shape. Got the numbers out of t he computer and had all of the se~uences and so forth and got that well down in the GMS . On rendezvous, how do you feel abou t the GMS training? The procedures that we learned in the simulator were fine, but you just can't take away that out-the window simulation. When you add the out- the-window element to it , it's di fferent. It ' s easier when you kick the REP out a.hd there it is out t here visually you can do it fine. The training that we had up at McDonnell on that simulat or was just identical to flight. Didn't you feel like we were \cOMilOEMlt~
276 Conrad • almost in the McDonnell simulator when we got the REP out? Just exactly. That training that we did up there with the visual presentation was invaluable . A lot of people don't realize how time critical that whole REP maneuver was. We didn't realize it even when we ran it a t McDonnell. When we ran at McDonnell , we had a visual di splay and no outside encumberances and no other systems. We had a computer. Gordo had a ball and an out-the-window di splay, a reticle and a hand controlle:c-. I had a computer and an MDIU over there and t ·:iat was it. And we would sit there, shoot the breez,= , talk to the guys out the window and run that tb:i.ng. I don ' t think we became aware of how crit :i.cal it was until we came down to the Cape and got :m that first sim-net -sim . Then we had the ground honking on the horn. They wanted information. We had a spacecraft around us in the GMS , and theiy could throw in little cliches every once in a while, which t hey did . It turned out tha t we e~t little cliches in flight starting out. The one• thing that we spent an awful lot of hours on was the REP.
277 I'll tell you I wouldn ' t have given you a nickels chance if we didn ' t have up systems. We would have had to fallen back on one of those backup jobber doos . That would have been pure luck. Eut I wouldn't have made a mistake reading it. You are just reading the checklist. They were extremely complicated and long-winded. Now I guess they simplified this a lot in Spacecraft 6; we were up against the wall. We had to stop somewhere ; take it and work with it or we weren't going to get it done . They were still in the process or ironing out the procedures. We did more of an eva luation, although it was a learning process, but we were involved in the evaluati on stage , which was not the time for us to be doing this.
278 Conrad Let me just add one thing. My recommendation is tha t you are going to have to be extremely careful with the mission planning people becau:rn I saw what happened to us . Every f l ight is going to have a different rendezvous. Somebody is going to want to start changing s omething, or mickey•-mousing around. I think it is going to wind u:;, to be a crew responsibility and that a couple of mo,~ths before the f light they really put the axe to them to stop. vlhether it is the best way to do it or not , the more you do in rendezvous, the more complicated it is and the more time critical it is doing the maneuvers . The computer is a complex little gadget and can really f oul you up if you make one mistake. '3o , training wise I can 1 t emphasize running the mis3ion the way it is really going to run in real time. We haven't enough time to really get it down. Cooper Cut i t off at an early date , s o you ca1 adequately t rain on i t . I can't conceive that you could ever get the off-sets that we were using in some of our r etrofire training. Plus , I don ' t th~1k we are using the right torquing moments on our Rate Command system. The trainer doesn 1 t have anyw.~ere near the brute power that the actual RCS Rate CJmmand has .
279 It is a great deal of difference. Conrad Yes , it was a pretty tight system. This is probably a function of each individual syst em because I remember Jim mentioning the fact that it was so much sloppier in Rate Command RCS and there is a differ ence in the tolerance. But it sure wasn't apparent to us. Both the OAMS and RCS Rate Command systems were just as tight as they could be. Cooper Well, the OAMS Rate Command system definitely was tighter because you could come zapping around with it and the second you let go of the handle it stopped right there . Barn, it never even quivered , just held right there . Conrad Yes, we must have had an outstanding set of rate gyros. The RCS Rate Command there had a wider band. There was so much power and authority in the RCS Rate Command that it actually gave me a little bit of problem just hitting the point, getting lined up on it for retrofire . There was just so much authority you had trouble getting just small amounts of control force until you got used to it. There was so much power there , almost more power than you needed for fine contr ol . It would be interesting to simulate
280 similar contr ol torques on the GMS to Eee what kind of off - sets it would take before contr ol problems are encountered. I don ' t belj eve that you would actually set one of the rockeits off enough to bother you. Possibly, you could since it is not a straightline functi on. Cooper W e had had adequate amount of reentry ·;raining. If we ' d had a thousand hours more we would not have done anything differently than we did. Conrad The reent ry in the simul a tor and the roentry • in flight up to a point went right down the line , I would say to slightly after guidance initiate . Then, the ball angles were ~ xtremely steep in flight in comparison to the h·ainer. I would very much like to go back and ta«e a look at this on the t rainer while it is fresh in my mind. I always use the horizon for roll reference in addi tion to the r oll bug. The horizon di sappeared too soon on our reentry. W e were looking at all white on the ball there for a long t ime. Cooper W e pitched on up pretty good. Conrad Yes, we trimmed out at an awful high angle. The stagnation point on the spacecraft inc.icated we were
281 in the ball park with the previous spacecraft. Cooper It had to be traveling right because as long as you keep your rates zeroed it is going to trim to its proper trim point. I agree with you completely. It seemed to me as though we trimmed a lot nose higher much earlier in the reentry than we did in the simulator. You have less nose up above the horizon for a longer period of time in the simulator than you do in the actual case. Conrad That was the only thing that seemed different about the reentry. Cooper It didn't concern me because I knew we were damped and trimed out okay. Conrad Yes, I knew we were in good shape , but it was a sig nificant enough difference so as to be a glaring dif ference with the s i mulator. Cooper I don't know whether it actually was the case or not , but the reentry seemed to go much faster than it did on the simulator. Conrad From Guidance Initiate to 100 000 feet , it seemed to pass at considerable less a.mount of time than it does in the simulator . Cooper Yes , it sure seemed to me like it did. That is some thing I think we ought to have people check into to
282 see what the actual time difference ws.s. Maybe it was just us. Conrad They can ring that out real easy. W e can improve the reentry on the simulator a little bit, it's different in this respect. Cooper O kay, Crew Station. I have the same C)mment that I m ade after Mercury on that . I think t::lat it is just t oo bad that we can ' t have horizontal 3imulators be cause that is exactly the way you are :in orbit. You are not laying on your back, you are ~1 a horizontal configuration. If your simulator ran horizontal you would be standing just like you would be in orbit. Orientation is entirely different. Conrad I compliment the Gemini crew station on the layout of t he para.meters that are displayed to you. I feel that there are some other para.meters that I would like to have seen displayed in the spacecraft throughout the fl ight . As an example, I ha te to rely on the ground for radiator temperatures or have them call me to heat up a cooling loop. That type of thing is an onboard function. It is very nice that the ground monitors and takes care of you. The spacecraft was extremely well layed out , and as we thought in the simulator it turned out to be true in flight .
€0►◄ Ftf!JEMT 283 Cooper I think the simulator people down here did a great job getting the simulator up to our spacecraft configuration. Conrad Yes . Cooper When we came down here it was pretty close to oux flight configuration. Conrad Yes. Cooper Stowage wise, they had i t in pretty good shape. Conrad With particular reference with Apoll o , having w orked for 2 years in the Apollo cockpits , and having now flown a Gemini, and knowing that these t wo cockpi t s have been layed out as f ar as I'm concerned, with two different philo sophies , and I think this i& the right one.
14 . 2 LTV and DCPS Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad I can't really say how accurat e t hey uere because we had a nominal mission. I think that they were good training. I think a certain amoun t of that is very good, very essential . I think there again we have to be very careful not to over em phasize it. I don ' t believe we did in our case . J think we had just about the right amount , although I think there was a number of people who were concerned that we could have used maybe more DCPS . I'll say one thing about the DCPS hor izon. I thought that that worked out just almost the way it actually happened. (' Yes sir, I do to. I would l ike to- - Boy , that horizon came in the window just about the same t i me you saw - - I think that DCPS should really be utilized to ad vantage as far as this out-the- 'window reference . Just crank it just a l ittle beyond and do a little bit of work as far as out- the-window referencing and I think it will be an extreme help . I wonder i f we might not be able to do some help on platforrn aligning and this s ort of :3tuff. I woul d like to go back again and look at the DCPS .et◄ FteENTl,t(w •Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad 285 from now - having seen an alined platform. I really was quite surpr ised at what 0-0-0 looked like. It wasn I t anything like what I imagined it was going i, to l ook l ike . I think we were both surprised when we got up there and got the platform alined and really looked at 0-0-0, that it looked the way it did. And you are also banked . Yes . You are banked right and I'm banked left. Yes . 14 . 3 MAC Engineering Simulator Cooper Okay. The MAC Engineering Simulator . Conrad I can't say enough for that half a day we spent on launches reading out Math Flow 6, on the computer. Cooper That's right. And the reentries . .. • Conrad That•s the most worthwhile half a day I spent as far as my side of the spacecraft went . Cooper The reentries I thought we did at MAC Engineering Simulator were just exactly' like the reentry we did . I think it was real good . I think, of course, the rendezvous we did up there .we tave al ready mentioned, I thought were probably one of the best things we did .
286 • 14.4 Centrifuge Conrad W e didn ' t miss the centrifuge at al l. The fact that we didn't go , I didn ' t feel that I wae1 left out of anything. Cooper No, I don't think we missed a thing w i th the centri fuge. Conrad I think you should ride it, you know, a time or two or something like that. Cooper I think if nobody has ever ridden cen·;rifuge- - Conrad • . ..boost profile or reentry profile :.s worth running a coupl e of nominals in your shirt s l eeves. I don't think you need instruments or anything, but- - Cooper I think if no one has ever ridden one before I think it is worthwhile they ride the centri::uge just to get the fee l of what it is like. But, so far as-- you never even feel those g's . You don't even know you'.ve got g's. You are so busy doing thing1 3 and you 're just "clickt y-cli ckty-cl ick." You don 't notice them at all . And that l evel of g is not en ough to even worry about. 14. 5 Translation and Docking Trainer Conrad The tracking tests that we did on the Agena, you know, for the camera, was real good. I diQ1 1 t do the one up in Denver but the one in the Agena was real good, up to, and of course we woul d onl y get up as far as @@++FtDE~+.11":
Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad 287 the nadir, but I think it wa.s helpful and I think f l ight proved the same thing that we concluded in this , that it wa.s a. very simpl e task , once you ha.d acquired something.. . . . . the track. Once you ha.d acquired something, yes . The one thing that I, to this day gave me the funniest sensations though , is when you track through the nadir and the things started to speed up and reverse I get the weirdest sensation that we passed the nadir and got a.bout 30° going behind us . I almost had myself reversed in flight, like I wa.s coming up on it again . Now, I can ' t explain the feeling but it was weird. It's a real odd optical i llusion where you a.re like you are in an inverted spin-type situation. You a.re looking--going back over here and the angle out is changing such that you al most do have the feeling that it's - that you have suddenly s tarted changing your whole angle... . And if you're looking a.t the nadir, and you're track ing through in just one axis , pitch or something like that, invariably you're off a. l ittl e bit in yaw, you see, and you' ll get going, all of a sudden it will start speeding up , and if there is any roll in there a.t a.11; all of a sudden the roll will pick up ,
288 I Cooper 14.6 Planetarium Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper • so all of a sudden this target which has been going this _ way and getiing a little bit sm aller al l of a sudden the whole world will start t o roll on you too as you are gcing away. had the feeling that I was falling over a cliff every time we got back to the end of that thing. It was pretty weird. W ell, here again, I just can't emphasize enough I t hink that a lot of people under play the val ue of the planetarium. I think Pete even agrees with me now that boy, that doggone planetariUIIJ is pretty e ssential training, Yes , i t felt ... . pretty good. The planetarium, unfortunately, is an item in your t raining program that is very easy to cut out. You say well I don't really know that, I can take along a star chart and I can recognize these, and we all t end t o do that. W e all tend to try and fall into t hat. I tell you, we would never have gotten Nye 1 s Zodiacal light done without having gone up there at the .. . and taken his displ ay on it. Oh, yes. If we hadn't gone up there a ~d actually gone through it we would never had don= it. 'CONFt&li►44 ~ /ttl
289 Conrad And with the gun site superimposed, excuse me, reticle superimposed on it. Put it right there to orient it with the Southern Cross and Grus and Fomalhaut we would have never gotten that experiment done , without having gone through that really that half a day did it for that experiment. Cooper Yes . That salvaged the experiment . Of course he will probably ruin the film anyway , The celestial identification up there t I think one thing that I recommend that we are going to have to crank up the brightness of the stars because we have had them cranked down to the Mercury level here all this time and it's just too confusing when you get up there you see so many more stars than you did in Mercury , I so we are going to have to raise the level, brightness level of it back up. Up for the training that we do because there were multitudes more stars than we had been trainL~g on. Conrad The stars move around in orbit too fast to use them for spacecraft orientation, as far as I was concerned. In other words I might recognize a constellation out there, The Southern Cross or Orion or something like tha t , but unless you know your exact point of time and have a star chart sitting m front of you
290 and even with a star chart sitting in front of you it wouldn't help you with spacecraft orientation. I take it tha t what you are saying. Do I know what I am in roll, pitch and yaw to the horizon, or something like that. I don't think so, because most of that stuff is moving too fast up there. Cooper Well , so far as it's yaw orientation :.t gives you relatively good angle. For instance you always know if you swing around just one lit·;le You remember when we would swing around and there was Cassiopeia, you knew that you were hended generally north. Conrad Well , yes that 's true. You knew that you were on one side of the tra ck or the other. n Cooper Pleides and the ... whenever you would see the Pleides, it always points east, so thnt gives you a clue and there are several pretty good clues and I always lmow when I see Delphinus that the Summer Triangle is near by. Conrad You're right, it would tell me where H was pointed but it w ouldn't have told me anything in roll. In othe.r words I wouldn I t say that I would use it completely for a three axis spacecraft orientation . It might give me an idea of which way the sky was
291 -IM Cooper Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper pointing but that wouldn't tell me whether I was upside down or right side up or anything , but I don't know the stars that well. With the accurate star chart updated and then finding the stars on there , then you could use them for spacecraft orientation. I'm taking this to mean you are talking about a quick orientation, you know, I aborted in the middle of the night on launch if I went on a night launch, would I know which way I was going? I don't think so . I don't know. You would be very lucky, you would just have to see one you could recognize . You can take your time when you are planning in advance. Okay. Now you want to use Orion to line up in a certain way with my reticle. Now that's a different story, but that would have to be done at a specific time because Orion moves all the way through the sky and it turns over on a 72 degree launch azimuth. W ell , tracking task. We didn ' t cover that but I think it is pr etty obvious that you can use it for tracking task we found . •
292 @OfictFtDEf~TIAP • Conrad Oh yes . Cooper Spacecraft orientation. I agree, you need a little help on that . It would be a help ~o find a horizon, but you could get pitch and yaw on it md then m aybe use the stars as a yaw orientat i on. 14,7 Syst ems Briefing Conrad Well , boy I can't say enough for the t;rpe we got at M cDonnell - were relatively different in nature and the type w e got down here but I can' t :,ay enough for both of them because they are both essential. I'll t ell you old Bob Snyder's one remark about that cryo stuff being abl e to go through that heat exchanger as a liq_uid and not bother anything w ould . . . I I just can ' t say enough for how that took the load off of our minds when we were up there . Cooper Yes, I think the - - Conrad A lot of little tidbits that we had out of these, specifically the gu:ys here a t the Ca.Pe, Cooper - I would sar that the content that we hE\d at the sys t ems briefing was excellent. I would say the number we had schedul ed, I would consic.er the absolute m inimum. I t hink that you should have at an early date some very thorough,extensive syste·ms briefings at a later date , closer to the flight some Pllit8E~~lhhlt and then
293 14 . 8 Flight Experiments Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper additional, maybe shorter , brush-ups on it . I think the people who have done , the McDonnell people and some of our own people and some of the McDonnell people and up at McDonnell is the w ay to do it . I think, I want the people to really !mow the systems, to use the systems briefing. I don't think they can be over emphasized, they're really necessary. Simulations. Well , we can rule out Denver because we didn't go there, and MAC, I ' ll never consider ever flying a flight without a horizontal seater on all the gear . Wait a minute now , we are in flight experiments. This is training. We got simulation, GMS , Translation and Docking and at Denver . This is all backwards because we didn't go to Denver. Oh, okay , simulation. Well , okay GMS, on flight experiments .. . . we really didn't do an awful lot of flight experiments in the GMS. No , the only thing we used the GMS f or down here was a final stowage revue when we got all changed around. We used it for the REP of course. A brush through on the REP. Conrad We never rigged. I take it back we did rig. We
294 went so far as working out the REP that the D-2 camera wanted to pull it out at real t ime but we never put it in the window. W e riggecl a 16 mm. Yes, we did use the GMS for all the things that were concerned with the REP which had to do with many stowed items, experiment items . Cooper Okay. Translation and docking t raine,~s . Let me just say this as far as the simulations on flight experiments. I really think you can use a mock- up to greater advantage and most experimnnts than you can the GMS . Conrad Yes. I think you are right. Cooper I think you are tyi:: g up the GMS in mnny cases over things that you don ' t need to tie it up for . Translation and docking trainer. I would like to have had maybe a little more time in it al though I think we got 99 per cent of what we needed t o get. Conrad Yes , the afternoon I spent in it was worthwhile, running the D - 6 camera eq_uipment, takj_ng some pictures and tracking them. All put ·;ogerther the GMS and the tracking thing and thn horizontal SEDR up at MAC ended up to good familiarity with the experiments equipment . 14.9 Spacecraft System Tests Cooper Okay, and at MAC we didn ' t really run 1 as you say, -.i @el>,,FID ~►~T Jl\t
295 t he horizontal SEDR was - around the spacecraft - was really the only flight experiments thing that we did on it up there . Let's see, flight experiments. Briefings . Well , I think some of the experiments, some were better than others . Some were lousy and generally the ones that got there in politically where the lousiest, or they didn I t bother to show up . I think this is s omething that should be very carefully controlled by the experiments board. If the experiment is going to be chosen the people who are the experiment ers should be forced to come in and give you a good briefing on these, everything ahllt them , or other wise they ought to be thr own off. Equipment - - now this is along the same line -- I think that you need desperately to observe freeze dates for the operation and availability of the experiments. Equipment for the experiments, if it isn't available i t ought to be thrown off the flight. I think that s omebody s omewhere along the line ought to back this . M aybe it has to go t o the LBJ level or something , I don ' t know. Spacecraft systems t est . .. . I personaliy am not very impressed with the multipl e
296 Conrad Cooper 14.10 Egress Training parallel testing. I don ' t feel that the crew really gets an awful lot out of, out of the spacecraft systems tests anymore because there are so many tests going on at the same time that you can't really keep a handle on what's going o:n and really get much of a feel for what's going on. You evolve t o an automated- type thing of calling three scripts at the same time and throwing switches and listening t o quite a complex thing going on. I think that a few of the systems tests that still go on such as the ECS test and the altitude chamber type thing are still well worthwhile, but I think that the parallel method of testing has decreased the val ue of the spacecraft systems test to the crew by great extent . There's no doubt about it, though, in l>eing present you keep them honest on many occasions. W ell , that 1 s right. On the--it is good in that re spect , but as far as the training point of view it does give you some certain familiarity with the sys tems too , but I was just pointing out i:hat it was decreased over what it used to be. I really thought our egress training wa.s well wort h while- - •
297 Conrad Boy, I do too. Cooper I think that was a good exercise- Conrad It was wel l organized- - Cooper I thought it was well organized and well run and just very well done and I felt like it gave us a great confidence in the water situation. Conrad I felt real good when we hit the water. Cooper Yes, I don't think there was a qualm in our mind at all when we hit the water that we were right on top of the situation--just no problem. In fact , I didn't even bother listening for l eaks . Conrad Yes . 14 , 11 Parachute Training Cooper Parachute training. As far as I'm concerned I think if you've had any--I don ' t feel that I missed parachute training at all . I personally think that . 1 s one you could just delete. I think sometime, some where al ong when people come in to the program, they need parachute famil iarity and parachute train ing. Of course, I ' m of the banned school and I believe very strongl y that we should have actual parachute jump training. Conrad I do, too . Cooper If people think this is too dangerous for this
298 .. unhazardous occupation. .. 14 . 12 Launch Simulati on Cooper Launch simulation, I thought they were very worth while and I think launch sims that we :~ave with the whol e, with MCC tied in, are extremely worthwhile. 14. 13 Network Simul at i on Cooper I think net sims are worthwhi l e . 14 . 14 Reentry Simulat ions Cooper I think the reentry sims we had were ~1valuable. In fact, I would sort of l iked to have had a few more reentry sims. Conrad Yes. 14 , 15 Simul ated Network Simul ations Cooper Sims, net sims. I thought were- Conrad They were invaluable on the REP. Cooper They were good for the REP, Conrad I think we got something out of the l aunch sims , too, a l though that exercise is more fo:~ on the ground , Cooper Yes, the launch sims had diminishing r1~turns--i t took us a l ong time to cover the grouncl that we shoul d have covered, Conrad I think it stayed with the crew and wao worthwhile just to get you pl ugged in to the neg ngain and get to hear some of the thing'f! you ' re going to actually ~• Ptf;)tNTfrA.Le .
299 hear over the net . . . the reentry sims are more im portant ...because it~s a more coordinated effort between you and the ground , and I'm convinced that for any rendezvous situations that some net sims have to be--be run... 14. 16 Zero "G" Flights Cooper Yes , well , okay, zero g flights, ... I ' m not real ly sure just what value you get out of zero g f l ights. Conrad Wel l , I l earned one thing, it was the only oppor tunity that I had before the flight to get--even though it was a bunny suit at the time , a pressure suit up there in zero g and get some idea-- opening and cl osing it which we did many times in the flight and so forth ...And I think we both learned a little something there. I would say now I've done zero g in the airplanes and I ' ve done it in the spacecraft~ and if I f l y again I certainly don't need to go back and do any zero g work again. Cooper I really- - Conrad As far as Gemini is concerned. Cooper I reall y didn't- - FCSD Rep Conrad Oh , Oh, well that ' s a different story, yes . Wel l, we did do EVA's ...but if I was going to do something €0PltFt018'fTl!Ar
300 "EVA again, yes,- - Cooper Yes , I think this zero g airplane plane is well worthwhile for a specific mission, especially mis sion training. But so far, as just in general .. . I don ' t bel ieve it's particularly worthwhile. Well , it is worthwhile like Pete said, that if a man hasn't ever made a f l ight before a~d never ex perienced zero g, certainl y good to f~niliarize him. Conrad Yes, I agree with you on EVA . 14.17 Flight Plan Training Cooper O kay, f l ight plan training. Well , we never did really have much time to do any real f1ight plan t raining, other than- - Conrad Yes, the onl y thing that we were invol'red in really was the REP and how it was going to go , We l et J erry Jones l ay out the rest of it without us really putting much effort into it. There rnally wasn ' t a heck of a l ot we coul d do along that line.. . Cooper And I think for long missions this rea:.-time thing is going to go, is going to have to go on, many changes to be made so I ' m not sure that the over..-all mission needs training.. . I think maybe you might just run spot portions of it on the time-critical of course- -
301 Conrad FCSD Rep Conrad , I What do you mean by operational check, you were talking about system checks; in flight? Yes, flight plan training. . . Operation checks. Thruster ill umination . Well, I don't have much feel for that one way or another other than what I said earlier this morning-- yes, I think I don't know why it's as plain as the nose on my face but I think we l eaped off the wrong assumption--that everything was going to run right without checki ng and I think that we shoul d flight plan up the first orbit now with more checks in it. That was a very poor assumption on this part , the more I even think about it , because it was a perfectly likel y situation to have some part of those three systems to be not working right , and it would have been a simpl e matter to have gone to the secondary scanners and el imina ting the problem at the very beginning that we had , but we weren't smart enough to know that . W e are now .
302 15 . 1 Crew Quarters Cooper 15 . 0 CONCLUDING REMARKS One comment on the crew area here . I think that the crew area here is a real good place to stay and that the kitchen facility we have set up i ~ : very worth while , when a real tight schedule is almost a neces s i ty . However , the bedrooms are not ~ :oundproof at all. You can hear anything throughout the whole thing. Any noise at all that goes on, or a tele vision or radio playing anywhere thr01:.ghout the whole thing is very easily heard throughout the ent i re build ing. I say this only because this was one of t he suggestions that we had before t he place was ever build , that the bedrooms be soundproofed . This was based on our old Hangar S experiences . Due to the fact that heavy construction is going on all the time , this place is completely useless so far as daytime sleepi ng. There is no possibility of sleep around here during the day due to the jackhammers and construction work goi ng on . So , if any shift work is going on , I recommend that someone keep them a motel room, and sleep during the day at the motel room if you are worki ng night shifts around here and
303 trying t o sleep duri ng the day and run any kind of night tes t s . So far as the people that we had with us that run the pl ace - - I think the place is very adequately run . I think one person her e who certainly deserves bouquets is the maid, Joyce , who just can ' t do enough for keeping all the laundr y done . She keeps the pl~ce , I think , very, very satisfactorily clean and squared away. Pete , do you have anyi;hing to add? Conrad Well , I didn ' t hear all of what you said , but I really / t hought the crew quarters were a great save f or us . I agree with all the thi ngs about the noises and everything, with all the construction going on now. I t 's kind of hard . I do thi nk that there is one thing that I ' m goi ng to have to go on record as saying we missed in our training, and there ' s no doubt about about it . W e were so pressed that we didn ' t have enough time f or adequate physical training. 15 . 2 Physical Training and Aircraft Flying Cooper There were t wo things ; we had inadequate physical training, arid I think we were somewhat short . on air - plane flight time . I would have liked to have had a f ew more days to be able -- when we were do,m here on our last period of time -- to got out and just fly ~MMU.L
304 Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper 15. 3 Sea Lab FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper Conrad Cooper local. I flew l ocal once the whole time I was down here . Yes , I don ' t think I f lew local at al l . No , that ' s right . And I thi nk , her e agai n , we were caught in the middle of a bad scheduling situati on, which higher level woul d not allow us to do anythin 1 5 about . But , I think we di d the best we could with t he short amount of time we had . I personall y f ,~el that we wer e extremely short on recreational time ru1d on flying time . We were pretty hard pushed there and on physical conditioning time . Did you all ever get to tal k to Scott Jarpenter? Yes. Yes. The l ast day, the second orbit before ·,;e were at r etro. Yes, just before retro. 15.4 Watches and Cl ocks FCSD Red Do you want to say anythi ng about watches and clocks? Conrad I think Gordo mentioned his Acutron stayed within 4 seconds during the whole flight and we only set it twice .
305 Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper Conrad My clock you talking about? It was the one- - My own personal Acutron I never reset and it was some 15 seconds off at the end of the flight for the whole 8-day period . The Acutron on the panel , the panel mounted Acutron, was--I changed it about 4 seconds . It ran 4 seconds f ast t he entire flight . The Omega that I wore was some 2 minutes off the first day and the second day was another l minute and some odd off, at whi ch time I jus t quit winding / it . I quit winding it about the third day and never even bothered using it again . The stop watch that I was--that I took along--at the end of the third day was still only about 2 to 3 seconds off. It actually was quite good and I just didn ' t have occasion to use one and let i t run on down. And then I cranked it up for reentry and started two minutes after retrofire . Your clock over there ran reasonably accuratel y your little 8 day clock over there , didn ' t i t? Eight day clock ran real well. I kept it on G MT- - the two big wrist watches I carried, I carried mainly for the REP maneuver and didn't use them too much. I did use them to count down to retrofire and my Glycene ~E~TIAcbs
306 watch here I kept on G.m. t . 15.5 Miscellaneous Discrepancies Cooper FCSD Rep Cooper OK , I have a little list of discrepanc:.es -ti~ that I might just include here. These are discrepancies that I noted during the flight and somn of them have been noted bef ore , but I might juHt hit them real briefly. Just to make sure we have all of them. 1. We lost the stage 2 IPS fuel gage shortly after launch. 2. We encountered this POGO effect at 2 minutes and 6 seconds. 3. We lost communications near SECO on UHF No . 1. many of these have already been explained why, but I just--1 1 11 get these down. 4. We lC>st fuel cell o 2 tank heaters. 5. The M..:1 experimer..t pooped out and also I thought it was objectionably noisy. 6. The gray interior paint flecks off of the guard bars and off several areas of the cockpit areas and • floats and flecks around on the inside. 7. The platform mode was no good for t he burm, and was not holding the spacecraft as it should. Let me ask one question. Did you ever try that platform control mode on the RCS system? No , I didn't. Sure didn't. I wish I l:.ad , I just- I guess I had just given it up at that point and just didn I t get around to it . I should. have. The
Conrad platform mode should work very well. There's no reason why it shouldn't work very well and I just can't help but believe it was probably in the OAMS system. 8. I would strongly recommend unsnapable legs on a harness like a regular aircraft parachute harness with adjustable buckle-snap combination things rather than the custom made harness that we have. I think they would be much more usuable for flight. 9 , The cabin temperature gage failed- - came back in the fifth day for one day and then went back out again. 10 . We did not use the polaroid window covers for launch so we don't know how they will evaluate holding on for launch. However, they worked out extreme~y well for flight. 11. Rest cycles are not observed. Too many little things keep getting thrown in that require two people. 12 . The PC0 2 gage was very irratic. It kept coming up and indicating PC0 2 up around 1 mm and it did that for a while and then ba ck down. And, 13. Tape recorder quit some time during the fifth day. That's about it. We had a couple here--l et ' s see , di d w e get the thing about cabin lights getting hot? And melting paint? Cooper The -l~iugh ! hey will burn your
308 hands and in particular the bright overhead one is very hot . Conrad One other--let ' s see, we talked about the purge switches being 3- positioned rather than spring l oaded . And one other thing we noticed , one systems glitch which seemed to affect either scanner-- out over the Pacific a couple of times we passed some really, really, really big areas of cload cover- , I mean we were almost--the whole visible sky or ground was covered with clouds or a good portion of it and this seemed to give the scanners fits. Cooper These same cloud.a were that big cloud t hat had all the lightning in it too--later on we- - Conrad Well , it may have been . I didn ' t make n.ny correla tion that way, but I, in the daytime , I noticed that the scanners had quite a hard time doiner their job when they were looking at much horizon covered by clouds . Got very irratic . I think that ' s a known phenomena--with scanners , anyhow, but I just wanted to mention that they did kind of kick up when there were a lot of clouds a.round . We talked about the right auxiliary light bulb bug thing breaking off. And I have one question, There was one place in the world where we 0 ased at:!Ct a great deal of rCOW:t EblTlit
Cooper FCSD Rep Conrad FCSD Rep Conrad Cooper Conrad 309 gigantic fires on the ground and just out of curiosity I want to know where we were--and it happened on the sixth day at 01 hours 02 minutes and 15 seconds so maybe we'll be able to find out where we were. That's all I got, Gordo, how about you , anything more? No. Oh, I got-- Pete, you mentioned. you blew that oxygen- Blew the OAMS squib--could not hear it blow. Had no way of telling that it really worked. You can ' t pulse a regulator up and I did and it works just like it does in the trainer . It gives it a blip, you know, and you got to keep blipping it up. And I built it up to about 325 from about 300 just to see if it would do it and it did. So the system worked OK. But I still don 1 t know that the squib was blown--you know you pulse, anyhow. Well, other than looking. Yeah. Well, I thought the squib was in the adapter. No way of telling, I don't think. I f they are lucky they. might have--( laughter) Well, they found a booster-- they might find the adapter.
. 310 "8Nf tDE~◄ Tt~H? 15.6 Medical Aspects Cooper I agree completely that the crew area.::iere should be i solated from the medics. I don ' t feel that the medical department should have anythini? whatsoever to do with crew quarters; otherwise, I thi nk the crew should j ust go right ahead and live up to flight day in a motel or somewhere else, because I have a very strong feeling t hat the medical deparu~ent is trying to make a clinic out of this place up here. I think the crew area should be held completely devoid of medics . I don't think they should have anything to do with the running of the crew quarters . I think the crew should establish its own procedurns of whether they're going to have low residue dietB , or . whether they're not going to have low residue diets , based upon recommendations from previous crews , fJ~om previous flight experiences along the way, and what everyone who has worked with it has passed on. We hope we can get all this information gathered up ir, a form that each crew coming along can be given a c.ondensation perhaps of all the previous crew ' s comments on things of this type , such as diets, methods of defecation and urination,
311 € O~◄ P'I0E~~TIAL • urination systems. drinking water systems . and pre flight set- up type things . As far as the medical-~ I'd like to hit that specifically. 5
312 We ·1a.ndeij on• t~e\ ree.Trier at ' ·" - mid- morning, carrier time , and we acconplished not one bit of debriefing or operational work throughout that day at all. We went to bed that night without ever having done one bit of our own de1iriefi ng of any kind, whatsoever. The entire day was npent with the medical community. I don't know that we lost anything there , particularly, but I st:.ll thi nk there are a lot of things you could sit down and start t aping that would be a lot fresher i n ;irour mind. Although, I think with two people on the flight , you tend to jog one another enough that yon don ' t forget ( . about things you might when one person has been on a flight. Now, so far a.s +,ne preflight nedical aspects, I still have some very strenous object:.ons to it and comments to make . I think that T- 2 day s physical - giving t hit extensive a physical at that period of time i s kind of ridiculous. I think you really drag a guy throught the hoops there just 2 clays before his flight and completely grind him down on a very, very extensive physical that I don ' t agree with the medics as being necessary. And I don ' t agree with all the blood- letting that was involved in thin. I think that al l t he number of i njections and sticko and reinser tions of isotopic bl ood and everything was completely M).taiFtDE►,TtM •
313 unnecessary, and , again, was just a m atter of r e search rather than anything else .
/ i