NASA-UAP-D017, Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part II, 1965

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PRELIMINARY
GT-4 FLIGHT CREW DEBRIEFING TRANSCRIPT
PART II

Prepared By
Spacecraft Operations Branch
Flight Crew Support Division
June 18 , 1965

This material contains information affecting the
national defense of the United States within the
meaning of the Espionage Laws , Title 18. U. S. c.
Section 793 and 794 , the transmission or revelation of which in any manner to an unauthorized
person is prohibited by law.

I

Group 4:

Downgrade at 3 year intervals
Declassified after 12 years

NOTICE: This document may be exempt from
public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. 552). Requests for its release to persons outside the U.S. Government
should be handled under the provisions of
NASA Policy Direct:ve 1382.2.

•

•

I

PREFACE
This preliminary transcript was made from voice tape -recording3
of the GT-4 flight crew debriefing conducted aboard the recovery ship,
the USS Wasp, on June~' 1965, and concluded at the Manned Spacecraft
Center on June 12, 1965.
Although all the material contained in this transcript has been
edited , the urgent need for the preliminary transcript by mission
analysis personnel precluded a thorough editorial review prior to its
publication.

Errors in this transcript will be corrected as soon as

possible and an official transcript will be published at a later date.
Thia document contains a transcript of the second part of the
total debriefing.

A preliminary transcript of the first part was

published on June 16 , 1965 , and it contains the crew ' s description
of the mission from an operational standpoint.

itit 4Fl8E!I ◄ • I Jlt'&'
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Paragraph

Page number

8 . 0 SYSTEMS OPERATION
8. 1

Pla tfo:r,n ................................................ . 1

8. 2
8. 3

O..AMS ....... ............ .........• ...... ...............• . 5
RCS ................................................ , ... 17

8 .4
8.5
8. 6

CoDlDlunications ........................................ . 68

8.7
8.8
8.9

9.0

Environmental Control System •••·················••••···22

Electrical System ...................................... 82
Computer ............................................... 87
Crew Station .......................................... . 93
Bio-Medicat ........................................... 134

OPERATIONAL CHEDKS
9 . 1 Apollo Landmark Identification (D- 6) .................. 144
9 . 2 Apollo Yaw Orientation •••·•··•·•••·•··••·•••···•·•·•••168
9 . 3 One Attitude Thruster Fai l ure Check ... ......... ....... 171
9.4 Horizon Scanner Track Check •·•••·•• ••·• · •• · •••• ·•·•••• 172
9. 5 Horizon Scanner Check ....................... ...... ~ ... 173
9 . 6 HF Transmission Reception Check ....................... 181
9·. 7 Orbit Navigation Check ................................ 182
9.8 Rela tive Humidity Test ................................ 185
9.9
Zodiacal Light Check .................................. 186

10.0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS
10.1

Cotllltdo\.lll .................•.•........................ . 188

10. 2
10 . 3
10 .4

Powered Flight . ................... ..... ..... ... ... . .. . 188
Orbital Flight . ............................... ........ 191
Reentry .................... . ......................... . 213

11 . 0 EXPERIMENTS
11 . 1 Two-Color Earth-Limb Photography (MSC-10) ............. 217
11 . 2 Synoptic Terrain and Weather Photography (S- 5 and S- 6) . 219
11. 3 Simple Navigation with t he Sextant .... ......... ....... 219
11.4 Electrostatic Charge (MSC- 1) .. .. ......... .....·........ 229
11.5 Proton- Electron Spectrometer and Tri-Axis Flus-Ga.te
Magnetometer (MSC- 2 and MSC-3) ........................ 229
11 . 6 Radiation ( D-8) ........... ... ......................... 230
11 . 7 Inflight Exerciser (M-3) . ........ .. . . .. ... ... ......... 230
11 .8
Inflight Phonocardiogram (M-4) . . ...................... 232
11 . 9 Extravehicular Activity . ... ... ...... .. .......... ...... 232
11 . 10 Miscellaneous ................. . ....................... 232

12 . 0 PRE-MISSION PLANNING
12.1
Mi ssion Plan ( Trajectory) ....... .......... ...... .. .... 234
Flight Plan ..................... ... .. .. ............... 234
12 . 2
12 . 3
Spac ecraft Changes ............. ... . . .................. 239
Mission Rule s ........... ..... ... . ....... . . . .... . ...... 240
12 . 4
12. 5
Experiments ........................................... 241
Training Activities ................. .... . . ............ 24 5
12 . 6
13. 0 MISSION CONTROL
13.1
GO/NO GO ' s ............. .. .............. .... ........... 249
PLA and CLA Updates ...................... . ............ 249
13 . 2
13. 3
Consumable s ............... ... ............... .. ........ 249
Flight Plan Changes ....................... .. .......... 250
13.4
13. 5
Systems ............................................... 254
14 .0 TRAINING

14 .1

Gemini Mission Simulator ..... . . .. ................ .. .. . 255

14. 2
14.3
14 .4
14. 5
14. 6
14. 7
14 . 8
14 . 9
14. 10
14 . 11
14 .1 2
14. 13
14. 14

LTV Simulation .................. . ...... . ........ .... .. 260
Centrifuge ...................... .. .......... . ... ...... 261
Translation and Docking Trainer ...... .. ............ ... 262
Planetarium ..................................... .. . ... 26 3
Systems Briefings ................................ .. ... 266
Flight Expe rimen ts ............ ... .............. ... .... 267
Spacec raft Sys t ems Te s t .. . ...... ... ... . . .. .... ... .. ... 273
Egress Training ........................ .. ..... : .... . .. 274
Parachute Training ................... . . ... ............ 275
Launch Simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .............. . 276
Network Simulation . .... . ............ . . .. . . . . . . . . . ..... 277
Zero "G" Flight ........ . .......... ... . .. . .. . ... . ...... 278
Flight Plan Traini ng .................... . ............. 279

8.0 SYSTEMS OPERATION
8. 1 Platform
McDivitt

Actually , the first portion of any alinement is
to cage the thing.

The case of caging the thing

is much more important than the alinement itself.

In the daytime I felt that I could cage the platform to a reference with an error plus or minus
about 3 or 4 degrees in all axes .

Did you think

we could do that wel l?
White

Only in the daytime.

McDivitt

The yaw was a little problem.

It took longer

to get it, but if you kept after it for awhil e ,
I felt that you could get down to just a few
degrees.
White

Within a couple of degrees .

McDivitt

The big thing is that you have to stop your yaw
rates, and then sit there and look outside for
awhile and see which way you're going, straight
ahead or sideways .

If you are going sideways

you rotate around for awhil e and stop the rate
and then look out a gain.

Ri ght?

get the thing ca ged quite well.

I felt you could
We. didn ' t do it

BEF at all, did we? We never did cage in BEF.

--,

2

White

I ' m not sure.

McDivitt

The caging of the thing with small- end-forward in
the daytime was r elative ly easy .

At night I don't

think it would be quite tha t simple .

I think what

you would have to do at night time is to point
the spacecraft down at the ground pretty much so
you can see the track ac ross the ground,

I could

see which way the land was moving under me .

I

felt--although I never did this --that if I could
do that and then roll around to where I had no
bank angl e , and fac e in my yaw directi on, either
small-end or blunt-end- forward , stop t he ro l l t her e
and pitch up to the horizon I could cage there
withi n plus or minus 10 degrees for sure .

It was

much less accurate at night, I fe lt, than in the
daytime .
White

You aren' t kidding!

We both felt that on those

dark nights when you really couldn ' t see anything
on the ground, pure star reference for yaw was
pretty rough .
McDivitt

Pure s tar reference for yaw was almost impossible
to use.

That was the only place where that thing

we decided not to take with us--the view of the
stars through the window--might have been of some

3

use to us.

We knew the stars along our track but

you couldn't see enough of them.

The quickest

way to get the yaw reference was to look down at
the ground.

Once we got the platform caged, aline­

ment was quite simple .

All you had to do was just

hold the needles at zero and the platform alined
itself.
on ,

Of course you had to have the scanners

The modes--the SEF and the EEF wer e identically

the same except the spacecraft is pointing in

different directions . You tended to null the
needles by using pulses and just hold the needles
very close to null and the platform alined itself
through the horizon scanners .

Orbit Rate was a

satisfactory mode, I thought.

As a matter of fact,

it was very good.
White

I liked that Orbit Rate,

McDivitt

Yes, because we finally had a reference where we
didn't have to look out and s ee the ground .

It 's

like having the old altitude indicator back in an
airplane .

The only thing was, we had the wrong

orbit rate in the spacecraft because it was s e t
for an orbit rate t hat was to take care of, I
think, a 60 nautical mile circular orbit.

This

was to take care of the short period of time between

~~ SQ -lii4Q"itsll-lM.- .

4
going to Orbit Rate at T- 5 and firing the retros
at TR.

We wanted to have exactly the right rate

in there so when we did our closed-loop reentry
we wouldn ' t have an error.

As I said , I had the

most accurate platform in the world with nothing
to do with it .

I think the displays were adequate

and the controls were adequate .

After t he first

couple of revs I really didn ' t have any confidence
at all in the platform.

I had done nothing to

establish any confidence in it .

I really didn't

get the chance to get the thing alined, and I
real ly didn ' t have the view out the window to check
it with.

We were hurrying and scurring through

there .

We finally shut the thing down before I

really got a chance to use it very much .

When we

powered it up there on the third day and we saw
that thing coming around there• -and cage properly,
we compared the out- the- window attitudes and that
old a ttitude reference was right there.

That's

when I got some confidence in the platform.
White

This is where we lost a couple of bets .

McDivitt

That ' s right .
platform .

We lost a couple of beers on that

At retrofire

I had a lot of confidence

in the platform , but the first two and a half to

5

three days I really didn't have anything with
which to establish any confidence.

It was just

an unknown.
White

Jim did the majority of the work in this area and

I think his comments reflect my opinion also .
8.2

OAMS
McDivitt

On the pad we did the thruster check that we
wanted to.

We went around one whole cycle and

got nothing.

We went around another whole cycle

and got nothing until we got to the l ast one.
We were going yaw left pitch-down, yaw right
pitch-up, yaw left pitch- down, yaw right pitchup .

When we got to that second pitch-up, I heard

the thrusters fire for the first time . ·
White

You can hear them.

McDivitt

That's right.

It was very distinct.

And then we went around and yawed

left and they fired again.

We -waited 20 seconds

and fired a yaw left again, and they fired again .
These were the bottom manifold jets.

We said,

"Okay, we're ready to go.", and that was the end
of it.

So, it -was a pretty straightforward check.

The inflight checks--I got my operational checks
on the OAMS systems while chasing the booster
around.

I had Direct, Pulse, and Rate Command in

Le !~FllffiPMxMii t a

J

6

there as I chased it around, and those were the
only modes I intended to use right then .

Later

on, I checked out the Reentry Rate Command and I
checked the Rate Command before we thrusted .
did seem to be operating fine .

It

Why don ' t you go

through the next part , Eli?
White

All right .

We 're going to get into the source

temperature and pressure , the regulated pressure ,
and the prope llant quantity .

temperature first .

Let ' s take the

The temperature of our OAMS

was 75 degrees all the way down the line .

The

i nit ial indications on the pressures were approximately 2800 psi for the source and 320 psi for the
regulated pressure .
McDivitt

The quantity gage operated all right except that,
as I mentioned earlier , the thing seemed to wander
up and down somewhere between 2 and 4 percent ,
depending upon where you were in the mission .
You ' d read it one time and it would be 60, and
you'd read it a little while later and it would
be 62, and you 'd r ead it a little while l ater and
it 'd be back about 60 .

The greatest variation in

that thing that ever occurred was when I went to
sleep one time with it reading 60 and woke up and

7
it was reading 56.

Another hour or two after that

it had climbed slowly back up to 60 again.

I

had a long time to look at it in the same position.
When we ended the cha.sing-around at the end of the
first hour, we were down to 70 percent indicated
and we never got below 50 percent in four days.
White

I'll tell you, the position it seemed to stay
for days and days was 59 to 60 percent.

We fired

in Pulse Mode for a long time with the gage at
that position, and all of a sudden that one time
it dropped down to about 55 percent .
McDivitt

But then it came back up to 60.

White

I guess it did , didn ' t it? The temperatures all
stayed fairly constant.

If I

recall .right, they

dropped down to around 70 degrees.

It seemed to

me they continually decreased throughout the
flight.

I noticed this particularly in the RCS,

but I guess we'll get to that later.

The propellart

quantity though , I think we mentioned earlier ,
ended up on our gaging at about 3 percent at the
end .

We got a little bit of ground information on

the 0AMS propellant.

I felt a little suspicious

of the gage when it kept staying there at 59 to 60

8

percent for so long.
McDivitt

We were pretty miserly with that OAMS fuel .

We

set out to save the fuel and we sure did it .
White

I think that in future missions , if they permit
the crew to use the Puls e Mode in a saving-manner
they could do a lot more with the mission--if you
could use Pulse Mode instead of just free-drifting
around.

In other words , line yourself up so you

can make some decent observations.
McDivitt

Shoot!

We were in Horizon Scan Mode when we got

the last data, and I don ' t think we used any more
fue l than we were when we were in free drift.
White

That ' s right.

We certainly got more out of the

orbit than we did when we were just drifting free.
McDivitt

I 'll tell you one record that we ought to hold .
We've looked at the earth from more different
angles than anybody else in the world .
maybe not .

Well,

I guess the Russians did , but we sure

got a lot of different views of that earth as we
rotated around.
White

I thi nk the ground information that they called up
on the status of our OAMS wasn't as much as they
could have called up to us, but I 'm really satisfied that our OAMS was staying pretty constant .

9

McDivitt

So did I.

The way I felt was that I knew that we

had to be as miserly with the fuel as we possibly
could, so we got as much out of as little fuel as
possible .

There wasn ' t going to be anything to

change that velocity.

We just went along and I

really didn't care how they were plotting that fuel
on the ground.

I knew that we were starting to

get ahead of the schedule, because I was plotting
it roughly onboard the spacecraft .

I could see we

were ~p above the line that we needed to remain
above to handle our OAMS retrofir~.
White

Actually , we followed the profile rather closely,
We leveled off there at first, and then when we
started using it , we we~c right down the profile,

McDivitt

We were a little below the line and we just held
the same fuel level until we walked out across it
and got up on top of i+

Then, we went on down

above it.
White

I think the controls and the switches were all
satisfactory.

McDivitt

I think so too.

The attitude controller worked

fine and dandy.

We didn't have any trouble with

it.

The stick forces weren't too high.

We didn't

get a chance to use it in any other mode besides

10

Pulse .

It seemed to wor k all right in Pulse.

I

don't really have any comments to make on the atti tude controller .
White

As a matter of fact, I didn't ~se any Rate Command .

McDivitt

Didn't you really?

White

We didn't use the Rate Command .

I got to use

Direct a couple of times . I used Pulse a lot .
Everytime you 'd go to sleep, I ' d rea lly have a bal]
McDivitt

I could tell that by the wiggling.

White

No . That was real ly great--flying that spacecraft .

McDivitt

That ' s right, and I think Pulse is the mode .
ca.n do a lot with it .

You

With a little bit of planning

you could get to the attitude--if you start out 5
or 6 minutes ahead of time.
doing.

That's what we were

At 10 minutes before I was supposed to be

at a certain atti tude I ' d start, and one or two
little pulses and you'd--boop, boop, boop, boop-th€ bad thing was if you were in an attitude where
you couldn ' t see the horizon and didn ' t know where
you were.

You would give it a couple of pulses

and nothing would happen, and you ' d have to give
it a couple of more pulses.

It ' d t ake a long time

sometimes before you would get to where you could
see .

As a matter of fact, if at 5 minutes be fore

@i~FfDENTI>4ct

11

we were supposed to be at a certain attitude we
weren't approaching it, I 'd start pulsing a little
harder.
White

You'd hear a series of about five quick pulses.

NcDivitt

It was a very economical control mode.
The ma.ne·,..;ver controller worked the way it was
supposed to.

White

What about the deadband?

Did you think the dead­

bands and breakouts were all satisfactory?
McDivitt

Yes, just like the one we used in the simulator.
You've got a lot of slop in it when you're making
gross maneuvers because you're not fixing your
elbow and manipulating around tmt point.

You're

fixing your shoulder and your whole arm, and
it's just like shoveling coal--you've got about
that much finesse to it .
much you can say about it.

I don't think there's
The controls weren't

too gross and they weren't too minor.
thing was adequate.

The whole

We did have an inflight mal­

function, or irregularity.

We were in Horizon

Scanner Mode one time and Fd wanted to yaw around.
He started to yaw and the thing rolled.

The

Horizon Scanner Mode fired the roll thrusters to
level it back off--

12

White

I couldn ' t get the yaw .

We had a circui t breaker

off.
McDivitt

Finally , after you did that a couple of times I
looked up and saw we had knocked a circuit breaker
off.

That was one thing that we didn't cover in

EVA that I should have mentioned .

Ed was a real

hazar d to the switch positions in that he was all
over with his feet, arms , and hands - - .
White

I don't think I threw any though .
on now.

McDivi tt

Did I? Come

You ' re not guilty until you ' re convic ted .

I don ' t know .

You kept putting your foot on the

HF Reentry Antenna Switch and stepping on it .
Ha . Ha . Ha .
McDivitt

As for the a tt i tude control modes --I mentioned
the Rate Command in OAMS seemed to be tighter than
the Rate Command i n RCS , a l though t hey use the
same electroni cs, the same gyros , and the i,,rhole
thing .

It might ha.ve just been my imagination,

but I felt that the Rate Command system in RCS was
a lot looser than it was in OAMS .

The Reentry

Rate Command operated just the way it should .

It

had a 4 degree dea dband , and handled the spacecra ft
very well during reentry .

Direct had a lot more

a uthor ity than I thought it would, but it was

~IDE►~llM.
pretty straightforward.

13

I think Pulse was the

best mode on the spacecraft for the orbit phase .
We were able to save all kinds of fuel, it worked
fine, and it was just about what the doctor ordered .
We didn't use the Horizon Scan Mode during about
the first three days of flight, except for the second
orbit when I think I \\18.S in Horizon Sca.n so that I
could have the freedom to help Ed prepare for his
EVA.

The last day we used the Horizon Sca.n Mode,

and I found it to be an excellent mode .

There was

only one case when it broke lock and didn ' t recover.
Wasn't that it, F.d.?
White

You've got it in the book .

McDiYitt

We've got in the book and we'll check on that .
The Ho~izon Scan Mode worked essentially for 24
hours without any problem ~and I think it' s an
excellent control mode,
economical on fuel .

It seemed to be very

We were doing a lot of

yawing around and right at sunrise a.nd sunset it
seemed to get a l ittle nervous , especially if we
had the horizon scanner pointed within about plus
or minus 45 degrees of the sun.
seem to affect it at all.

The moon didn ' t

I noticed that, occa­

sionally, we would ~et some thruster blips with the sun

n&Q·tslfiO EtslltAIA ·

:i Ob JFIDE1'4 Tf,t(ilf r

14

pointed toward the hori zon scanner although we
never got an unlock light .

We wouldn ' t get an

unlock light , but we 'd ~et a bunch of maybe four
or five thruster blips right there.
White

Particularly at sunrise .

McDivitt

It would hold .

Whi te

It was definitely getting some spurious signals

I thought the Ho rizon Scan--

through but not enough to break it out all the way .
McDivitt

I thought the Horizon Scan Mode was an excel l ent
attitude-hold mode.

White

Did you notice the water boiler venting, Jim?

McDivitt

Yes, I did.

We kept yawing around to the left .

I believe it was left.

I did notice the fact

that we were yawing , but not very much .

We were

yawing a t rates that we r e extremely low and it just
took a pulse every once in a while to handle the
thing.

As a matter of fact, when we were chasing

the booster around a lot a t the beginning, I never
even noticed.

It was when we were i n the Pulse Con­

trol Mode for a period of time,when we didn ' t do much
thrusting in yaw, that I noticed
off in yaw .

we did start drifting

So I did notice the water boiler venting.

15

•
White

I didn't think you noticed it earlier when we
were working.

McDivitt

Well, I did notice it a little bit in that first
orbit, but it wasn't distracting at all.

It would

just drift off a little bit and I'd whop it
it would be back .

and

At SEX:;0 + 30, I used the trans­

lation thrusters to damp the booster-spacecraft
rates .

One of them was a little higher than the

other, although they were both down in the order
of a half of a degree/second.

I did fire one

thruster one time or possibly two times to damp
the rate.

I don't know if it was pitch or yaw .

You know, you are working in spacecraft pitch and
booster yaw and spacecraft yaw and booster pitch.
I was getting my coordinate system transformed
around in my mind, going from booster coordinate
system to the spacecraft .

I don't remember

whether it was yaw or pitch, but I did thrust
once or twice.

By the way , I could hear those

thrusters fire.

At

SEC0 + 30 I said, "Thrusting, "

and I started thrusting.

"Separate" , and Fd

punched the SPACE.CRAFT SEPARATE.

We were in Direct

and I thrusted straight ahead for about 5 seconds.
Then I went back into Rate Command.

Separati on was

16

just smooth--we didn ' t come off with a rotational
rate .
White

I think one of the things you mi ght commant on , Jim ,
is that you fired most of those thrusters during
that initial time .

McDivitt

I ' m sure I fired the upward-firing thrust ers a
number of times .

That isn ' t any more difficult

to control than t he other one .

Actually you can

fire these thrusters whether you are in Rate
Command, Direct or even in Puls e .

When you fire

them, you get a rate and you just damp t he rate
out with the a ttitude controller .

When you are

firing the translation thrusters , th0 things t hat
you r ea lly hear are not the trans lation thrusters,
but the attitude thrusters .

Those translation

thrusters are really tough to hear , but the a ttitude thrusters a re very easy to hear .
understand why.

I doh ' t

They must be mounted differently

because their location isn't that much different.
I think I fired the aft-firing thrust ers a couple
of times and they didn ' t make any more noise than
the f orward-firing thrusters, that I could tell .
The up and down and left and right ones were just
as easy to fire as t he other ones .

Our OAMS retro

•

17

was 127 feet/second which, incidently, happened
to come out exactly 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

I

suspect that we selected OAMS retrofire on the basis
of time, rather than on the basis of t::,.V.
White

Very convenient , wasn't it?

McDivitt

Very convenient.

It -was obvious there is no more

difficulty in timing 2 minutes 40 seconds during
our OAMS retrofire than it is during any other
thing.

We had no trouble with it .

I was convinced

that when we got through with it, that was really
the proper conversion factor between t::,.V and

t::,. T.

We had exactly 127 feet/second, and we sure had
the time nailed down.
8.3

RCS
McDivitt

The operational checks that we did on the RCS
occurred at about TR minus an hour.

When I checked

the system out it seemed like I had a lot less
authority and a lot sloppier Rate Command than I
had in OAMS .

The operational check consisted of

pitching up and down , yawing left and right,
rolling lef+ and right on each ring in Rate Command
and Direct.

Direct worked as I expected it to.

In Rate Coremand, however, as I pitched up and down
I noticed that my top left yaw thrus ter was doing

18

a lot of firing , too.

I started out checking the

Rate Command , so I thought I might possibly have
one bad pitch thruster that was causing a rolling
moment that was bei ng counteracted by the yaw-roll
jets.

When I did it in Direct, however , it wasn' t

doing that . It wasn't rolling either , so I felt
that it must just be a very tight deadband that
was trying to hold us in there .
checks were all right .

So , the operational

The only thing we had to

monitor on the system was the temperature and the
pressure of the propellant .

It seemed to hold

pretty well .
White

I have some comments on that.

I kept a running

log of them as we went along .

The tempera ture

started out at 75 degrees and 3000 pounds .

It held

that way pretty well until about the 65th hour , when
the temperature gradually went down.

The temperature

decreased to a point where we started getting the
RCS heater lights that we noted earlier.

We got

about eight series of RCS heater lights .

It took

about 5 minutes to extinguish the light .

It was

t he A-ring,then the B- ring, and then the A-ring.
I t s eemed to alternate each time back and forth and
it came on for about 15 to 20 minute periods of

19

time .

It started right after a night cycle .

It

seemed rather natural to me that there wasn't
really something wrong, but that we actually had
a cold RCS thing out there and it did need some
heat .

After heat was applied it did appear to go

away.

I decided to go ahead and set up a slow roll

rate in the daytime, and I kept that roll rate in
for several orbits.

Whether this actually helped

to get the light off or not, I don 't know.

We

didn't get anymore lights after this time . I think
there ought to be one other comment on the RCS ,
and that is the temperatures and the pressures
stayed up pretty well except when we actuated the
system.

The pressures then went down further than

we had expected them to go .
2400 to 2500 p~i.

They went down to

This was a little lower than I

expected to see.
McDivitt

I think the pressures in the RCS A and B dropped
by about 100 pounds throughout the four-day period.
They were slightly over 3000 pounds and they got
down to slightly under 3000.

White

The lowest temperatures I noted were in the neighborhood of about 63 to 64 degrees.
out at 75 degrees.

They started

20

McDivitt

Let me ask you a question?

White

Yes.

McDivitt

When you turned on the RCS heaters , did you turn
on the heater s on both r ings , or did you turn on
the RCS Heater Swi tch and then turn off the cir cui t
breaker on the ot her ring?

White

I turned the heaters on and then I checked to see
which ring it was that was ac tually heat ing up by
using the circuit breakers .

The first time I went

ahead and left them on and then the other ring
came on .

I fel t that one of them was about as

cold as the other, so I left the heaters on both
rings throughout the heating cycles .
McDivitt

Good.

White

They were in perfect sequence--A and B, A and B,
and about 15 minutes apart .
surprising.

The regulari ty was

The temperatures at the time when

these lights came on were indicating about 63 or

64 degrees and it seemed like it would come up a
little bit, and then come right back down and pop
back on again.

I felt it was not an actual

temperature problem .
McDiv.itt

I used Rate Command, Reentry Rate Command and Pulse
c ontrol modes.

I didn ' t use Direct .

They a ll

'-OtslF-tD-E~.l lA:L:;;.

21

operated as I thought they should.

I've already

mentioned I thought Rate Command was a little
sloppier in RCS than it was in OAMS .

It certainly

did a fine job of holding the retro attitude during
retrofire.

Retrofire attitude control was excellent.

We didn ' t deviate more than about a degree from
the attitude we were supposed to hold, and I had
plenty of authority there .

From my standpoint

it couldn ' t have been any better.
happy about it.

I was really

I used the Reentry Rate Command

with roll rate gyro off, so that I had essentially
Direct in roll and Reentry Rate Command in pitch
and yaw axes.

It had the typical 4 degree deadband

that it was supposed to have.
as it was supposed to.
it should.

It did do rate damping

It performed just the way

Fd, you want to cover that heater-lights

thing again?

I think you've already got that thing

pretty much in detail.
White

I have the precise times at which the lights came
on.

It started at about the 64th or 65th elapsed

time hour .
came on .

At 06:47, the first light, in the A-ring,
At 08:23 the A- ring light came on again .

That was the last time .

During that period of time

the A and the B-rings cycled on and off inter-

MWfiO,ftSl;QAJ•

22

mittently .
McDivi t t

During descent , we turned the power off to see if
t he drogue chute was unstable . It wasn ' t .

We

turned the power back on and the propellant valves
of f and burned up a l l of t he fuel i n the manif olds .
We had no fumes after impact .

8.4 Environment a l Control ~ystem
McDivi tt

I thought the suit mobility was as good in the
s pacecraft as it is anywhere else .
sui ts a re pretty good suits .

I think these

I didn' t f i nd any

trouble with them whatsoever i~ the spacecraft
that I wasn ' t a lready awar e of .
up good .

The pressure held

I did a pressure check on the suit .

It

bled down about 0. 2 or 0 . 3 psi in about 30 s econds ,
which real l y wasn ' t too bad .
a lways good.

The temperature was

It ran between about 50 and 55

degr e es diring the entire flight except when we

I don ' t think it ever got up

really worked hard .
over 60 .

Do you , Ed?

White

No.

McDivitt

We had reasonably good temperature contro l .

Whit e

The ca bin temperature got up pretty high one time
and then it came back down .

McDivitt

Yes , on about the first orbit .
_ _ w , f _ . . , .....

I

'

23

White

That's r ght .

It got up to about 90.

McDivitt

100, it was.

We turned the cabin heat exchanger

on for just a short time and it went right back on
down to 80 degrees.
White

It stayed in the area of 82 to 83 degrees the whole
flight.

McDivitt

The humidity in the suit must have been pretty dry
because rrry foot dried out.

I didn't take any wet­

bulb readings inside the suit.
zero all the time.

The CO stayed at
2

It never did go up except when

we'd go to o High Rate, when it would bound off
2
the top peg and fall back down again. The comfort
The o
2
demand regulator seemed to work all right . My

and suit controls were pretty reasonable.

umbilicals were short.
lousy.

My fingertip

lights were

Before _launch I only had one that worked.

On rrry right-hand glove one of the bulbs obviously
didn't work.

One of them did work.

On rrry left­

hand glove the switch on the batteries would only
turn the lights on if it was in one exact position,
vh.ich wasn't full throw in either direction.

So I

found out I had only one fingertip light that
worked.

However, during the flight I didn't use

my' fingertip lights except one time when I used ·

24

them for a flashlight. I had my gl oves off and I
reached over and got my gloves and turned the
fingertip lights on and shined the gloves on something .

I didn't use them a lot .

I do want to

comment on one thing , though , since we ' re talking
about the suits here .

I launched without the plug

that goes in the blood pressure port in the suit .
I don ' t feel we should launch these things with
no plug to plug up the blood pressure port in the
suit , especially when we ' re going EVA .
that was a mistake .

I think

The only pressure points I had

in the suit were in the helmet .

Those were just

above my ears where I tended to move my head back
and forth within the helmet.

I finally rubbed up

a ll the hair so that it was going in the wrong
direction .

When you press against hair for a long

time in the wrong direction it becomes very uncomforta ble.

At about the end of 2 3/4 days I took

my helmet off for a couple of hours, and it felt a
lot better.

The only problem is that when you have

your helmet off there is no place to stow it.

We

had the foot wells full of gear , so when I had the
he lmet off I just let it float around on my lap ,
and over in Ed' s l ap .

There wasn ' t any place to

25

put it.

The micro-meteroid blanket that I had

strapped under my right leg wasn't a detriment.
As a matter of fact since we had no place to stow
it , I just left it strapped to my leg until reentry.
Then, I felt that if we had to get out in the water
I didn't want to have any straps hanging off me
that I didn't need.

So, I took it off and threw

it on the floor a long with Ed's sleeves .

I don't

have anymore comments on my suit .
White

I wore the ENA suit .

I think the mobility of the

suit was about what I had expected.

Actually, I

think the mobility in some respects was a little
better, and in some respects it was a little less
than I had expected. I wasn't able to get into the
right-hand aft food box as well as I had thought
I was going to be able to in zero g. In fact, the
position that I had figured out to use, which was
leaning forward and reaching in backwards with my
left arm , didn ' t work out well at all.

I had to

actually turn around 90 degrees in the seat and
reach in with my right arm.

This worked out all

right.

I was able to get hold of things in the

box.

The surprise that I got though , was that I

could get into the right- hand aft refuse box much

26

easier than I had thought I ' d ever be able to .

It

turned out t ra t I was able to get into that box
ea sier while in orbit, by far, t han-McDivitt

It ' s a rubber covered box.

White

It's a rubber covered box on the right hand side .
I think that box does have the capability of s towing refuse in it and stowi ng some things prior to
l aunch in it , too .

White

Did you try that box during flight , Jim?

McDivitt

Yes , I did.

I didn ' t find it easy to get into .

I thought the things we had stowed in it wer e
real good things--items that we didn ' t need at all
in flight and possibly might not need-White

I used all four defecation bags
side .

that I h~d on my

I used them up during flight .

In fact , you

used one of them .
McDivitt

That ' s right , we did have a bag of those defe cation bags out .

It just happened to be over on my

side where you could get to it.
White

You were asleep.

I had to get them or wake you up .

I pres sure- checked rey suit .

I checked it at 8 . 5

and it bled down several tenths of a psi .

I was

satisfied with the pr es sure-holding of rey suit .

27
There was one thing though with the suit that I
wasn't too happy with.
in the suit.

I was hot all the time

It got so that after a while I got

used to the normal temperature as being warm.
I could incr ease the temperature , which seemed
rather strange to both Jim and me, by putting out
zey gloves and closing zey faceplate .

to sleep.

I could go

At that time zey temperature would go

up considerably inside the suit .

It seemed like

I coul d stay in there only an hour or an hour and
15 minutes and rest before I had to either open
up the faceplate or do something else.

So, the

temperature got uncomfortably warm in about an
hour or an hour and fifteen minutes with the faceplate closed, the sleeves on and the gloves on .
The humidity in the suit, I thought , was quite
dry.

I had quite a tendency for zey lips to crack

and nzy- nose to get very dry .

In fact, I noticed

zey nose was itching considerably.

This was an

indicator to me every time I would go to sleep.
I would wake up with zey nose itching and feeling
quite hot and uncomfortable.

}zy- lips got to the

point where I thought they were going to crack,

28

and I was trying to be very careful and keep them
from cracking and getting anymore uncomfortabl e
than they were .

Jim mentioned the CO

sensors
2
stayed on zero, which I was happy to see . I
think one thing that I was fairly happy about was
that the suit , as bulky as it was , wasn ' t depressingly uncomfortable.

I felt that I did have a

pretty heavy suit on most of the time , and I was
a little bit constrained in my mobility.

The

i dea to have the detachable sleeves that I could
take off after the EVA work was , I felt, a very
good decision.

I felt much more comfortable ,

and I had a much higher degree of mobility around
with my arms in the spacecraft.

It was not as

tiring to move around as it had been when I was
inside the heavy sleeves .
to take them off.

So , I was quite happy

We took them off, I believe,

shortly after my first sleep.

I slept with t hem

on the first time, and then we took them off .
think they were quite easy to take off.

I

As a

matter of fact, I think if you went EVA at a
later time you could take those sleeves onboard ,
and if they were made just a little aasier to
slip on and off over the wrist, you could take

@e 14

rte Et<4,t,\ t

29

them on and off in flight if you wanted to.
McDivitt

I don ' t know.

I'd hesitate to recommend putting

them on in flight .

It might get pretty tricky.

I think if you put them on in flight , you'd want
to put them over all the harness, rather than
i.mder the harness.
White

That ' s exactly what I was going to sey.

I think

if you took the life preservers off , you could
actually make the sleeves big enough so that you
could slip them on and velcro them across the
back over the harness.

This might be for the

type of operation of throwing equipment in and
out .

I think in the future , though , a suit as

heavy as this might not be required.

The controls

and the switches in the suit , I felt , were satisfactory.

There wasn ' t anything that I couldn ' t

get at in the spacecraft .

It was easier under

weightless conditions for me to operate certain
controls. In fact, I think I was able to get
down and unscrew the bellows in the gun hose as
well and maybe a little easier than you could,
Jim .
there .

At least initially, I was able to get down
Of course you weren ' t really particularly

trying to do it at that time.

@8 ~ •••i-EM-liaJ.;;

30

McDivitt

I suspect I probably could have gotten down there
as easy or easier than you if I had really gotten
around to trying.

White

I don ' t remember , but , anyhow, I was surprised
with the ease which I had in getting down .

McDivitt

We were trying to dump the pressure in the bellow
before we went EVA with it .

White

Right .

The demand regulator was satisfactory.

Ivzy­

umbilical,I thought,was very easy to use and
disconnect .

I was quite happy to have the micro­

dot in there.

One comment on the micro-dot--the

first time we exercised the micro- dots on our
suit , they were pretty hard to operate .

Mine got

progressively easier to use each time I used it .
The fingertip lights that I had were better than
Jim ' s .

I ha:l lights with Lexan tops on them .

All my lights worked, and r felt that their
operation was quite satisfactory.

We had decided

to put my lights between the first and second
joints for several reasons .

We thought the EVA

gloves would be easier to don and there'd be less
tendency to break them.

I think, though, the

position of the lights was still a little too far
forward if it was intended to put them back between

31

the first and second joints, because the lights
were resting right on top of my first joint .

I

think if I had worn my gloves anymore, I would
have gotten a very sore first knuckle .

If you

are going to move them back, I think they should
definitely be moved back behind the first knuckle.
McDivitt

Where were they getting you, .fili?

White

Right on the top of the knuckle .

McDivitt

You think they ought to be back?

White

If they are going to be anywhere, they ought to be
back here, and I'm not too sure that is necessary.
In fact, I think the best place is behind the
fingertip and in front of the first joint .

McDivitt

But, with the pl astic covers over the gloves.

White

With the plastic cover on the glove , and I think
we've got the right position for the lights .

I

don't think they should be back behind the first
knuckle .

I think they should be in front of that

first knuckle and behind the fingertip,
good place for them .
them in the past.

That's a

That's where we've been using

I think thf'

Le::mn

cover

on the light bulb is a darn good idea ,
McDivitt

Yes, I think so.,. too .

Shoot!

I checked my lights

before launch and found out that I already had one

32

of them out on my right hand.

I wasn ' t too happy

about it .
White

I was a li ttle disappointed.

I think the only

discrepancy I found in my suit was that I had no
blood pressure plug either.

A point that I was

pretty happy with was that I had no pressure points
from my suit at all on my body .

I had one set of

pressure points from my helmet pressing down on the
front forward part of my head.
was .

I lmew why this

I 'd had Joe Schmitt adjust my cables so that

I could pull my helmet down to a maximum amount
for the EVA work.

I felt that I just bought this

discomfort by having my cables adjusted in this
manner.

It was pretty uncomfortable though . I

checked out the use of the emergency bottles on
the EVA equipment and they worked as they were
supposed to .

I was able to regulate the flow.

Incidently , before I went out the reading on the

EVA bottles was full-scale, 3400 pounds . I was
happy to see that .
with the suit .

Al l in all, I was quite happy

I think it was a very well designed

suit and it met the requirements that were levied
upon it . It was a heavy suit and a big suit to
wear for four days, but I felt the auit wasn ' t as

€ ~~f-~ L

33
bad as I had expected it was going to be.
I have one more comment.
the inner liner.

I'd like to comment on

We decided to go with the inner

liner. in and I felt this was a good decision .
The inside of the suit was comfortable , and I
didn ' t get any pressure points .

I think one reason

why neither Jim nor I got any particular pressure
points from the suit was that we had worn these
suits a heck of a lot of time .
hours on my flight suit.
hours Jim had on his.

I had over 50

I don't know how many

34

McDivitt

Actually Ed had just finished talking about his
inner liner .

I 1 d like to comment about the inner

liner too .

I thought about it when he was talking

about his .

I think that was one of the reall y

wi se decisions •- to go with that inner l iner .
I felt that it offered a lot more comfort than
wearing that rubber suit up against my body, or
up against my underwear .

I sort of felt that I

was really quite comfortable in this suit .

I

didn ' t find my mobility limited by my inner l iner
at all , and I had made sure that it fit .

I think

that has a l ot to do with it.
White

I worked the suit once for about a four-'hour
period with just the rubber ins i de .

I

did no-

tice it sticking to me, and I didn ' t feel as comfortable .

After I got inside the suit with pres­

sure on my body , the suit felt pretty darn good.
I had the knees cut out of my suits .
are still too short .

The knees

Having been in it for four

days , I know the dimensions are wrong .

The di­

mension from my knee down to my foot is not long
enough .

I t ' s not just the inner line~ but the

f¥18~4AL

1

·~

35

link net in itself just isn't long enough.
McDivitt

You wouldn ' t say you had a pressure point though?

White

No, it was just a constant pull on there all the
time.

McDivitt

Did it bother you very much during the flight?

White

Yes, it bothered me a little bit .

McDivit-'-

So you really did have sort of a pressure point
then?
Yes, to some extent in that area .

I had had that

one so much before. It had been so extreme in
some cases that it really didn't bother me too
much .
White

Both of us should mention something about the
visors .

McDivitt

I thought you ought to mention something about
your visor problem,

your EVA visor or the other

one.
White

Well, I have briefed the visor on the EVA pretty
well.

The one that I will mention now is the

visor that I had on my regular helmet .

I thought

that the vision through it was quite good .

I

noticed no distortion at all through it, but I
did immediately put a couple big scratches on it

in the beginning when I was unstowing equipment .
I continued to scratch it throughout the mission.
When I finished , the visor was considerably
scratched up as you would pr obably notice if
you looked at my suit .

I don ' t know what there is

to do about this other than to accept a scratchy
visor .
McDivitt

If you ' ve got the visors down in front of your
face, you don ' t tend to scratch it up as much .
I think it was really worn out because you
started opening up your visor and leaving it up
over your head a lot earlier than I did.

At about

the two and a half or three day mark , I looked at
your visor and it was really a mess .

I took the

helmet off and cleaned the visor because it was
dirty on the inside and the outside .

I looked at

my visor and had very few marks on it .

I had a

few l ittle scratches , but very minor .

Then I

started putting my vi sor up more and mor e because t hey wanted us to stay open .

Because I ' m

a lot taller than you are, I really started beati ng mine up .

In the last day, I think I caught

up with you and maybe even surpassed you in the

37

amount of marks on it .

I'll say another thing .

I'm sure glad we didn ' t go in for those Lexan
visors that they wanted us to fly with, cause the
distortion woul d have driven me batty in about
the first six hours .
White

I think you must insist on perfect l y optically
clear visors .

McDivitt

That ' s right .

You 've got to have good optics .

White

I took my helmet off about three times , and I
didn ' t leave it off very long.

McDivitt

I took mine off about two times .

I took it off

one time for an hour because my hair right above
my ears was really bothering me .

I didn ' t bother

getting a light- weight headset out , and when anybody called me , I had the thing sitting in my
l ap and I could hear it .

I took one of the • ~ . ~

and pulled it back and I hollered into the mike,
Ha , ha. ! 1 till I could hear it .
my hel met off .

I s~id , "I ' ve got

Unless you 've got something im­

portant to tell me , don't bother me ." .Ha , ~a!
And he said, "Okay . "

It was one of those passes ,

you know , where you only talk to one guy for about
an hour .

Then I took it off one other time for

about a half hour to rub my ears .

s€0►~ ~t8l!lttfif1Aif:r:

I was quite

J

comfortable with my helmet on for two days.
White

Do you want to know something that ' s kind of
strange?

I was more comfortable with my helmet

on than off.

I n fact, I kind of got used to

those pressure points on the top of my head with
the helmet on .

When I took the helmet off and

moved my head around , I felt a little dizzy from
not having these restraints.

I didn ' t feel as

comfort able as I did with my helmet on.

The times

I had my helmet off were when I was running D-9.
I ran the D-9 Experiment several times with my
helmet off so I'd have better use of my sextant .
I took it off one other time near the end when
they indicated they would like to have everything off .

I didn ' t feel particularly comforta­

ble with my helmet off any more.

I got so us ed

to having that thing on that I put it on so I
could talk better with the stations .

They were

calling me from time to time , and I thought it
would be a little better.

Before I forget, I

think the portable headset is really a lousy
design .
McDivitt

I concur.

I think it ought to be thrown out .

-

39

White

I've seen the ones they've got in the MCC and
they're good plain old headsets.

I don't see

any reason why we can't get one that stays on
your head and stays in your ear .

You put this

thing on and it pops off about two minutes later .
It's not built to stay on my size head and I
noticed it didn't stay on Jim's very well eit~er .
I think the portable headset idea is a good
idea, but we ought to have a good headset for

it .

Okay.

As we mentioned earlier the cabi n

pressure relieved at about 5. 5 and held that
way during launch .

It went back down to 4.9

or 4.8 and this is where it stayed for the remainder of the mission.

I think that they prob­

ably overshot their zeal to correct the cabin
pressure that John and Gus had had on GT-3 and
put ours down so that it was actually relieving
lower and sealing lower than it would have been
desirable.

I was expecting it to seal up around

5.5 or 5.7 like it was advertised.
McDivitt

I checked my suit gage against the cabin pressure

g-age and my suit €8,ge read higher than:

the cabin pressure

gage by about .3 of a pound.

40

White

Yes, mine was right on it though .

McDivitt

I know .

You checked your suit gage

against

the cabin pressure and yours read just about on
it, didn ' t it?

Was it a tenth of a pound higher

or was it right on it?
White

Right on .

McDivitt

Okay .

So mine was reading a little higher,

indicating to me that possibly the cabin pressure was higher .

But since Ed's read with it,

I don ' t know where we were .
White

Well, the pr essure at which it relieved at went
right into the problem of the temperature- pres sure relief in the cryogenic oxygen system so
t hat those two problems kind of lashed together .
The venting in the o system was set at around
2

970 .
McDivitt

967, I think the poop sheet said.

White

Well , it was about 967 or 970 .

We had the pos­

sibility of losing oxygen in a steady manner
out of the spacecraft if we let the pressure
rise up above- -well , the ground felt 960 , and
I concurred with that figure .

So throughout

the flight we had to keep venting our o system
2

41

down so the pressure woul d remai n down below

960 . They initially told us to vent it to keep
it at 930 to 960 .

Then they told us to vent it

on down to about 890.

From then on, we vented

it down in the neighborhood of between 890 and

93, depending upon who was asleep and who wasn't
asleep .

It sure seemed to be an unsatisfactory

solution to two problems--one of the cabin holding at a higher pressure than they wanted it to

on GT- 3 and also the problem of the o system

2
venting outside of the pressure gage . In the
oxygen system I think the solution to putting
the venting down at 967 was a poor solution to
the problem of having a poorly designed ga ge .
I think the gage was agai n poorly designed and
it should be designed to read about 1200 pounds.
Rel ief should be up in that area .
McDivitt

I f they really went ahead and jacked down the
relief pressure, to get it on the gage, I think
that is one heck of an approach to an engineering problem.

White

I think that ' s a gross thing to do and if they
did that deliberatel y, I thi nk they deserve a

42

very black star for that one.
McDivitt

They need their heads examined t

White

I guess we beat that one around pretty well,
didn 't we?

McDivitt

Yes~

The way that we were venting the cabin

was by going to o High Rate and venting the
2
oxygen out through the cabin vent or going to
cabin repress and using up the oxygen through
the cabin and through the cabin vent valve

that way.
White

I was quite satisfied with the cabin temperature .
It started out and got pretty hot at one time
early in the flight and went up to 100 as you
noted,and then it went back down into the 80 's.

I think it actually dropped into the 70's a time
or two.
McDivitt

That ' s right.

It was in the 70's most of the

time .
White

Right.

McDivitt

Let's get the data book ,

The dry bulb tempera­

ture was 80; 80, the first time we tood it.
Then it was 79, 79, 79.

Then it was 75, 75,

75, and then they stayed between 75 and 77,I

OQ\il I i ~ L

think, .the rest of the flight .
down as low as 72 .

No, here it is

So it got down to around

72 late in the flight, and here we are with a
whole bunch of 70's to 73's and a couple of 76 1 s.
So I guess that 75 was the average temperature
throughout the whole flight.
White

I think our cabin temperature gage was reflecting a little higher temperature than these.

McDivitt

No, let's see .

White

It went down to 74 at one time, I remember.

McDivitt

Yes, I think 75 was a good average cabin temp­

It was down around 75.

erature for the whole flight.
White

I thought this was a pretty satisfactory cabin
temperature.
down.

The suit temperatures were also

They stayed down from about 52 to 54

most of the· flight.

I thought that was a pretty

satisfactory temperature there.

I believe that

there was a difference in suit temperatures between Jim and me because I was continually
hollering about being hot.

I think that temp­

erature-wise Jim was relatively comfortable .
McDivitt

I was vecy comfortable, and as a matter of fact,
when I went to sleep, I tended to get just a

44

little bit cool , especially if I had urinated
all over myself.
White

I don ' t remember one time during the flight
during which I was cool in the suit .

I think

I was hot most of the time in the suit .
used to i t after a while.

I got

The only time that

it was not satisfactory, as far as I was concerned, was when I was trying to sleep.

The

humidity data that we got doesn't go along with
what everybody was expecting.
McDivitt

No, not by a l ong shot .

White

No, not at all .

Our l i tt le gage seemed like

it was working properly.

We didn ' t have any

visible moisture at any time at any pl ace in
the spacecraft .

It seemed to be indicating

down around 62 to 63 percent

relative humidity

which was a big surprise to myself.

With this

type of data , I began going open faceplate and
open gloves fairly early in the flight, about
a day or a day and a half, and continued in this
manner just about throughout the flight .

We

used the wrist dams quite a bit of the time .
But I had my faceplate open with my wrist dams '

CiO t ◄ F10E._ffd +b

on a great deal of time also.

I think you had

your faceplate closed a little more than I
did .

There at the end we were both going to an

open-faceplate and open- gloves all the way .

'
McDivitt

Yes, we were especially going open-faceplate
at the end just to see if we could jack up
the humidity.

I actually preferred to have

my faceplate closed, as opposed to having it open.

I went ahead and left it open trying to get
the humidity up . We never really did get it
up over 60 perc ent.

That seemed to be where

it was going to stay.
White

We were happy to see that the CO

sensor
2
gage stayed down low the whole flight . It

would pop up any time we turned the o High ·
2
Rate on and go up to a pretty high reading,
and then settle back down to zero.

I didn't

notice any particular discomfort versus day
versus night .
McDivitt

No, as a matter of fact, I didn't either.

We

took some temperature readings on the cabin
window frame and they varied by about 6 or
8 , 10 degrees at the very most .

White

Yes, I don ' t think there was any discomfort
associated with the day-night cycle.

We didn't

use the cabin fan as we planned during the
flight.

We did neglect to turn it on initially

during the preparation for retro.

We noticed

that we weren ' t cooling off in the cabin as
much as we would have liked to .

So, we turned

the fan on and immediately the temperature
dropped down about 10 degrees,if I remember
right .
McDivitt

Yes , that cabin heat exchanger and that cabin
fan really do the job.

White

It really cooled it off.

McDivitt

Early in the flight when we got the temperature up to 100, we turned the fan on and the
temperature went down to below 80 in about
20 minutes, or so.

White

It really did the trick .

The cabin pressure relief valve was venting
just a hair abouve 5.4.
very many times.

We checked this out

Every time we filled the

cabin up with o High Rate, it vented,or if
2
we used the repress l•ever the cabin would
vent .

.,

'3@>rNfff) EttlIM:·
McDivitt

47

Here we had an environmental control system
that was supposed to protect us .

We found

out that the darn thing was overpressurizing.
f

The first couple of times, to keep the ECS o
2
bottle from venting, we vented the cabin itself .

I found myself sitting in there vent­

ing this thing with my gloves off and my face
plate open.

It began to dawn on me that the

pressure went down inside the cabin at a tre­

mendous rate.

If this thing ever stuck open

and I had my gloves off and my faceplate open,
I would be a dead man .

So we made it a proce­

dure to suit up when we were going to dump
this thing .

This meant that every four hours

we had to put our gloves on and put our faceplates down and lock them and get all suited
up just in case this vent valve didn ' t reseat.
Frankly, as much of an inconvenience as it
turned out to be, I think that was a wise
maneuver.

I would never suggest that anyone

vent that cabin again without being fully suited.

I thi nk there is such a risk involved

that you would be fool- hearty to do it .

For

GO~ ifli itl..l,tct 0

48

that reason I think that we ought to make an
effort to get the ECS o tank vent and the

2

ECS o tank pressure gage compatible and at
2

a l ot higher pressure than they are.

This

suiting up and unsuiting every four hours is
for the birds.
White

I thoroughly agree with you, Jim. There are
two things I want to know.

I want to know if

they deliberately lowered the venting pressure

for the o system down to 967 to solve the
2
problem on GT-3.

I would also like to know

if they deliberately lowered the cabin venting

down to 5.4 .

I'd like to know the answer to

those two questions.

I think the combination

of those two situations make what I feel is an
unsatisfactory situation in our flight.

It

occupied far more time-McDivitt

That's right, we were screwing around with
that ECS o .

2

touched.

That's something we never had

It was a eage

that we should have

monitored, instead of a thing that we manipulated all the time.
White

Right,

Okay, the cabin pressure regulator.

'

49

I didn't have any comment on that.
McDivitt

Neither did I.

It seemed to be doing a good

job .
White

I felt the cabin vent valve was set lower
than I had thought it was going to be .

I

thought it was supposed to be set up around

5.7. I'd like to know if it was cha.l'lged intentionally.
McDivitt

The manual vent valve worked fine.

When we

wanted to vent the cabin, it vented.
White

The cabin repressurization valve worked fine .
I was very happy to see how well it worked
also with my chest pack.

McDivitt

No, I don ' t think so .

Any comment on that?

I don't think the cabin

repressurized or overpressurized when we were
trying to vent it.

Since you were repres­

surizing it and venting it at the same time,
I think the vent valve actually overcame the
repressurization,which is a good thing if
you're trying to vent it, and it is not a good
thing if you're trying to keep it from venting.
Going back a little farther to my other statement, in case that vent valve sticks open

50

and you are not suited,I don't think you're
goi ng to have time to get suited .

I t takes

me too long to put those gloves on.
White

Okay, the cabin air inlet valve worked fine .
We vented the cabin with it when we went EVA.
It apparently worked all right when we used
it down on the water.

I rave no further com­

ment on that.
McDivitt

Neither do I.

It seemed to work fine .

White

The cabin air recirculation valve worked as
it was supposed to .

McDivitt

As advertised .

White

Okay , that primary o system gets another
2
black star. I think this is the area that I
want to know the answer to , for sure .

I want

to know whether that was deliberately set
down into the range of the gage
complaint on Gemini 3.

to solve the

I think that if this

was the case, this is a prime example of poor
engineering.

As far as monitoring the system

though, as long as their reading was down below 960 the system worked pretty well.

I

felt fairly confident that the pressure wae-

51

McDivitt

That ' s right .

The way that the thing was set

up , we could sure monitor it because we knew
it was going to vent without being on the
gage .

I think they compromised the whole

system so we could monitor it .
White

As a matter of fact, we monitored it very
thoroughly and spent about 100 times as much
time on t his SJs t em as we should have .

John

Young ' s been complaining about this point,
and I think that it ' s a very poor thing .

They

ought to dig up the money and put a gage

in

there that will do the job .
point .

Very strong

The quantity measuring system,I thought,

was all right.
McDivitt

I thought it was pretty good .

I thought it

was excellent as a matter of fact .
very readable gage ,.

It was a

It had tremendous scal e

on it, but, shoot, you could read the thing to
a percent .

I don't know why it was a:ny more

readable than the other ones, but I thought it
was pretty good.
White

The flow rates--I don't have a:ny particular
comment on that .

I thought the flow rate on

N4sl-f.1Dfl~T1Aw

52

..
that repress valve into my suit was satisfactory
to keep me in a pressurized state and keep me
venti lated enough under normal operations .
Under tough operations though, the flow rate's
too low and you really heat up.
McDivitt

Yes, I think since it was an open loop system,
you had to keep from dumping all the oxygen
overboard, and had to go high enough to keep
it from dying from the heat.

I think it was

a compromise system.
White

I thought it was well set up,
plaints there .

I have no com­

Primary o temperature--I didn't
2

have any comment on that.
McDivitt

No, neither did I.

White

The manual heater--I think that you used the
manual heater twice during EVA .

McDivitt

Twice during EVA for about five to six minutes
each time .

It responded all right , but it didn't

go overboard,

It got the temperature right back

up there, and I shut the thing off again.

I\!0 ~~FIDE~iilA L

53

•
White

We were able to turn the automatic part of it
off quite early in the flight , particularly
since this was the problem we were having .
We were getting--

McDivitt

That was something I wondered about .

You

know , the t hing is marked , and we were always
instructed that when the thing got down below
38 percent
more .

we didn ' t need the heaters any

We shut the heaters off at 42 percent .

White

Right .

McDivitt

0bviously,the guy that told us to shut the
heaters off at 40 percent

knew what he was

talking about because we never needed them
again .
White

I think, again , I am very suspicious of McDonnell
on the fix on that gage, and on setting that
pressure on 970 , and I'm going to get to the
bottom of it .

McDivitt

Yes , but I think, though,that the pressure
would have still built up even if we had the
relief set at 1050 or so.

It would have still

built up .
White

It might have built up and stabili zed,
•

54

because it ' s a cryogenic system and it could have
stabilized out around 1000 or 1050.
McDivitt

But on the other hand it could have continued to
build right on up .

White

Su.re it could .

McDivitt

But I sort of suspect that the--well, I don't know.
It's different from this other problem where we
were told that the thing didn't require heaters
below 38 percent , and we found out that it really

didn ' t require 'them below 42 percent .
White

We turned them off at 42 percent .

McDivitt

Right .

White

The secondary o system--I thought those performed
2
admirably. In_fact, they had more oxygen in them
than I thought they could hold.

Jim ' s was up to

around 5500 pounds shortly after launch .

It re­

mained up there and drizzled out about 100 pounds
throughout the flight .
1'1cDivitt

Actually they increased by 100 psi each right after
launch .

White

Right at the first mode of flight .

Then they

drizzled back down and stayed at 5400, I think,
right on down through the flight .

The lowest

55

mine got was about 5250 maybe .
McDivitt

Did you notice by chance what they were at landing?

White

No, I didn ' t check them .

McDivitt

Neither did I.

White

That was the last thing I had on my mind , to tell
the truth.
fine .

I thought the quantity measuring was

It was a little questionable, that we might

have overpressurized on your system, but I guess

they had plenty of margin in that respect . The
secondary o flow rates were satisf actory as far
2
as I was concerned.
I was amazed that secondary o flow
2
was such that I really didn ' t get too hot in i t .

McDivitt

I think so .

White

Yes, I was not as uncomfortable as I had been at
other times.

McDivitt

You know, after awhile· you hit yourself in the
head so long that it finally stops hurting.

White

It ' s like that big heavy suit, after awhile you
begin to feel good .

I know the average guy on

the street probably wouldn't like the flow rate,
but it didn't seem to be too bad.
objectionable .

It wasn ' t too

56

White

I think we jumped into something else .

We were

in secondary o system and we weren ' t on flow
2

rate.

The only time we had the flow rate on that

was during reentry.
isfactory .

The flow rate there was sat­

The pressure obviously was satisfac­

tory, but we didn't check it at the end .

The

control--r.de put an extra detent on that control.
I think the control was a positive one and we
were able to keep it in the detents where we
wanted it .
McDivitt

I had no p~oblem there.

Right, I think that the way it's rigged up now
is excellent.

We designed it .

It had better be,

ha., ha!

White

Right .

Okay, the CO

2

partial pressure.

The gage

has been discussed prior to this time.It stayed
down satisfactorily.
McDivitt

Yes, it never got off zero.

White

Okay, the coolant- the radiator operation configuration--I

don't have the times in front of me

right now that we went onto

the radiator, but I

think it was about 40 minutes.
McDivitt

40 minutes.

White

We went on the radiator about 40 minutes and we

never had to come off it again .

We didn ' t get

any abnormal operation of the radiator at any time .
One time they called up to me and mentioned something about the radiator and the coolant loop and
I didn ' t get any clarification .

I lost contact

at that time , and I thought just maybe that I
had a failure of some type in my primary cooling
system .

So just for caution sake I turned on the

secondary coolant pump and waited till I got contact with them again.

They asked me why I had the

secondary pump on , and I said , "I thought maybe
I had a problem in the primary system ."

They

asked me why I thought that and I said , "I thought
they were telling me something about it when I
lost contact with them .

I did it just to be sure ."

But that was the only time that I thought we even
might have had a problem in it , and I turned it
off .

We used double coolant loop early in the

mission,and after we turned the secondary system
off we did not use it a.gain until the teentry .
Prior to the reentry , we turned it on .
McDivitt

That's right .

White

Okay , here is one at which we'll get at them--

That coolant system real ly worked.

58

the water management system.

I think you have

a few thousand words you'd like to say about
launch.

I think you actually already hit on most

of them, anyhow .
McDivitt

Man, I sure do.
Flush Mode .

The l'brmal mode , Drink Mode, and

We got the water management thing

kind of goofed up.
thing first.

Let's just take the drinking

The drinking nozzle was attached to

the management panel by a hose and the hose looked
like it was made out of rotten rubber .

The

first time I tried to drink out of it , I stuck
the thing into my mouth-White

The first bad moment of the f l ight .

McDivitt

--I pushed the button in and no water came out ,
~d I almost had a heart attack.

I said to Ed ,

"Ed, this is going to be the shortest four day
flight in history. "

Ha, ha!

White

Jim said, "Guess what? · The water doesn ' t work."

McDivitt

Ha, j{.a !

But you ' d already had a drink out of it ,

though , hadn ' t you?
White

No , I hadn ' t .

McDivitt

Oh , hadn ' t you?

White

You handed it to me.

eeJmrDEMffM
McDivitt

59

Oh, so I handed it over to him and then he took a
drink out of it and didn ' t have any problem at all .
What happened was the hose was wound in the helix .
It came out to the gun in a straight line .

When

I drank out of it on my side this thing always
crimped like it was an old rotten piece of rubber
that had been bent over in that position many
times before.

It looked like something that came

out of a 1890 steamboat or something, instead of

a-White

It looks like your old oxygen mask hose.

McDivitt

That's right.
mask hose .

It looks like my old rotten oxygen

So I think that we ought to get at

least a decent piece of hose in there. The next
thing is the water gun that you drink from.

You

push the button in and a little spigot would come
out and the wat er would start running out of it .
This worked great.

You could always get the wa­

ter to come out when you didn 't have your hose
bent.

It got worse and worse and worse and worse

and worse .

As far as returning it towards the

end of the flight , I almost drowned a couple of
times because I ' d get that thing out and I couldn't

@ONFl0Et'4Tl=At

60

get it back in.

I finally ended up actually using

two hands to operate the water gun so that I
could get the button back out.
White

The button definitely did get more friction in it
as the flight progressed.

McDivitt

It seemed like it was all scored up and it kept
getting worse and worse and worse as the flight
went on.
too.

This could have been a major disaster

If we had that gun squirting water inside

the spacecraft , you'd have had water all over the
place.

I'll be the first to say that we made a

real effort to keep the water out of the spacecraft.

We wanted to get four days out of the

flight.

I felt one of the major probierns would

be the humidity in the spacecraft .
out, it wasn't a problem.

As it turned

We didn't know it right

off the bat and we were really concerned about the
water.

The last thing I wanted to do was to have

an open water nozzle running into the spacecraft .
So I think that takes care of that .

I think the

whole water management panel ought to be clarified
before we fly GT-5.

We were arguing about what

position the waste .Mmagement Switch was going to
be in during the countdown to launch.

w@f'f Fto•Ef'IT trA L

I think this i d

61

certainly not the time to be deciding what the
heck the position these switches were going to be
in.

We were always briefed that this thing would

be in OFF.

We were going through the switch

positions and they'd ask me to check in the count
at. about T-45 minutes or so.
White

And I couldn ' t see that one .

McDivitt

You couldn ' t see that one and you asked me to look
down at it .

I saw the thing was in EVAPORATOR,

so I question the STC.

He checked around and they

had a big flap about what position it was supposed
to be in.

Pretty soon we got a call back and he

said if I could get unstrapped and reach the thing,
I ought to turn it over to OVERBOARD. • We thought
it should have been in OFF.

They had it in EVAPOR­

ATOR so we finally decided we ought to go to OVERBOARD to keep the thing venting.
strapped in the spacecraft .

I was already

I undid my shoulder

harness and reached around in the spacecraft and
flipped a little valve over to OVERBOARD where
it should be and then got strapped.
White

You sure they didn ' t have you put it OFF?

McDivitt

No, we went to OVERBOARD .

62

White

I remember they argued.

I thought they had it on

EVAPORATOR firs t.
McDivitt

It went from EVAPORATOR--

White

That seems like the least likely of any position
to put it in .

McDivitt

That ' s right.
OVERBOARD.

We went from EVAPORATOR over to

So I think a comment that I ' d like to

make right now about the whole water management
panel is that it's a simple thing.

It's got

three !mobs and each !mob ' s only got three or
four positions .

We had the ECS engineers at

McDonnell give us a briefing on this simple water
management panel.

We had about seven guys there

with seven different versions of how it was designed, how it operated, and what the different
positions we were supposed to be in.

They got us

so screwed up that when we left ther e we didn ' t
have any idea in the world whatit was supposed to
do.
White

I think those designers didn ' t either.

McDivitt

They didn ' t either and it was pretty obvious that
they didn ' t .

We went through a lot of discussion

with that water management panel.

Finally I think

that the four of us got it pretty well squared
away.

Then just before launch we found out down

at the Cape that because they had gotten those
switches in the wrong position we pumped 32
pounds of water out of the adapter , used up all
the pressurant for the water system, and pumped
all the water into the lithium hydroxide canj.,3ter.
If it hadn't been for one last minute check in
the data, we would have lost the lithium hydroxide canister full of water and nothing to drink
with.

So we would have had about an hour flight,

if we had gone that long.

I think that before

we fly another flight we ought to have all the
people at McDonnell and NASA, who are · respons-ible
for this thing get it squared away and figure out
just where the heck they want these switch positions.and get them there.

If there are a lot of

switch positions on that panel that aren't useful
anymore, we should just go ahead and block them
off.

We decided between the four of us that there

were--I don't even know what they call those
switches-White

Condensate Valve and Water Valve.

..

McDivitt

--and the Water Valve should be put in NORMAL
NORMAL.and left there.

That was ~xa.ctly what we

did and we knew how to work the waste management
valve.

We didn't screw it up, but I ' m not sure

that if with a little trying, we couldn't have .
We never had to use the Evaporator Fill Mode .
The Flush Mode,or the waste ·management portion of
the thing,had a couple of different positions .
In the normal OVERBOARD position and in using
the Preheat and Flush switch over on the side ,
we managed to dump a large number of urine dumps
through this.

We dumped both our launch- day

urine bags which were full.

I probably urinated

eight or ten times and you probably about five
or six t i mes.
White

About five times .

McDivitt

About five times .
through this thing.
ing .

So we had a lot of dumps
At 92 hours it stopped work­

Ed had filled up the bellows pretty well

just before this.

I was the man in charge of

dumping urines, it seemed like .
White

The Urine Dumper!!!

McDivitt

I was the only one who could reach the knobs and
swit ches .

It ~ nerally went down in spurts.

~8-M f'IDt=P,.ff IrA L

65

About haliwny

through the dump , it started

slowing down .

Then it just went in very slowly

the last two or three inches .

Then I urinated in

the thing and had a bellows full of a mixture of
air and urine .

It started dumping .

It looked

like it went down about halfway and then it
stopped .

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it

wasn't the air going out of it.

It w.ent very

slowly for ju.st a short time and then it stopped
completely .

Nothing else would go out of it .

S~

I turned off the Flush Switch and I went from
OVERBOARD to EVAPORATOR,and it flushed through
the evaporator .

We had one more urine dump through

the evaporator and this worked all right .

Well,

I ' m sure glad that we had those two ways of working it .

All the way through the flight after I ' d

dumped the urine through this thing, I kept say1

ing :w-ell , McDonnell finally designed this thing

so it works after about 30 or 40 attempts and
redesigns :' But I guess I was over-optimistic because it did drop out just before the flight .
It finally got to work for 88 hours .
use the E~aporator Film Mode .

We didn't

Okay, Ed, why don't

66

you take over.
White

I extended my wrath .

I just had a feeling you wanted to say something
about that, Jim.

McDivitt

~, ha!

After having messed around with that thing for

96 hours trying to make it work .
White

I think you expressed my feeling too .

McDivitt

Did I leave anything out?

Whit e

No , no .

I had the same feelings .

I thought you

might have had them a little stronger since you
were the one who discovered the water gun was not
working.
McDivitt

I ' m really serious about that simple panel being
able to screw up the whole flight.

If we don ' t

get that thing figured out we ought to stop flying space missions .
Whi te

One of the worst moments of the prelaunch down
there was when I found out they had that two
gallons of water in the system somewhere and didn ' t
know where it was.

McDivitt

That's right .

White

The humidity sensor--I thought if the readings
are right, it worked very well and pr oved the
point that the humidity in the spacecraft is

67

relatively low•, and that the water problem is not
quite the problem we had it cracked up to be .
I ' ll make a comment on the sponge material on the
s ide of the spacecraft at this point ,since we ' re
talking about humidity .

I didn ' t think the sponge

material was a very good idea to begin with but
once it was in there and we flew with it, I think
it was-McDivitt

It was a real bad mistake!

Ha, h9. !

White

No, I thought it was all right in there . The only
thing wrong with it was what they had it treated
with for fire - proofing.
it was unpardonable .

I thought that part of

There is no excuse whatso­

ever for having those ammonia vapors and the hydrogen sulfate ~or whatever those other things
were that we had permeating around the spacecraft.
McDivitt

We smelled bad enough, but it was no contest when
it came to comparing ourselves with the spacecraft .
It smelled worse .

White

If there was any moisture it grabbed it all.

I

don't really think there was any moisture for it
to grab .
McDivitt

I don 1 t think so either, Ed.

I kept feeling that

r1ecr,

68

thing and it was dry as could be .
White

There was no moisture that I could notice .
'lhe sponge stuff on the side wasn ' t objectionable
to me but the odor that obviously came from it
was very , very objectionable .

The readings we

obtained I thought, were easy to take.
age of the unit was not a problem.

The stow­

It was easily

stowed in the spacecraft while we were using it .
8 , 5 Communicati ons

White

Okay, I have a few comments on the communications
which we ought to go on to .

We ' ll take them in

sequence .
McDivitt

Okay, why don ' t you go along I'll express my comments .

White

I think the interphones worked pretty wel l .

I

noticed one thing, though, as we progressed along.
lf'he volume requirement on both my side and on Jim ' s
side needed to be increased all the time to get -

McDivitt

No , Ed .

White

Is that right?

I launched with all my volumes full up .
Anyhow in my interphone , I pro­

gressively raised it as the f l ight went on .
McDivitt

Yes , I started off with mine almost all the way
up .

On the UHF it was absolutel y all the way up ,

C04 4~t!li 1t6 L

69

and I flew with it almost the whole flight .
White

I don't think it was all the way up.

The one

thing though --I think the interphone operation
and quality were quite good .
McDivitt

Yes, I thought so too .

White

We were ready to communicate back and forth.

It

was just the way I would liked to have done it .
I thought it was very good.

The UH performance at

the countdown was satisfactory and just after we

got into orbit we felt that we had a bit of a
communication loss.

We switched to UHF No. 2.

Later during the flight we used both UHF sets and
didn't have any difference in performance from
either one .

During the recovery you were using

the UHF primarily.

I think you had as much com­

munication as you could expect.
McDivitt

That ' s right.

I think so too.

I do think, though ,

that we had a very bad UHF situation in the first
eight or nine orbits.

It was really lousy.

As

a matter of fact, I was getting concerned that
maybe we were going to have to land because we
were going to run out of communications .
White

You were actually working more on this problem
b

70

than I was.

You were communicating during the

FNA work and also after I went to sleep.

I heard

you working on the Communications Check and that's
when you went to the reentry antenna.
McDivitt

That's right, when we ran through these checks,
it finally became apparent to everyone that the
reentry antenna was doing a better job than the
adapter .a ntenna.

And then later on, I switched

back to the a dapter antenna for some reason which
I can't remember right now.

We ran a couple of

more checks and it seemed to be-White

I know what we did.

We ran an HF check , Jim, and

we switched back to the a~apter so we could use
the HF antenna back there .

We got just as good

U1IF transmissions at this time as we did on the
r.eentry a.ntenna .
McDivitt

When they checked them out again, they said they
still thought the stub antenna was better.

So, we

went back to :reentry antenna .
White

We used r .eentry just about 95 percent of the
flight.

McDivitt

That's right.

In the last 55 orbits it was great.

In the first eight it was lousy.

I was really

71

concerned about having to come down because we
didn't have any radios .
White

One thing that I'd like to say is, I would give
a good gold star to the controllers down there.
I thought their voice procedures were excellent
and their methods for giving us information were
all good .

I had no comment , whatsoever, other

than I thought it was all very good .
McJ)ivitt

That's right.

White

I had no objection . I thought there was no time
in the flight in which we got a cluttered voice
from anybody .

Yes, I think that is pretty good

when you have that many people working the loop.
McDivitt

I think so too .

White

Okay, the voice tape recorder- -let me vent my
wrath on this one.

McDivitt

Get ' em Ed, get 'em!

White

Right .

This is another thing that should be fixed

before the next flight.

I think we're going to

end up being very, very sorry.

We're going to

end up losing valuable data from time to time .
This will be due to no reason other than a voice
tape recorder which is poO'r on all accounts.

EiOt •rt"Ef ◄ lt/.L:

72

McDivitt

We ' ve already lost some very va l uable data from
this flight.

We could have taped t he entire

EVA and brought those communications back down.
As it was, we couldn ' t tape them becaus e we had
to put the thing in UHF so that we c oul d transmit
to the ground .

We los t all of t he

bless ed

stuff going to the ground anyway .
White

There are certain systems in here that I think
are very poorly designed .

I think t his is about

the poorest of them all .

It ' s l ocated in such a

position that you can not see the opeation light
when it is on.

The light is in an area where

you normally would put things .
on top of it so

Things get put

that if you look down there, you

can't see the light .

The light is such a small

insignificant thing when it comes on.

Unless you

conscious l y bend your head down and l ook down
below your right elbow, you can not see whet her
the light is on or not.

The switch is set so t hat

you have to go in either RECORD , Ul!F , HF, or
INTERCOM and you can not be in RECORD while you're
on UHF or INTERCOM.

This is a very unsatisfa c t ory

method of having a tape recorder.

The tape r e corder

73

should be set up so that it can record conversations on normal UHF , HF , and INTERCOM type operations .

As Jim pointed out , in our flight alone

I think we l ost sets of valuab l e information.
During launch we weren ' t able to tape anything
onboard .
EVA .

We weren't able to tape the work during

We could have taped some of the work duri ng

t he rendezvous part of the flight ,
lieve we taped i t though .

I don ' t be­

The w~y it's set up

you wouldn't l eave i t on i n t hat manner . We both
had requirements to communicate over UHF .
was our normal mode of operation .

This

If we have a

tape recorder , it shoul d have a separate switch .
If t here is an hour limitation on the tape, there
should be a light that oomes on and is easily visible on the front somewhere.
MoDivitt

That's right .

It ought to go right on the VCC .

White

That's right .

That ' s really where the light be­

longs .

I think that it woul d be desirable and

important to have a voice t ape of what ' s going on
throughout the flight .

I wouldn't have any ob­

jection to having a tape recorder with the capability of recording more than the one hour at a

CO t 4fl"Et tTI.Q:t

74

time that we have now.

I'd like to see us record­

ing a great deal of the flight .

It'd be nice to

have a switch to turn it off from time to time
if you did want to discuss something that you
didn ' t want to go on tape .
McDivitt

I don't think we ought to put the whole flight
on tape .

If we flew a week-long flight, it would

take a week to go through the tape.

You wouldn't

want long periods of nothing on there .

I think

the way we wanted to operate it this time would
have been all right, if we could have just operated it that way.

There were certain periods

where we put a tape on and ra.n it all the way
through.

Well, that was the tape that covered

a certain experiment or something.
White

On our D-9 Experiment, we used it.

McDivitt

Yes , that's where we used a whole tape on it .
Then there were periods that were questionable
when you were s l eeping and I wasn I t doing anything,
or I was sleeping and you weren't doing anything .

White

If you carried adequate tapes, and you had adequate
warning when the thi ng went on and off, you would
not have the same situation we had on the D-9

75

Experiment .

You could have the tape stop in the

middle of the experiment and be lying on your
back looking out with the sextant.

You haven't

got any idea in the world the tape's run out on
you .
McDivitt

Right.

White

I think that it's a ve-ry, vezy unsatisfactory system .

It ranks right up along with the top ones,

and we ' ve already hit on some of them already.

The digital command system I · thought worked very
well.

I thought the light in there gave U$ a

good indication of several things.

It gave us an

indication of when the station was about to come
on and communicate with us.

We used this as a

clue to turn on our UHF to warm our transmitter
up so we would be ready when the transmission came
up.

I think updates from the ground came up in

a ve-ry orderly fashion.

I don't have any objec­

tion about that or any further comments .

Do you?

McDivitt

Ed, I thought it was very good.

White

Handled in a very good manner.

McDivitt

I think so.

White

The only update that I have an objection to is

<i8MftDl!

76

t hat they updated our t ime reference system and
had it inaccurately updated by a second .
McDivitt

Yes, I think there is a big fla p about that .

White

I 'd like to find out about that , too .

The r eal

time-transmitter , delayed- time transmitter, standby transmitter-- they seemed like they all worked
pretty well .

We had no use for the standby

transmit t er and we used the rea l - time and delayedtime transmitter throughout t he flight .

You don ' t

have any comments on this, do you?
McDivitt

I 've got one comment .

When we came over Guaymas

after our computer went out , and we ' d already
fouled the thing up , I know , they said they wanted
us to come right- side-up for a critical tape dump .
So I did , and I got a message from the ground sayi ng , "Put your Tape Playback to CONTINUOUS ."

So

I put the Tape Playback Switch to CONTINUOUS .
Pretty soon they called up and said , "Do you have
your TM switch to REAL-TI ME and DELAYED-TIME?"
I said, "No, I don't have.
to put it down there."

You 're going to have

They didn ' t bother telling

me that t hey didn ' t have any command capability
whatsoever .

I went ahead and put the Tape Play­

back to CONTINUOUS , which means that you 're dumping

77

all that tape.

If you don ' t have the ~eal- time­

delayed-time transmitters on, you're just dumping it into noth!e!lg.

You're erasing.

So we got

some pretty inadequate communications there.
should have said,
capability.

They

"We don 't have any command

Will you please place your tape

recorder and your TM switches so we can receive
it?"

We knew how to work the thing.

It ' s just

that the instructions we got conflicted with the

normal procedures.

Consequently we dumped all this

tape that really was critical.

I'm not sure how

much of it they got on the ground.

I'm not even

sure if they ever got any of it on the ground • .
because we got some not only inadequate but really
erroneous instructions.
White

Okay, communications---we covered them in coordination with the ground a little earlier.

I think

that the flight controllers handled our flight in
a very good manner.

I think that when they had

something to say, they said it , and when they knew
that we wanted to talk to them, they'd talk to us.
When they didn't have something to say, it was kept
in a good manner.

I thought it was a very profes-

78

McDivitt

Yes, I thought that they were to be commended .
As a matter of fact, when we have our world-wide
network debriefing or whatever the heck we ' re
going to have I really intend to applaud them
loud and long .

White

I thought the teamwork between the spacecraft
and the communicators on the ground was outstanding.

McDivitt

It was really good .

White

No adverse comment on anytime during the f l ight .

McDivitt

Shoot, if you wanted to talk to them they were
more than happy to talk to you .

A lot of times

they ' d come on and say, "This is Gu.aymas .
have your TM solid .
you .

We

We don't have anything for

If you have anything for us, we 'll be

standing by."

And that would be it .

really good , I thought.

They were

We've about covered

procedures .
White

Right, I think we've hit that too.

Okay, the

communication controls and switches--voice control
center--I've always been pretty happy with that .
McDivi tt

One other thing I want to comment on is the voice
control Center.

If we had carried that idiotic

..,

79

contraption that McDonnell had designed to keep
the moisture out of that thing , we would have
had one more hunk of junk in the spacecraft with
us.

It would have been a completely ·useless thing

because of the nwnber of times that we switched
switches on that VCC .

Heck , we switched switches

on the VCC more than all the other switches on
the spacecraft put together.

I think if we would

have had to pull off that big piece of plastic
every minute, it would have gone on the floor and
stayed there.
White

That's right.

That was a very poor fix to try to solve a bad
design.

McDivitt

Okay, why don't you talk about that sleep configuration?

White

Okay, with the sleep configuration , we lmew right
away we had bought a weenie .

The first time I

tried to go to sleep, we tried to t urn everything
off.

We tried turning all my volumes down to zero.

We turned to PUSH.JIIO.JI'ALK only, and I could still
sit there and hear it about a one by one level.
It was just enough so I could hear audibly what
was going on and under stand if I paid attention

80

to it .
McDivitt

If you really listened, you could hear .

White

That's right .

If you were very close to going to

sleep and something went on that was interesting ,
you could hear just enough to wake you up and
pull your interest to it.
rather difficult .

It made sleeping

We didn ' t want to disconnect

ourselves from the system a ltogether.

We ' d like

to have a way to actually tum the volume all
the way down and provide the astronaut · that ' s
awake the capability of controlling the voice
c~ntrol ccnter ' R volume so that he can turn the
sleeping astronaut ' s volume up and talk to him
anytime .
McDivitt

That ' s right .

I think what we really need in

there is an ON- OFF switch for each half of the

vcc.
White

So you can effectively cut him off and turn him
back on .

McDivitt

That ' s right.

You just reach over there and you

break t he communications with a simple ON-OFF
switch.

Then if you ' ve got to get to it in a

hurry , you j ust f l i p the thing back on and then

81

talk to him .

I don't know where on the VCC you ' d

mount it.
White

I think they can solve that problem pretty well.
It might not be in that manner but I think they
can solve it so you've got it definitely on or
off.

McDivitt

That's right. T.hey need a simple way of disconnecting the man from the c©mmunicat i ons center wi thout
disconnecting his--

White

I'd say that this was a very unsatisfactory condition.

When we finally went to get some rest, we

disconnected the communications cord at the helmet.

I think this is an extremely unsatisfactory

mode.

If we should go pressurized at any time

and have to pressurize our suits , we 'd just lose
communications between each other.

This would be

a very, very unsatisfactory situation.

I believe

that this should be corrected prior to the next
flight.

The .Jieacon Control, Adapter and l:\eentry-­

no comment,

Those were all right.

McDivitt

Yes, that was excellent.

White

The TM control transmitter and antenna--I don't '.
have any comments on them.

McDivitt

No, they were pretty well designed, I thought.

-

• · '5Q ►+F•9~~.W.,1,--+

82

White

That ' s right .

Okay , the electrical system--

8 . 6 Electrical System
White

Okay, t he systems
satisfactory .

monitoring.

I thought it was

We went through and monitored the

systems every time for the GO/NO GO checks, and
quit e a few times along the line in addition to
this.

So I thought the method of monitoring was

satisfactory.

I don't believe we really had any

way of monitoring the electrical power remaining.
McDivitt

Yes, that ' s a draw back, and we all know it, I

guess .
White

Right .

That ' s an unsatisfactory conditionmd

I don ' t know what we're going to do about it.
I think it's too much of a job to try to think
that you ' re going to sit in there and calculate
all the things you have on,and try to keep an
onboard plot of what electrical power you have
remaining .
McDivitt

Yes , I think this is a ground function .

I don't

think that we can realistically do it onboard the
spacecraft .
White

I don't believe we got any indication of how our
electrical power was going from the ground,except

83

for one time when they called us up and told us
we wer e 190 amp- hour s , I think it was 190 amphours , over-McDivitt

That was after we turned the computer off.

I

wanted to find out why we turned the computer off
and if we were really short on electrical power .
Then they told me we were 160 amp-hours over the
200 amp-hours cushion.

I almost went throught the

overhead .
White

I think I'd like to have had a little more informat i on from the ground on the status of our electrical system.

The mai n batteries--I have a com­

ment on them .

They started out with a charge of

about 24 volts and progressively decreased to the
point where I was a hair concerned about them.
They progressed down to the 22 . 5 reading and
began to shade lower than that near the end of
the mission .

I was using the parallax to be sure

I had a satisfactory reading on t he gages each
time .

I noticed they decr eased down to a minimum

of 22 . 5.

Maybe it got to 22 but it was getting

near t he end of the mission.
McDivitt

Ha , ha ! Maybe 22 .49 .

White

Just the way I 'd lean my head I could get the

7
iii> blBO.E~IJA:~
reading the way I wanted it.

Ha, ha!

The

squib batteries--our electrical briefing I
thought, · wa.s very good.

Everything behaved just

the way they told me .

The squib batteries star ted

out pretty high, around 27 or 28 volts , and they
progressively decreased in voltage as we went
through the mission .

The main batteries--every

time I checked them they always checked out at
about

9 • as far as the amps were concerned . The

adapter batteries--I was glad we'd had the briefing on them because I realized that knees on the
adapter batteries were in operation during the
launch when we got a high reading on the left
stack ammeter up around 27 or 28 amps, and we had
a reading of around,I believe,14 amps on the right
one.

I didn't alarm Jim with this information

because it was still below my cut-off point of about
30 amps or so.

I felt that it was due to the knees

in the adapter batteries causing unequal loadings
of the main batteries with respect to the adapter
batteries.
McDivitt

Hold it .

I want to make some comments about the

electrical system and the power as we used it .

85

When we powered down , we turned of.f the a . c.
power, t he QA.MS power, t he ACME": biag power, the
rate gyros, the horizon scanner, the IMU, the
computer, both FDI ' s , and the attitude indicator
lights.

We operated with as little in the way

of cockpit lighting as we possibly could.

It

got less and less and less as the flight progressed.
In earlier orbits we had a l l the lights on in the
cockpit- the over, the middle light , and the two
side lights .

Then £or the night time passes, as

the flight progressed, we got around to using the
red lights .

We finally got around to making the

night-side passes generally with one r ed light on
or one white light on, as we got more confidence
in the spacecraft .
power that way.

I think we save quite a bit o{

They were surprised that we were

160 amp-hours ahead , and I don ' t think that we
got that way by accident.
White

I ' ve got a comment to make on that.

We were both

watching the loadings and I could read them a
littl e better over there.

We started out operat­

ing arourd 14, maybe a l i ttle better .

The reading

on the combi ned amp-hours s l owly decreased down

86
and near the end of the mission, we were down to
12 or 13 amp-hours on unpowered down configuration.
That was as low as I saw it go, down around 12 .
McDivitt

Another thing that we did was that when we wer en't
actually planning on transmitting on one of the
radios, we were always putting the mode control
switch to INTERCOM, which would then cut the transmitter off the line.

You could actually see the

ammeter go down a little bit.

So I think that

by really powering down the spacecraft and getting
all the non-essential items off the line , we helped
ourselves a lot.

We got this 160 amp- hour cushion

because we really worked at it, not because it
just happened like that.
White

This takes a little diligence.

McDivitt

Yes , not because it was a miscalculation on the
guys who were planning the flight, but just the
fact that we really worked at keeping the lights
off , keeping the radios off, and keeping those
little bitty things down.

You know, you only

have to save two amps per hour .

We ran on a single

suit fan almost the entire flight, except when Ed
was getting warm when he was sleeping we ha d to

87
go to two suit fans.
White

Right.

When it got so uncomfortable that I

couldn't sleep, we would go over.

We really did­

n 't do that too much .
McDivitt

No , we didn't .

We made a real effort to keep the

electrical load down.

I think that it sort of

showed up there towards the end of the mission
when we really had enough spare power to run the
IGS through the last day--uselessly of course ,
but at leas t we ran it.
8 . 7 Computer
McDivitt

In the launch we had the computer in ASCENT .
was reading out the errors during launch.

F.d

I read

ou~ the rates which didn ' t require an;y information
from the computer.
White

I was readi~out the lack of errors most of the
time.

McDivitt

Lack of errors, right.

Why don't you discuss

the

error status.
White

I think we discussed it earlier and I'll just go
briefly through it.

We didn't have any error s

that I feel would be worth repeating during Stage I.
At guidance initiate we got a ful}-scale-down indication.

This indication I had been

told

88

fairly routine, and it appeared routine ' to me
too as it began to steer into zero and steered
right on into zero .

As we approached iSEXJO the

error started to increase a little bit and increased out to a little less than a degree in
pitch-down on the error needle .

Aside from that,

we didn ' t have ,,as far as I can see, any other error
that was worth talking about during launch.
McDivitt

Okay, at SECO + 20 the IVI ' s counted up as we
separated,rolled around, and did all the maneuvers
we were supposed to. The IVI's acted as they should .
When I got turned around and was faced toward the
spacecraft,I was in a hurry to get all these
things done .

I started thrusting and I went from

Ascent to Catch-Up, and then hit the Start Comp
button.~

I lost a couple of feet/second here ,

but this was sort of insignificant at the time.
The IVI's counted up in the Catch-Up Mode and they
operated properly throuehout the rest of the chasephase of the mission.

We were getting the kind

of information that we needed right there early
in the flight .

Ed had 52 punched in and it read

out at 30 feet/second, I think he said earlier .

89

White

Yes , I picked that up later on because I wasn't
even concerned with it since we had a good orbit.

McDivitt

Once we had a good orbit that kind of information
wasn't that important.

White

Do you want the IVI readings at this time?

McDivitt

Yes, you might just as well read them out.

White

The IVI readings at the time we decided to read
them --at

zero, zero, zero on the attitude indi­

cator~- 20 forward, right 11, down 5.

McDivitt

The attitudes weren't really what they should
have been, because we had a good insertion and
we had to go right then and we had to get turned
around and get at that booster.

I didn't fool

around with getting the spacecraft at.exactly the
right attitude to read out the IVI's.
that was of a :~;:i.demic interest .

I thought

It would be great

for post-flight analysis but it wasn ' t going to
help the flight at
to those things.

all.

So I didn ' t do justice

I'm sure that we can go back

and resurrect this thing to find out exact ly
what it was.
time .

It wasn't very meaningful at the

The orbit maneuvers consisted of really

just chasing the booster around and reading up the
IVI ' s as they came out.

We received all our updates

difi)~~FIDE~~llAuw-

90

properly.

We got the computer on and got it

loaded .

The DCS updates were going in and they

were gett Lng V fJ dfication on the ground.

One time

I remember we didn't g6t the DCS light .

As a

matter of fact, they sent the load up again and
we sti.l.l iid.n ' t get the DCS light.

They verified

on the ground that it was going in .
White

Well, the funny thing 'we.S when the computer wasn ' t
on we got a DCS light.

McDivitt

The DCS lights come on when they get set up for
the TX and send out a :r.ealbtime command,too.

White

Well, mRybe the TX when they sent up-·

They

kept telling us that they got a good load in it
and I had no light.

I really didn ' t quite bel ieve

them .
McDivitt

Neither did I.

As a matter- of fact, we had it

verified at the next station.
White

Okay.

McDivitt

And that ' s where the onboard computer thing ends .
I might go through what happened to the thing .
We were over the .States and h!;',,d the onboa rd computer
on for getting a new load in it.
over Florida .

I got just about

He said, okay, I could turn the

tffiFIDEr-4TIAL
computer off.

91

I turned the switches off and

nothing happened .

The comp l i ght stayed on

and I don ' t even think the ·malfunction light came
on , did it? No, it didn't. So I said, "Well, that 's
interesting that the darn thing doesn't go off. "
So we flicked the IGS power of~ and back on
quickl y and told them on the grotmd that it
didn't look l ike I could get the computer to go
off and stay off.
White

I think you told them you thought you had a
failure in the switch .

McDivitt

Yes, I told them it looded to me like I probably
had a failure i n the ON-OFF Switch or the ON- OFF
switchiqsfunction.

And they said okay .

So I

said, "What do you want me to do here?"

I knew

we could a l ways t urn it off by t urning the IGS off,
but I wasn ' t too keen on that , So they said, "Stand
by.

We' re going to have the experts check it. "

So we flew on out of communication with them.
I think they talked to me over Bermuda too, but
nothing of much importance.

They said to stand

by they were still checking it.

Then we got ove.c

Tananarive and I got this message to turn the

GQt◄ FIDE~~TIAk

92

switch to the ON position but to turn tie a . 0.
power to ACME,which was going to power down the
computer whether we wanted it to or not .

It

was a voice relay station but we weren't getting
the voine relayed.

We were just getting a message

sent up from somebody on the g~ound.

I ' m quite

sure we didn't have any controllers at Tananarive .
I don't r eally know who was talking to me .
SOUlf-!

Probably

COM TECH , So • not being able to discuss the

thi.ng with them and not knowing what the status
of my total electrical p,wer was at the tim., , I
went ahead and t·..1.r.ned them off. The comp light
or the malfunction light came on and then it sort
got dim H,nd wen-f: 1)ut.

Then I sort of figured that •s

the end of the ACPU.

So we put the thing back

on over Carnarvon and back off again and it
woul dn't come on.

It was dead,of course .

that's the life story of the computer.

So

Then we

played a lot of games afterward trying to ml'l.kc~
a dead man come back to lifA.
else on the computer.

I have nothing

I sure wished I'd have

had it though.

f'~t 1F1DfJM+IAit

..

93
8.8 Crew Station
McDivitt

Controls and displays. -okay, I' 11 talk about
that.

The s,equential Telelights

all operated

properly,--came on in the proper colors,
punched off and everythi.ng.
operated properly.

and

The event timer

The IVI operated properly.

The flight director indicator operated properly.
I would like to discuss the GLV fuel and oxidizer
pressure gages here for a minute .

We got about

a $25 million vehicle,! think,that depends almost
entirely on a launch.

We've got an onboard

manual ietection system ,or something like that .
White

Malfunction detection system.

McDivitt

Malfunction detection system .

An integral part

of the malfunction detection system, are the fuel
and oxidizer pressure gages for both the first and
second stages .

This is one of the abort criteriaI

On the scal e of these gages down below the glass
is a beautiful, beantiful set of lines and numbers
and hash marks ,tha.t are wrong. They updated the GLV
information and found out that these things were
in error by quite a bit.

No~ to take and fix

these gages would have taken a couple thousand
bucks.

I don't know exactly how much or how

94

long, but it would have taken a few dollars.

In­

stead we decided it would be simpler and cheaper
and a lot quicker to go ahead and paste some
paper decals over the top of the glass .

The

parallax with these things is horrendous .

The

decal s were pasted on over t he top of the glass
in such a manner that they completely obscure
the inside-the- glass readings.They also obscure the
center needles which are not only the clue to
what the taz1k pressures are but a clue to whether
you have any APS power, which is also critical .
When you cut these things back so that you can
see the inside needles ,
too .

you see the inside gage

I think this nickel-dime fix to ·our multi... ·!.

million doll ar vehicle is ridiculous.

I think

that we ought to get those inside gages painted
the way that they ' re supposed to be painted.

I

think we ought to end this Mickey Mouse gage
routine right now and get going on GT-5 ' s fuel
and oxidizer gages for both stages .
lous the way they are right now.
worked as advertised.

It's ridicu­

The a .l timeter

I mentioned that it went

down and back up again at around 100,000 feet .

95

The rate of aescent seemed to be all right.
accelerometer was okay.

The

The switches and circuit

breaker panels--! had no comment.

We knocked a

couple of switches and circuit breakers off during the course of the flight.

We always caught

them and got them back on quickly , or maybe we
didn't get them back on quickly.

We got them

back on quickly enough because nobody ever said
much to us about it.

They commented one time .

Two times,I think, they asked us if we turned something on or off.
White

I remember that .

McDivitt

Was one the A

One was over on my side.
pump

on the

s econdary

loop or the E pump on the secondary loop,or did
you turn that on?
White

No.

I think one of them was up there, and I for­

get how we got it on.
McDivitt

Maybe we just bumped it.

Yes, there was another

one over on your right-hand side and there were
a couple of them in the center circuit breaker ~
panel.

One time I know I bumped one on the left­

hand side circuit breaker panel.
was the-electronic timer.

~ ►~FlDWTlAIJ

I thought it

It was one right above

96

that.

I almost had a heart attack when I saw

that thing go down because it would have messed
up the whole time reference system .

I thought

the switches and circuit breaker panels were
very good .

I have no complaint about it.

think that's a well designed cockpit.

I

The mirrors

were fine and the swizzle stick was a real life
saver .

I can't reach the circuit breakers and

switches over on the right-hand side unless I

use the swizzle stick.

I had to do a lot of

switching when Ed was sleeping.

This swizzle

stick was the real answer.
White

I 've been always telling you to get some long
arms .

H~, ha!

I didn ' t use the swizzle stick

very much .
McDivitt

Yes, but you don't have to reach over and get
those switches all on the left-hand side .

White

I found the swizzle stick was quite useful for
unstowing items out, of the center stowage box.

McDivitt

That ' s right .

White

It was really good there.

I used that every time

when I unstowed.
McDivitt

It ' s a good piece of equipment .
.you want to ~

~

GiQ.f >.~tfit~

Okay , lighting- do

ting, Ed?

97

White

Okay, I think that the lighting to me was surprisingly good.

I think that at one time there

was a press to put two white lights on either
side on the instrument panel.

I think the lights

on the instrument panel should remain just as
they are.

I think we used the red light much more

than we used the white light.

There was quite a

bit of time when you had to do a lot of out-thewindow operation at night and you wanted to have

some reference inside. The red light doesn't
seem to destroy your night ~eference at all.

So

I think the instrument lights, the two on either
side above the panel, are satisfactory.

I also

thought the del etion of the red light in the cabin
light and the substitution of a bright white
light was certainly good.

There were several times

when I wanted to get a reading on something right
away and I didn't want to fool around with dim
lighting.

I would switch on the big bright light

and I was almost always able to get good readings.
Now when the sun was really bright in you face,
there was a period of time in which your eyes
had to adjust to the instrument panel before you

.e@t'4FIDEMTIAL

98

could make the readings .

I think you could put

spot lights in there and not get by that problem.
McDivitt

That's exactly what I was go ing to say .

Lights

aren't going to solve that problem .
White

No, it's just plain bright outside.

When you look

back in, even though you have your lights on , it's
fairly dark inside .

I personally wasn ' t troubled

by this very many times during the flight .

Were

you , Jim?
McDivitt

No, I wasn ' t.

White

I didn't feel that was too bad .

S~ actually, I

felt that the lighting , although not abundant ,
was adequate.

I think the actual light ing of the

instruments would certainly be nicer if we had
individual instruments lit up.

Oh, ene thing -­

several times I would like to have had a flashEght in there, something where I could direct a
real beam of light.

The little side light& I

thought, were close to being useless .

I didn' t

use my little side light, the auxiliary light ,
very much at all.
McDivitt

As a matter of fact , I didn ' t either .

White

Very seldom .

I think that if we're going to have

•Gl>J~LOiMIWs.

99

a little auxiliary light like thatl it
ought to be a light-McDivitt
White

It ought to be a big auxiliary light !
a directed beam.

Ba, Pa!

This goes right back to

something that we forgot to point out in water
management.

I think we ought to point it out

right now loud and clear.

I think that we have

to have a system in which we can gage the water
outflow.

I think the medical people feel fairly

strong about this also.

I know that I restrained

from drinking because I didn't want to drink all
the water out of there prior to the end of the
four days.

I got a feeling Jim was doing the same

thing.

I was doing exactly the same thing.

McDivitt

That's right.

White

I didn't drink abundantly at any time during the
flight except perhaps right before the r3entry.
I felt I was taking quite a bit of moisture with
my reconstituted food.

I felt that if I overdid

it t he first part of the fligh~, we wouldn't get
through the last part, because water is so critical.
McDivitt

That's right.

We've got a number of expendp.~les

like OAMS, and we've got a couple of gages for

t◄ p=rr,aq l¥A l

100

the propellants .

We ' ve got the EGS oxygen .

got quantity gages for that .

We ' ve

We ' ve got electrical

power and we ' ve got .ways of measuring that from
the ammeter .

We've got food and we can a l ways

count that .

But when we get down to water, which

is just as critical as all these other things in
flyir.g_ long duration missions, t here ' s not a single
way in the world we can measure how much we've
gotten or how muchi. we ' ve drunk .

I think it ' s

imperative that we get some method of measuring
this t hing before we try to fly another long duration flight.
White

The white light on the little utility light was
not satisfactory.

We tried to look to see if we

could find out what we had in the cabin bottle- McDivitt

Water tank .

White

And that wasn ' t satisfactory.

I think we ought , ,

to have some t ype of a metering system which
would enable us to actually determine the water
that we 've utilized and in some way koow that
we ' re getting it out of t he adapter .
know .

I don ' t

We need to look into the whole water

metering system, which is non- existent, and see

ic!o~{Bt some kind of system.
FNilAt

101

McDivitt

You lmow even if we can ' t get something that they
can pipe into the spacecraft, at the very least
we ought to TM the pressura.nt pressure down to the
~ound and back up again , or something, and get ,
some sort of calibration curve--

White

So that we'd lmow what we have remaining in the
a .dapter.

McDivitt

We could at least call the people down at the
ground and say, "How much water do we have left?"

White

That ' s right.

And I think we ought to be able to

tell what our bottle has inside of it in the
spacecraft .
McDivitt

Yes, I 1:h:ink they're really two separate things .
I think first of all you 've got to know the
total water that you've got left and the r ate
that

it's going down.

I think the second thing

that Ed's pointing out is that we don't even have
a:n:y way of telling what the water supply is in the

spacecraft.

The first clue that you get that

you're out of water is you just run out of water.
White

The lighting on the water management panel I
think is just about non-existent.
in the daytime.

You can see it

If you know the position of the

102

switches and lmow where they're supposed to be,
you can make sure they ' re located properly and on
the proper indication, but I can 't read anything
down in that area at night.

The lighting is very

poor in that area.
McDivitt

One thing that I'd like to comment on here a
little bit is that

~

amber light that I insisted

that they put on the Preheat-Flush

switch over

back of the water management panel .

I felt it

came in real handy.

Two times during the course

of the flight I left the Preheat switch on after
I flushed it for short periods of time to make
sure we didn't have any ice left in the lines .
I did it on every occas ion, but two times the
thing that called my attention to the fact that
I still had the thing on , was the fact I could
see that orange light-amber light-shining up between the food box and the front of the spacecraft .
I could tell that I had another light on in the
back.
White

And so I think the left panel, center panel , right
panel, pedestal, and console are not lit abundantly,
but are lit what I ' d call adequately and perhaps

a little marginal in some cases .

I had no diffi­

culty in reading the des i gnations on the switchbreaker panels.
quately also.

I think they were lighted adeI'm not going to say they're

lighted well , because I don ' t think the lighting
is real good in the spacecraft.

The water

management panel isn ' t lighted properl y .

I 'm

not sure we reall y have to have it l i ghted too
well .

The utility lights, I t hink,as they are

now.,are very close to being useless .

It's like

taking a match and trying to use it to find your
way around .

It doesn ' t provide enough light .

From time to time I would have liked to have had
a light which had a little stronger output of
light available,~ so that I coul d-- I several times
wanted to look behind my seat for things at night
and I ' d like to look down into the area in the
water management panel light.
McDivitt

Yes , I think probably the wattage on those bulbs
should go up an order of magnitude to make them
effective.

White

You use it so seldom that it wouldn ' t be a big
power use.

You ' d only use it when you needed it ,

104

It wouldn't be something you ' d use very often.
McDivitt

I'll tell you what it all is,though.

When you

want it, you want something that you can see .
You just can ' t see with those things at all .
White

I don ' t particularly understand what the interior
and exterior lights mean .

McDivitt

Do you?

I think the exterior lighting is probably the
lighting that could probably be used for docking .
We didn't have any exterior lights.

White

I thought the intensity control of the lights was
an absolute necessity and I think it was satisfactory.

I think the fingertip lights are quite

useful , and were commented on already. They should
have the Lexan covers, and we've also commented
that they should be located between
tip and the first joint.

the finger­

The onboard data--now

here we come to a very useful piece of equipment.
Ha , ha!

I believe I made a considerate effort

three times to

update that thing, and I never

got up with it any one of those times .
McDivitt

We had three positions on our flight plan strip.
We had launch,the first five minutes-- ·t'he next
time I tried to get it was 23 hours.

The next

105

position was 88.
White

:Ha, ha '

And neither time did I catch up really where we
were .

I turned and turned and turned and then

got distracted into something else .
McDivitt

Quite frankly , the only things I, ever saw in that
flight plan roller were the 23- hour and the 88hour times and I never even read what it said .

White

I didn't quite agree with--

McDivitt

84 it was, I'm sorry.

It wasn ' t 88, it was 84 .

And Ed wrote something on here. He wrote my
parachute-deploy time .
White

I wrote your times during l'.eentry on there .

McDivitt

It would have been much more useful if there
hadn ' t been anything on it at all.

White

Yes , we put a few times up there--

McDivitt

I couldn't read those things, which were the only
numbers that I really was interested in at all .

White

40CK

2+ 38 • Ghute 12+ 33 .

The only two that I

thought you really needed were those two.
them on there.

I put

I diat t thoroughly believe Gus

when he said you ought to take the thing out,
throw it away, and leave a hole in the instrument
panel .

But I ' m inclined to agree with him r ight

106

Now.

You ought to take it out, throw it away ,

and leave a hole in the instrument panel .

But

honestly, what I do think ought to go up t here ,
is a good digital clock readout .
McDivitt

I don ' t think an analog clock in that

position

would do you any good though.
White

They both have a high degree of parallax .

McDivitt

Yes, the parallax would make it usel ess .

I think

if it goes in there it ought to be digital .
White

Yes, a one- second clock.

McDivitt

I ' m not really sure that we're going to get a
digital clock in because of the

complexity and

the weight and all that jazz.
White

Let ' s talk about the clocks right now , Jim.

McDivitt

Okay, let ' s talk about the clocks .

White

I ' ll hit mine and then you hit yours and then
there should be a conclusion that we could come
to .

McDivitt

Very good .

White

I think the clock on my side is unsatisfactory.
I wouldn ' t recommend flying it on another flight .
It's difficult to read .

There are two hands

going aroun~ keeping track of minute~ and somet~

Q

ou read the wro~

minute hand.

~,FtDEf>ffl~~-

The one

107

that ' s keeping your hack-¼t's easy to mistake for
your minute hand.

The way the face is marked it ' s

difficult to read the minutes out .
interfere with each other.

The hours

The whole readability

of the clock is unsatisfactory and the readability
of the hands is unsatisfactory.

SQ I think the

clock is out in all counts as far as I ' m concerned.
I kept watching Jim's clock over there and I think
I could get a better Greenwich Mean Time off of

his clock than I could on mine on my side of the
instrument panel.
McDivitt

Hey, let me comment on mine .

I thought the reada­

bility of t hat Accutron 24-hour clock was excellent.
The accuracy of it was lousy.

It lost four or

or f ive seconds every day or more .
about every 24 hours.

I reset it

My Omega wrist wat ch that

I had set on GMT never lost a second, except I
forgot to wind it one day, and it ran down .
stopped.

It

Ha, ha!

White

I was guilty of the same thing.

McDivitt

But the Accutron clock on my side of the instrument panel, that they put on as sort of an
afterthought, was indeed a fine clock as far as

~ee, ◄ rrAL

108

readability.

It didn ' t have any chronometer func­

tion to it at all .

It had strictly a second,

minute , and hour hand on it.

It told you GMI'

and it didn't tell you anything else.

It told

you GMI' in a way you could read it .

You could

read out the minutes, you could read out the hours,
and you could read out the seconds.

I really

didn't have any trouble with it at all .

It had

a nice thin second hand which I find to ~e much
more useful than those great big blunt t hings
with huge arrows on the end of them.

I hat e to

lose the chronometer feature on that right-hand
side, but I do think that the readability of
this thing ,as far as the GMI' is concerned, is so
much superior to that other clock that it isn ' t
even comparable.
White

I'm not sure that the chronometer function on
that side is really too important .

McDivitt

• Don' t you?

White

No, I would be perfectly happy to go ahead and
take that ,out and put a good clock on there in
Greenwi ch Mean Time.
comments on--

Now I 've got some further

CO f\J FIDEf\lTlAL
McDivitt

109

I guess what you end up with is two clocks that
aren ' t any good .
good .

Either one of them aren ' t any

You ' d rather end up with one clock that

was good.
White

Yes , the way it ' s combined together right now ,
it ' s really not too good.
burn on my watch .

I hacked your OAMS

I work with two clocks on my

left arm and it worked out r eal well for me.

I

had elapsed time on one and I had Greenwich Mean
Time on the other .

I used the elapsed timer as

the one on which I made my hacks .
got adequate backup.

So I feel we

If one poops out , you can

use the other one to make your time on.

So, I

think we should have a good clock to keep track
of the time in the spacecraft on the instrument
panel .

Now ,

I'd like to get back on the clocks

again.

I think that elapsed time is the only kind

of time that we ought to have in the spacecraft .
I think that we ought to have a good method of
keeping track of elapsed time.

I think probably a

ten-hour clock that keeps track of each ten-hour
incement that you pasa to a high degree of accuracy, is the kind of clock that we need.

I don't

0Gb liUailJJlAL

110

know what we're going to do about wrist watches.
Maybe they 'll design us a ten- hour wrist watch
that we can wear.

I don't see any reason why

they can't .

They can design twelve-hour ones just

as easily.

We 're going to go to this in Apollo.

We should face up to it and go ahead and spend the
money to get ourselves a proper t iming piece of
equipment and get our ranges and stuff operating
on elapsed time.

In long flights this is the kind

of thing that ' s going to be of interest .

It was

confusing to me, to tell you the truth , to operate
on Greenwich Mean Time and elapsed time through-out the flight.
tracting.

I was constantly adding and sub­

They'd call us up Greenwich Mean Times

and I'd want to convert them to what I was using
on my flight plan.

I found this a gr eat incon­

venience.
McDivitt

I concur with what Ed said.

I ran the whole

flight plan using elapsed time except for the
times where they called a specific GMT time
perform a function .
face wrist watch.

to

I did it off of a twelve- hour
I added up all my twelve -hour

incements and came to whatever I wanted.

If I

111

had something like 83 hours and 15 minutes , I
had to figure out that that was six times around
the clock and another 11 hours and another 15
minutes .

Obviously,not the best way in the world

to do it , but the only way that was practical from
the standpoint of the flight plan .
White

Well, to tell you the truth , Jim, I feel strong
enough about that

elapsed time that I would be

happy to go with that type of a system of timing,

and just go ahead on elapsed t i me all the way and
use twelve-hour incements.

They would call up

your time and elapsed time and use your own clock
to keep track of it .

I felt it was simple enough

also to do it in this manner .

But I feel that

this is ini'erior to having a good elapsed timer
and ten- hour digital incements.
McDivitt

I tell you I hate to see us get involved in some!..
thing where you 've gpt a clock thats so difficult
to read,where you've got to add up twelves and-­

White

Now you're on the other side of the fence now!

McDivitt

No, I think that we ought to do things like retrofire time a.~d that' s ort

of

thing

in a

standard time that you can use-:.. something like GMT .

g?t 1~18 Et fFt,-,L

112

White

Well, you really needtime.

McDivitt

-elapsed

If we had elapsed time- -

If we had a good elapsed timer onboard the spacecraft, I would say that there ' s no doubt about it .
Elapsed time.

White

I think we ought to start working on it right
now .

McDivitt

Elapsed time is the way we should go .

I don ' t

t hink that with the timing systems we 've got
available for the Gemini that we want to go to
elapsed time for the whole mission .
White

Trying to get our data back from this f l ight is
going to be a horrible mess because of those two
timing systems .

McDivi tt

I know it .

I agree.

Before we lai.mched , we knew

that we wanted to run it in elapsed time , and
there wasn ' t any doub't about it .
White

I think maybe if we make the point str ong enough
maybe they ' l l get busy on it .

McDivitt

You ' re right . l,,J,e'll get going on it .

Whi te

Okay , why don ' t you take the checklist cards , Jim?

McDivitt

The checklist cards .

We had two complete sets of

car ds that were broken up into t wo groups .

Qt@ tffl4f11D8JWA L

We

C9f<JFIIDE~~IJAl

113

had the launch, insertion, M:>de II and M)de III
aborts, EVA, the suit check and all the things
that we were going to use in the first five orbits
of the flight on one set of cards.

We had another

set of cards from Pre-Retro Checklist down to the
post landing and emergency egress .

The cards

included all the plots that were needed to do all
the retrofire and to make corrections to take
care of all the non- nominal things that might
happen to us during the retrofire .

We also had

in this group of cards a card that we used to contain the final retro information such as with
OAMS or without OAMS

burns , time to reverse bank,

and all the other things that we had.

It was a

format , something that cou1d be easily held in
our hands and was actually used during the launch,
during insertion, and during reentry .

We actually

had these cards out so we could check them off.
White

I thought the only thing we would have out during
these t wo critical busy periods of time were these
two easy- to-hold , easy-to-operate, hand-held card
checklists.

The rest of the stuff was all stowed

away .

c:@ ► H•I1.>6hlil4'.L

114

McDivitt

We got every checklist

that was required to make

the spacecraft run on these two sets of cards,
which together were about 3/4 of an i nch thick .
White

I feel that we had a real workab l e solution to
the problem.

These things were the same size as

those carried on GT- 3 .

They were much more ex­

panded than what GT- 3 •had.

We had the whole

how-to-operate the spacecraft routine on these
cards.
McDivitt

The preparation and availability of them-- is
this from a training standpoint .

That i s later

in the brief.
McDivitt

Well , anyway, we actually received our cards at
about 8:00 the night before the launch .

White

That ' s the thing that I was hollering about the
loudest not to have happen and it happened .

I

understand why it happened, but-McDivitt

We had so many changes in the flight plan and
nobody was working on turning this stuff out .
Our time

was so filled with over- all t rai ning

and the change in flight plan that we just

didn ' t

have time to go--, We did not have time to go
through the checklist over and over.

00-lstEtDEtJIJA L

When we did

115

go through them it took too long to get the
thing back to us .

Dick Benson came down to the

Cape and did an absolute marvelous job, I think ,
in getting these things turned out .
White

I think he did, too .

I think we all owe him a

real vote of confidence.
McDivitt

That's right.

He did an outstanding job .

White

I think the biggest confidence builder that you
had, Jim , was when we started getting. these books .

McDivitt

That ' s right.

Shoot, I was worried about us get­

ting ready for the flight because I didn ' t think
we would be able to get all this stuff together.
'Finally he showed up and really went through it 9
but it doesn ' t change the fact that these checklist cards and data books didn ' t arrive until
8: 00 the night before the flight .

changes that had to be made .
bed about 9: 30 .

We had a few

I guess I went to

Dick Benson and Martin Miller

were still in our conference room making changes
to our books.

So a lot of t hese things we didn ' t

see until we flipped them out in flight .

I think

our data books, as we had them laid out, couldn ' t
have been better.

Well, I shouldn't say that;

116

there is always room for improvement .
White

Yes, I think we could organize them a little
better for utility and use .

We had so many

things that

changes in so,..many

got put in at the end.

It got so that they were

put in in a bit of a helter-skelter manner, but
certainly they were easy to find .
McDivitt

Well, I don ' t know.

I was really q_uite pleased

with the outcome.

I think that the general ar­

rangement of one data book and two-- .whabever we

ought to call those other books-White

What did we call those other books?

McDivitt

Two Experiments and Spacecraft Procedures and
Flight Plan - 3o uks--

White

Two procedures and one data .

McDivitt

Yes , two procedures books and one data book .

One

thing I would have changed -- I would have expanded
the flight plan and made maybe two or three times
as many pages as we did .

We could have written a l l

the notes right in it and had enough room to make
it intelligible.

Because it turns out , tha:t!s

where we really kept all of our notes .
White

Yes .

McDivitt

Right on the flight plan.

• 8t-tftfl~E ►•ffi l-A L♦

117

White

About the way they had it initially was pretty
good.

Maybe that ' s a little more than we need,

but-McDivitt

No, I don't think it is, Ed.

I think that is the

way it should be.
White

This is a whole hour on one page .

McDivit t

Really?

White

Yes .

So later on, you see, they went from one

hour dovm to six hours on a page .

Maybe if they

cut that in half and made two or three hours on
a page--this is probably about the-McDivitt

Two hours on a page for our flight would have
made 50 single sheets or 25 double pages .

That

would not have been bad .
White

That probably would have been just about the ·
right length .

McDivitt

We'd have gotten a lot more out of our notes, I
think, because we found ourselves scribbling in
places where it was pretty hard to determine
where you were .

White

The requirement

to mak~ ·changes i-n the bo0k after

the flight goes· on is ab5o;tut-ely nil .

So , I thi nk

118

that rings should be replaced with something that
doesn't come undone .

My rings came undone sev­

eral times during the flight and luckily only
one at a time came undone.

It would have been

a real mess if a:ny of these books would have come
apar~ because it would have destroyed numerical
sequence.

So , I think something other than rings

ought to be used . .
McDivitt

I tell you one thing I found.- -that size boo.k and

that concept that we had, I think , was really good .
White

That was just the right size.

McDivitt

It ' s just the right size.

Their sheets are big

enough where you can write a.lot on them .
White

They ' re easy to handle .

McDivitt

They ' re small enough so they ' re easy to handle .
They ' re easy to stow .
suit.

They fit into the flight

When we launched, I had both flight sets

of data cards in my right lower pocket and the big
data book and my procedures book in my left- hand
lower pocket.

I had all the checklists right on

my spacesuit..
White

I had one procedure book and both my cards.

McDivitt

And both your cards .

So that between. the two of

~PIDE~4TIA1

119

us we had all the data books right on the flight
sui~ which was just right where we wanted them.
Whit e

Another thing we did - -we hand carried this equipment down to the spacecraft to be sure it was
there on l aunch .

McDivitt

The maps , overlays, and star charts we should
lump all together along with all the other junk
that we carried in the data case .

White

Let's start with the star charts.

That's easy.

I thought the star chart was satisfactory. I
think you used the one with less stars on it
than I had .
McDivitt

Yes .

White

I used my own one that J fly with all the time
and I was quite happy with it .

I think t l.is is

exactly what you need and I don't believe you
need to overla~ two times around, but that wasn't
for the chart .
McDivitt

Yes, and really the flight chart, the one that
was actually designed for the spacecraft, was designed ,30 that this swiveling out the window dis play fit on it .

It was a certain size to take care

of that and had a lot of dead space out on the

C~'4fFIDE~~TIAl

120

edges .

I would have rather seen the stars ex­

panded more so that we could tell it.

We used two

polar plots of stars that were put out for the
Apollo thing that we picked up on our training.
We actually f l ew with one of the training things.

I took one out of my brief case.
White

Those weren't put out by Apollo. Those were put
out at Oll<r request.. Remember? We asked for a--

McDivitt

Yes, but I thought they came from the Apollo office .

White

No, they came from our own Flight Crew S uppart .

McDivitt

I know we requested them , but I thought that's
where they dug them up.

White

No, they got them from--

McDivitt

Okay.

White

See, what they did is they added on all the Apollo
navigation stars .

They came from our own boys in

FCSD.
McDivitt

Those polar charts are really the cat ' s meow.

White

All those charts are pretty good .

McDivitt

So I thought the star charts sure gave us all the
information we needed.

The maps and overlays--

I think we really ought to cover the maps and overlays by the experiments.

The map with the sliding

121

overlay of the orbits, I thought was a real good
tool.
White

Very easy, yes .

McDivitt

Yery easy to use and I am sure glad we came up
with that .

White

I think also carrying

pre-plotted orbits on the

· maps was also useful and stayed pretty- McDivitt

That ' s right .

Right at the last second we decided

to take four maps that were glued back to back ao
we had two sheets .

They were on a sticky- back

which made them reasonably thick and durable .
One of them had no orbits on it , one had one to
22 , another one had 22 to 44, and another one bad

44 to 66 . You could look through there and you
could get a quick reference of where you were going
to be at a certain time .

The times did get off,

but you were only off a little bit .

122

White

You can keep track of how far you're off.

McDivitt

You knew about where you ' re going to be .

As Ed

sa.ys,as the time went on you could tell a.bout
where you ' re going to be just by knowing the correction .

It didn't change much .

these to be pretty useful .

So, we found

We didn't really get

to start using them until the second day .
White

I didn ' t know you had them in there .

McDivitt

We took them out, I guess, one time when you were
sleeping just for the heck of it and, my gosh, they
started working pretty well.

White

I used them almost exclusively once we got them
out.

McDivitt

Yes .

White

We had a l ot of other information onboard and I
don't know whether we should go into all that
stuff now?

McDivitt

Oh , yes , I took schematics of all the systems
right out of the GOH.

I didn ' t ever have to use

them .,but I thought it was worthwhile having them
along.

Everybody was getting so screwed up on

the water management panel and I took my notes
on the water management panel with me .

ce~~Fl0.ENJJAL

I had a

• corsiFJOEffflAL

123

couple of drawings.
McDivitt

I had what happened when I put all those valves
in a lot different positions.

You know when you

compare something like that digital computer with
the water management panel you certainly think
the computer would be more difficult to operate .
But after the million conflicting descriptions we
had on the water management panel,I think we all
agree that it was the worst in the spacecraft.
8.8

Stowage
White

Well, I guess I was the chief stower and unstower.

McDivitt

All I did was take the food out .

White

I thought the stowage in and out of the center
stowage box was probably the easiest place to get
in and out of .

The boxes were easy to slide in

and out and the stuff was easy to put in and out .
I felt that the right-hand wing box was tough to
get in and out of.

Getting in to get the bags

full of equipment took a little bit of time.
When I got to actually stowing the refuse back
in the right 'hand box, it was easy enough for me
just to reach over my left shoulder and put the
items in without even turning around .

It was

124

pretty easy to use as a trash can.

The stowage

of the items of equipment in the footwell, to me ,
was not objectionable at all during launch and
reentry.

The ventilation module which was stowed

on the left side of the right footwell was well
out of my way during these times and offered no
impairment to me whatsoever.

Something that was

a bit of a surprise to me was all t he equipment
we had in there, that we were not able to jettison after EVA ,

I knew we were in for a bit of a

problem with so much equipment.

I think the stow­

age of the miscellaneous pieces of equipment
underneath your legs back up in the heel in back
of the stirrup area is
for

. pretty good s torage

almost all of the loose items during flight.

Jim and I had the a r ea just chucked full.
McDivitt

This was not any big su£prise.

Remember how we

were talking about how we were going to put all
that stuff up?
White

We were going to put a big refuse bag in there .

McDivitt

We decided that the most likely place to put these
big items would be back underneath the seat because we weren 't going to keep our legs back

125

there.
White

We never did get them back there.

There was no possibility to put them back there
once we filled it up .

McDivitt

Yes, but even if we wanted to, I don't think there
was any big desire to put them back there.

White

It would have been nice to stretch but that's
just about all .

That would have been from time

to time.
McDivitt

That's right .

White

I found that actually the thing that I appreciated
the most was having a lower seat so I could actually stretch my legs out forward than actually
behind and bending my knees.

McDivitt

Yes, I was more interested in straight"ening my
legs out than bending them back more .

White

I couldn ' t have done that if they hadn ' t corrected
that seat.

I was able to get in and use the stow­

age in the refuse box on my side fairly easily.
White

This is the rubber covered box.
wasn ' t quite as easy to get into .

Jim said his
I had to get

into a certain position to get back there, but it
sure surprised me.
about useless.

I thought it would be just

126

McDivitt

Well, I got things out of it .

I got a defecation

bag out one time and I got another little bag out .
I don't know what else I had back there .
White

The right hand box with the clamp l ock was easy
to get in and out of .

I stored things from time

to time in there .
White

Yes, I found that the most useful storage area
that I had was the right-hand little velcro covered container right down by my right

knee .

I

kept all the slides for the cameras and the miscellaneous little pieces of equipment in it .

I

felt that was a very useful container.
McDivitt

Is that the one with the canvas cover on it?

White

Yes, I really used that one .

McDivitt

Yes, that was pretty nice.

White

The periscope container I didn't use much at all .
I really didn't need to use it.

I kept the blood

pressure adapter in it throughout the whole
flight.
McDivitt

The left-h8Jld aft food box actually had food in
it.

It was pretty difficult to get the first

piece out .

It was a long hard struggle, but I

finally got one piece out.

Once I got one piece

out~the rest of it was a real snap.

cbN~?fA!t

They had the

things taped together .

I l eft the door open the

whole flight after we once unstowed it.

I would

leave a meal floating out so that when I wanted
to get a meal I would reach up and grab the meal
that was floating loose.

I would pul l the tape

out until I got a hold of the tape so I could
force another meal out of the box .

Then I woul d

cut the first meal off and we'd eat it.

I managed

to get all the food out of the box ~ithout getting
out of my seat.

The left-hand side box had the

film stowed in it and it was easily accessible.
I think the most useful stowage place that I had
in the spacecraft was the little Volkswagen-type
bag that we had made up and bolted on the center
pedestal .
White

Oh , that was a jewel .

McDivitt

We kept our checklists, maps , data books , and
procedure books in it.

When we went to sleep and

had a change of command and we wanted to get to
one of the pieces of equipment that the other
gu:y had,

we almost invariably stuck it in that

little pouch .

I really thi.nk the most useful

i8t~Fi8~

128

thing that we had put on that spacecraft were
those little pouches.
White

Yes, I think the pouch could even be made a little
bit bigger.

McDivitt

I think it could, too.

White

Then it could receive a little bigger item and
perhaps have a little more volume that it could
expand out to.,
useful item.

I think that it was a very

We used that as storage area more

than any other.
McDivitt

That's right.

White

I used the long khaki refuse bag on the side for
various things, but the· main thing I use it f or ,
once_we got the flight going,was a refuse ca...
I would put all my refuse in there until I got
a full container of it.

Then I would package it

up and put it back in the right .1.a.nd box.

I

thought it was very useful . .
McDivitt

I used it for all kinds of things.

I stored your

Mae West in it, and I had some of the camera
equipment in it when we were doing EVA .
McDivitt

When I got all the good pieces fished out of it,
I finally started putting trash in it.

129

White

We both have an interesting item on this .

Well ,

I emptied mine out all the way , but I think you
enter ed with it full of trash .
McDivitt

I reentered with that bag full of trash and it
didn't tear off .

White

It was in pretty good shape .

McDivitt

It was light-weight trash .

Papers and things

like that .
White

I have a comment on the other little trash bag ,
I never used it .

McDivitt

Neither did I .

I would get them out and I did not

even know where they were .

Yes , I think it ' s

just too small .
White

Yes , it ' s just too small and I think that Volkswagen pouch can be improved upon .

I think both

right and left canvas storage bags we~e very
adequate and should be continued .

I think i t's

satisfactory just the way it is .
McDivitt

They could make the -Velcro strips on it a little
longer 8Jld the Velcro strips attached to the
spacecraft a little longer so that it didn ' t have
the big curls on the edge .
and make an opening.

It tended to curl i n

I never could get the thing

'2

130

c l osed.
8 .8

8.8

8 .8

Belts
White

The bel t s worked satisfactorily.

McDivitt

Yes , mine wor ked very good .

Harness
McDivitt

Harness .

Okay .

White

The harnes s was satisfactory .

Life Vests
McDivitt

Life vests.

Very good.

White

Very good .

McDivivitt

I might comment on those l i fe vests.

I never

took my life vest off my r estraint harness the
whole time.

It wasn't i n the way at all and I

was amazed that I didn't pop them.

I always pop

them in the simulations .
White

I was waiting for you to pop one.

But I was sur­

prised with the ease I could t ake t hem of f and
put them on weightless.
son at a l l.
8.8

Ther e 's just no compari­

That's an easy task.

Waste Disposal System
White

I thought the defecati on bags worked as well as
anything we had.

Ther e isn't anything you're

going t o do to make it go to the bottom of the

131

bag when you use it .

I think you should be

familiar with how to close the bag .

I only used

one bag and I think you were a two - bag man .
McDivitt

I was a two-bag man .

White

The stuff didn't float out of the bag or anything .
I would permit t he thing to remain open while I
used the paper.

I actually used the pa.per as kind

of a charging n.echanism to push t he stuff on down
in the bag.

Y)u 1mow like loading the cannon .

Then I sealed it up on top .

There was a tendency

for the fecal material to be up on the sticky part ,
which m5de tle closing not quite as nice as I
would like i ' to be , but I was able to close it
up all right

I broke t wo of the disinfectant

bags and I c it the bags .

There were two different

kinds of dis mfectantJ , One of them came in a bag
inside a bag and the other just came in a bag .

I

was a little suspicious of that one , so I cut it
first and I think you did that , too .
McDivitt

I did that to a couple of mine .

I still think

that those ba 5s break too har d.

I hate to have

to cut those things before I st i ck them in there .
I cut one and the darned thing floated back out
again and I didn't notice it .

C8MFIDE~~TI.Asl

I had the bag just

C~MFIDE~~TIAb

132

about sealed up when I noticed this thing float ing around inthe spacecraft.

I had to push

it back down in there .
White

When I cut it, I got the stuff on me and a little
bit around .

The two that I broke , that were

contained inside the plastic bag, seemed to work
all r i ght .

On the whole I was satisfactorily

pleased with the defecation bags.

I felt also

that the liquid was easy to work into it.

I

think that ' s a satisfactory system.
McDivitt

You really have that knack of kneeing .

White

One thing, it is just like oleomargarine was -. Ha, ha!

McDivitt

A little different in coloL Ha, ha!

White

One thing t hat I want to comment on was the toilet
paper with the darn wax job.

I did not think the

toilet paper was satisfactory.

It had a waxy

back so that it was like the back side of a Sears
Roebuck Catalog.
McDivitt

That was not the side you were supposed to use.

White

I know it but the other side had such a small
amount of absorbency .
so

This is why you always used

darn much paper J im McDivit~

Ha , ha!

133

I found that the tissues that we car ried in the
little containers were very satisfact ory for the
purpose .

I think they can leave the paper out of

those bags and provide us with adequate tissues.
Whil e we ' re talking about these tissues , let ' s
go into the container .
McDivitt

That 's right .

The container .

White

Yes, the container failed .
a similar manner .

Both of them failed in

We had tissues just loose .

They were tucked in around the spacecraft .
McDi vitt

The zippers that went around these tissue bag
holders ripped out completely.
separated-

Actually they just

almost immediately, as soon as we took

them out of the bag.
White

And both in a similar manner right off the bat .

McDivitt

So we had a bunch of tissues that were not contained in anything.

White

I think the containers were ver:y good containers .
The method of dispensing would be fine , but they
a l l fell out the side .

That ' s the way I used mine

for the rest of the time .

I used those tissues

for all kinds of things .

I cleaned my window with

them .

I cleaned the camera lenses with them .

I

4'·€»~f.. 19 E~~TI AL '

134

1

cleaned my v isor with them .
sal

salt spray.

I got my vis or so full of

Remember when I got that -salt spray

all over them during the ENA and my visor was dir,ty?_

I cleaned everything all up .

I substituted it for t he

toilet paper in the defecation bags .

I think this

is another thing I am certainly glad we requested .
We started out by requesting lense t i ssues, and as
it ended up thi s is what we got .
McDivitt

We wanted one little bag and ended up with two big
bags ,and I think we could have used another one.

White

I used every bit of mine .

I think I could have

used them more properl y if I had a good dispenser
system .
McDi vitt

I ' d grab too many.

Those big towels weren ' t too bad either .

They ' re

great for sopping up the urine and stuff .
White

Yes , they were great urine mops.

If we had had a

big spill of some kind t hat's what you'd want to
use , because you could use i t, it would dry out, and
you could use it again.
8 , 9 Bio-Medical

McDivitt

We have already discussed this in great detail
with the doctor s so I think we can go over it
briefly .

The Medical Data Pass Type 1 was not

an inconvenience .

It got the data down to the

135

doctors quickly .

I think it made them happy .

wasn't a big drag on us.

It

Medical Data Pass Type

2 was only about half of the Type 1.

It wasn ' t

bad and the doctors got some use out of that.
The food evaluation was discussed with the medics
so we can just summarize .
White

I think we should put a big gold star on the food .

I think it was one of the most important parts of
the mission.
McDivitt

That ' s right .

White

Both morale wise and just keeping your strength

It was really good .

up .
McDivitt

It was a good picker-upper when you felt lousy .
The chow tasted good .

The thing I didn't like

about it --I think it gave me a touch of the GI ' s .
White

I think it tended to loosen you up a little bit .
I think, now as I look back,I would prefer to have
maybe two of the items in one of those plastic
containers and two hard items .

McDivitt

Gee , I thought t he way they were mixed up was
prett y good .

White

Sometimes though you'd have four rehydrat ed and
nothing crunchy .

One time I had one that was all

136

crunchies just about.

It had one drink in it.

Every bag that I had, except one, that had any
form of an orange drink in it, leaked.
White

Mine started leaking, too , as soon as you mentioned
it.

McDivitt

I only had one other bag that leaked or maybe two
other bags that leaked .

I think that the rate of

leakage was just i.macceptable.

I think those bags

are going to have to be fixed.
White

No toast.

McDivitt

We didn't open up the toast.

White

Well, I ate that one thing of cinnamon toast .

McDivitt

I ate the cinnamon toast because you discovered
that it had a coating on it and it didn ' t crumble
so much.

White

I guess there was only the one cinnamon toast .

McDivitt

Overall, I thought the food was good and there
wasn ' t too much of it.

White

That peanut stuff also kind of crumbled.

McDivitt

Yes .

White

I think we ought to include more meats.

I think

the bacon was outst1J.11ding.
McDivitt

Oh, that bacon was absolutely great.
f

C.Qt~.f10EMTIAL

137

White

I could have had that everyday.

McDivitt

Ed doesn't even like bacon .

White

I could have had that kind of bacon .

That was

kind of a smoked bacon .
McDivitt

It really was. good .

White

When I ate it, I got to thinking that I don ' t
understand why we don't have more meats in the
smoked capacity .

McDivitt

That's what I was thinking--smoked beef and smoked
barbecue .

White

Yes, that's very good tasting,and it ' s salty .

It

makes you drink wate~ and drink water is what you
should do.

But I think we ought to look into

some of this .

Another comment, too , is that Jim

had thrown the sausage out prior to this time and
the sausage that I got was a completely different
breed of eat .
McDivitt

It was in one of those water bags .

I never did get a:ny shrimp.

Boy, I bet it was in

that last day's meal .
White

The sausage was pretty good.

There was one thing

that I didn't eat,and that was one chicken bite
because it coated my mouth .
or three of them .

I actual ly ate two

138

McDivitt

The only thing I didn't eat was the bacon and egg
bites, either.

White

I think if I had my druthers, I'd take bacon.

McDivitt

One of the bigges t problems on the whole flight
was the lack of sleep.

I don't really feel that

I got more than six hours of good sleep or even
six hours of medium sleep in the whole 100 hours
we were up there.
White

I think if I estimated my sleep time I ·

might estimate more.

I got that one five hours ,

That was good.
McDivitt

Fil had one real good one,and there were a couple

of them where I didn' t wiggle around for about five
hours,but never did I sleep more than two hours .
White

You weren 't soundly asleep.

McDivitt

I just sat there and I rested.

I had one one-hour

period right there at the end that was pretty good
sleep ,a.nd I had another good two-hour period.
White

That mike was one of the reasons we were getting
poor rest.

McDivitt

I think there were two reasons.

One was the radio

was feeding into our headsets all the time during
the first half of the flight.

The second half

139

of the flight. we had the darned OAMS thrusters
going so much-- BANt-, BANG , BANG , BANG , BANG!
White

I was just too hot some of the time .

McDivitt

Yes .

White

Early in the flight the ammonia fumes kept me
awake .

The first time I tried to go to sleep they

kept me awake .
McDivitt

I don't even lmow if they kept me awake .

White

I really noticed it then .

McDivitt

I think we really need a s leep period longer than
the four-hour s l eep period.

First of all we always

fooled around and never really got the sleep that
we wanted .

If we had gotten a four-hour sleep

period everytime it was scheduled, we would have
been in great shape .

I think we ought to schedule

a longer one on the order of six hours .
talked about this earlier .

Ed and I

What I suggested is

that we schedule four six-hour sleep periods ,if
there aren't a lot of experiments that have to be
done together .

Where two of these sleep periods

come together, you can make that a dual awake time
so that the people could be up.

As a matter of

fac~ you could modify it in such a way that if you

140

want ed two people to be up at the same time you
could really have three periods during the day .
You could take two of these six-hour sleep periods
and really make them sacred so that nothing could
touch them.

Then you could just take those other

two six hour sleep periods, and maybe chop periods
off each end of the thing~in such a manner that
you ' d be able to get one good sleep period and
some rest periods in between.

I think during a

six-hour sleep period you ought to plan to be in
a drifting flight and not do any experiments.

I

really think there ought to be one long sleep
period with no radios and no thrusters firing.
Then you've got a real chance.
White

You might be able to put i t in Horizon Scan .

McDivitt

Well, even then it goes, THUMP, THUMP , THUMP ,
every once in a while, you know.

White

I think you could almost do this by ear .

If it

was bothering the gu:y, you shouldn't do it.

In

my opinion I think we're pretty close to the same
thing.

I had originally told Chuck I thought that

the four-hour sleep period wasn't satisfactory.
We should have one period of six hours of sleep,

141

with another rest period scheduled in there sometime of several hours .

This would be satisfactory .

I felt we were really productive when we were both
up .

I would like to see periods of time in the

day where each of the guys are up at the same time ,
and doing actual experiments and work .

When you

are working together · like that, it seems you are
complimenting each other,and I think you get more
productive observations .
require two guys.

Some of the experiments

D-6 is going to require two

guys~ D- 9 requires two guys , and to adequately do
it to get the pictures we want,you just need two
guys up .
McDivitt

Let me modify that position of mine even further .

If you scheduled a six-three and then the other
guy with a six-three that would leave you six
hours up together everyday .

I think that might

be adequate .
White

You should also always try to schedule your eating
periods so you aren, t" eating during this up time .
You should schedule your eating when the other
guy is sleeping.

McDivitt

Right.

142

White

Go ahead and eat when you just get up and the
other guy is asleep.

Eat just before you go to

sleep, and don ' t eat simultaneously.
the other guy is sleeping.

Eat while

I think you should

spend all the time, while you are up together,
working on productive experimentation.
McDivitt

Yes.

I think you should keep these two six-hour

periods inviolate and then make the other ones
really flexible where you could move those sleeping periods around.
White

If you got tired you could go on and take four
hours for sleeping.

If you needed it, you would

go on and take longer.

If you only needed one or

two hours, you could go ahead and take that.

I

didn't feel as strongly as you about being tired.
You said I was tired.
McDivitt

You commented on it a number of times during the
flight and also you looked like you were tired .

White

Several times I missed a rest period.

I think

we got fouled up a couple of times on it.

I did

get tired before I took that five hour rest.

I

knew I was tired.
McDivitt

You had that one really good sleep right around

143

85 hours or so that really seemed to pick you up .

White

It helped me a lot.

When I came out of it , I

really felt groggy until I had had a f ew minutes
to wake up .

I think this pick~d me up consider­

ably and probably this gave me a l ittl e gain on
you as far as the rest of the flight goes .
McDivitt

That ' s right .

During the time you were sleeping,

I fell asleep .

I saved one night cycle out a ~d

went to s l eep .

Ha , ha !

CO l'!t'fit)fNffAl

"(i j) MFt0f t◄ l lAr"

144

9.0 OPERATIONAL CHECKS
9.1 Apollo Landmark Identification (D-6)
McDivitt

The equipment we carried onboard the spacecraft really didn't apply exactly to D-6 .
didn't have a Questar lens .

We

The 200 mm lens that

we carried did not have the periscope mounting
for it.

It did not have any way you could

aim it with a telescope , so the only aiming
device that we had onboard the spacecraft was the
gunsight mounted in the left hand window.
The cameras that we used for this experiment
were the 16 mm movie camera with.:5 mm telephoto
lens on it and the fixed mounted 35 mm Contarex
with the 200 mm lAns .

The fixed mounted Contarex

was in the right-hand window, and the 16 mm camera
was in the left-hand window.
White

It was kind of interesting since we were in
free drift, and they told us to go ahead
and run a tracking task.

But the first one that

I ran was Apollo Run No . 1, which was over the
junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile in
the middle of the delta of the Nile River.

C: e I Qffl'JfNf ;f,M

145

White

This was i dent i fication and acquiring it and
seeing how well the charts that yo.;. had equipped
you to identify specifically the landmark in
consideration.

The first one I had was the

junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile ,
and more specifically it was a little island in
therA,and it was the northernmost tip on the
island.

I r ealized as we came around that I

was going to be in pretty good shape in this
free drift to be able to see the targets .

As

we came aro'.llld , I looked out in the general
di rection that I had been instructed from the
ground , and the firs t thing that I noted was
the major Ni l e coming down to the i~tersection.
I was able to follow it pretty clearly down to
the intersection as we got r oughly 20 or 25
df~gre es from the vert ical .

I was able to pick

up the little island in the junction of the
White and Nile River , and I was able to follow
i t all the way through as we passed over .

As

we got to the 90 degree point overhead , it was
quite easy to track with rny eye .
actually tracking it .

I wasn't

It was northeast

146

of my track 92 miles , so it was really q·-.1ite far
awey even when I was at the 90 degree point.

I

reported that I thought this was a very good
landmark.

It was very easy to see , and I felt

if I had a higher power telescope I could have
tracked it quite adequately.

I classed this

landmark as being satisfactory, and I classified
the charts that I had used to identify it for
me as being quite satisfactory .

Incidentally,

I believe that this , of all th ➔ landmarks we
had , was probabl y the easiest one of them all to
locate , being right out in the middle of the
desert , pointed out by two rivers converging
f rom a major river .

It was a very good

landmark.
McDi vitt

Okey .

You ran some more -- just Apoll o l and­

marks. It wasn ' t really a tracking task problem.
Didn ' t you run o~e off of Puerto Rice\ too., or
-was t his the onl y l andmark that we really ran?
White

This was the only real Apollo Landmark I ran .
I r an some:1 D- 6 Landmarks .

McDivHt

Okay .

Fine .

I think the next one that we r an

was a ~order pass on El Paso .
Te1 - Aviv before that?

~@MFIOEt'<JTIAL

Or di d you run on

147

White

I'm not sure exactly the sequence in there .

McDivitt

Okay.

White

I think before that ,though, I did run a series
on D-6 Targets 11 , 12, 13, and 18 .

McDivitt

Ok1:1.y.

Why don ' t you go ahead - -

White

Shall I discuss those?

McDivitt

Yes .

White

Okay.

11 was Adagier Morocco , 12 was Wheelis , 13

was Alexandria , and 18 was Dhyran.

They gave

me all these four targ~ts a-id I realized
right awa3 that I couldn ' t possibly handle this
many of them and do it adequately.

This was

the first time we'd been givei1 t; ,1.) go- ahead
for some tracking on which we could use OAMS.
I elected to "J.Se ,pulse as a fuel conservation
method .

I selected to try Wheelis and Alexa.nd:riu:·

since I thought that I could locate them quite
easily and that they were sufficiently far
apart to track adequately .

As we came up on

Wheelis {I'd been stationed there prior to this
timei I k~ew pretty well exactly where it was .
As it turned out , there were sc.n,.. high clouds
over Wheelis , and I wasn't able to observe it .
No . 13-- I picked up Alexandria and took manual

IOEtiTIAL

148

pictures with the 200 mm ~ontarex .

Since I

was actually ta~ing the pictures, I had to
divert my at;tention a little bit to the camera,
so I didn I t actually 1 ook down, and, I didn I t
actually see the airport .

But I had seen it

prior to that time, and I di d see it many times
afterwa-rds as we passed over .

Th<' recommendation

that I made from this was that the targets should
be fa.~ enough apart to allow adequate set-up, to
go from one ta-rget to another .

I thought the

updates ware good and the general location of
them with respect to my orbits was good .

And

the next one is El Paso Int;ernational , Jim.
McDivitt

Okay.

This was the fi:-8t tracking task that "1e

were going to do with the telescope ,

the

16 mm m:>vie cam1;!ra. , and the fixed 200 m:n l ens on
the Contarex.

We sta=t;;d o,1t with a time of

closest approach and a time we should have been
able to see the target .

The only kind of

identification assist that we had at this time
was a piece cut out of a WAC Chart , that showed
El Paso International~and the world chart with
a gigantic scale on it . This made it a little
bit difficult from an acquisition standpoi~t .

cet•Fto[ ► 4TIA.L-

149

But later on we f ound that these same t wo types
of information- -the world map and the small WAC
Char t --were a.dequo.t e for other types of target s.
The WAC Chart showed of course the range of
mountains just west of El Paso and the White
Sands and the Rio Grande River .

We came across

Southern California, and I could see the Salton
Sea.

I didn ' t track them , but I looked out the

front and I could see the mountains of New
Mexico and Arizona.

.And I saw a bunch of white

places down below us , any o~e of which co~ld iave
been the White Sands .

I f I could have really

picked out the White Sands by themselves. and
unf ortunately they were off the WAC Chart ·
that I had , I think the contact would have
been good enough for me too pick up El Paso .

As

it was , the only features I had that would have
been of great importance were the river , which
was the Rio Grande River-:--'3.rld at that point was
not very noteworthy-- and the mountain range , ._
which from the al titude of arou..~d 90 miles or
more couldn ' t be picked up .

I think that this

type of a topographical or geographical feature ,
like a valley or a mountain ,,is not adequate

150

Ei0HFIBE~TIAL
for this kind of task.

You need a contrast in

color as you get from the White Sands to the
surrounding d,9sert .

The best of all is a water­

land interface or border.

As we came across

the United States, I think we picked up El Paso
just as we were over i t , but we weren ' t pointed
down at the town.
out in advance .

We were still pointed well
The only clue that we were

over El Paso was that I could see the Gulf
Coast .

I knew that when I saw the Gulf Coast

we were probably too far al ong to pick up El
Paso .

Rather than just scrub the run , we went

ahead and made a run on a pair of sand spits
with a channel between them in the vicinity of
Corpus Christi .

We picked up a target well in

advance , and as I started tr-JLag t o line up on
the target , I found out that the gunsight had a
light intensity and the gunsight was inadequate
for a daytime tracking task; because as you
pointed the sight down and had a background of
clouds , you just absolutely could not see the
sight .

I didn ' t have any idea in thA world where

it was p,-, i.nting.

When you put it on the dark

land, it seemed to be adequate , but I think we

.......,'

149

But later on we found that the se same two types
of information- -the world map and the small WAC
Chart--were adeque:r.e for other types of targets .
The WAC Chart showed of course the range of
mountains just west of El Paso and the White
Sands and the Rio Grande River .

We came across

Southern California, and I could see the Salton
Sea.

I didn ' t track them , but I looked out the

front and I could see the mountains of New
Mexico and Arizona.

.And I saw a bunch of white

places down below us, any one of which co~ld ~ave
been the White Sands .

I f I could have really

picked out the White Sands by themselves, and
unfortunately they were o!'f the WAC Chart •
that I had , I think the contact would have
been good enough for me too pick up El Paso .

As

it was , the only features I had that would have
been of great importance were the river , w'nich
was the Rio Grande River-:-9lld at that point was
not very noteworthy-- and the mountain range , \
which from the altitude of arou..~d 90 miles or
more couldn ' t be picked up .

I think that this

type of a topographical or geographical feature ,
like a valley or a mountain ,,is not adequate

150

for this kind of task .

You need a contrast in

color as you get from the White Sands to the
surrounding d~sert .

The best of all is a water­

land interface or border.

As we came across

the United States , I think we picked up El Paso
just as we were over i.t , but we weren't pointed
down at the town.
out in advance .

We were still pointed well
The only clue t hat we were

o·,er El Paso was that I could see the Gulf
Coast.

I lmew that when I saw the Gulf Coast

we were probably too far along to pick up El
Paso.

Rather than just scrub the run, we went

ahead :::ind made a run on a pair of sand spits
with a channel between them in the vicinity of
Corpus Christi.

We picked up a target we ll in

advance, and as I started t:q.L:lg to line up on
the target, I found out that the g-~nsight had a
light intensity and the gunsight was inadequate
for a daytime tracking task; because as you
pointed the sight down and h9.d a backgroan.d of
clouds, you just absolutely could not see the
sight .

I didn ' t have any i dea in the world where

it was p,-·i.nting,

When you put it on the dark

land, it seemed to be adequate, but I think we

@8t Wt0et.s1I.IAJ:

151

can increase the intensity of the gunsight by
q·..1ite a bit .

During the night time you can turn

it down and t he brightness is just abo-1t what
you need .

We made this ru~ on this pair of

sand spits , and t he t racking t ask was q,.j t,~
easy .

Now , I just happened to pick something

that was obvious t o me and tracked on this and
picked it up ;"11ile we got on at abo~lt 30 degrees,
u.nt il I got to the vertical ,. and then I tcacked
it out to about 45 degrees past the vectical.
This was-a' t a real tracking task, in that I
didn ' t select a target before I got there .

But,

I just stuck with whatever target I happened t o
be pointing at and ran the tracking task .

I

think we learned something from this pass in
that we want to be very careful about picking out
targets in the mi ddle of an area where there
aren ' t any good water- lmd borders ; there aren' t
any good contrasting colors .

There wasn ' t a

really prominent feature that I could start
from, that worked down to the city and eventually
to the airport .

So , I think that on this parti­

cular pass , although we didn ' t get any pictures
of our intended ta~get , we learned quite a bit

CC!t'(f.fii&E ►4"E h,e

152

from it .

I don't believe I ha.ire any other

comment on that pass.
White

No .
Paso .

Do yoa?

I was quite surprised when we missed El
Remember we thoaght , "Boy, this is one

•
t o nai· 1 . fl
we I re g01ng

McDivitt

Anrl the f unny part of all this is that we had
both flown in a~d out of El Paso International
Airport no less than a hundred times .

We w,~re

pretty well assured of where we ware going and
what it looked like .
early eno-:.1gh .

But we didn ' t find it

We progressed too far before I

r eal l y saw the toi,m , s.nd Ewen then I didn ' t
see the airfield , because I wasn ' t sure I was
over the right tovn U!1.til I was over i t .

And

then , it was too late to lo:->k q,t the airfield .
White

I think that the point that you ' re making is
going to be well brought up in what I'm going
to say next .

McDivitt

Okay.

Why don ' t yo'.1 - - you made the next pass,

I think, on Tel -Aviv.
White

The next pass was Run No. 6, Target 15 .

The

information I got was adequate to lJcate i t.
It turned out that this target had the essentials
t hat Ji;n was l ooking for and mentioned on his last

pass I had a nice body of water .

Th8 Dead Sea

was a good l~cation, and actually the city
itself was located at the end of the
Mediterranean, so I felt that landmark-wise I had
a pretty good tar get to track.

I came in and

the first target I picked up was Jaffa, and I
was on it so well t hat I decided to go ahen.d and
track Jaffa.

At f irst I had thought it was Tel-

Aviv, and 1.1. few seconds later I relized tha-'; it
wa.s the city 10 o:r. 20 mileo north of 'l'el- Aviv.
The reaso:i. I picked it up so easily is because
there was a little spi ~ of l i:i.nd t~1at jutted out
into the water and it sat right in this little
natural basin .

I looked down and I saw Jaffa

and I a0tually saw the 1 ittl,~ round cir,:ul :1.r•
airport in Jaffa ,

I also saw Tel- Aviv , and I

saw the airport that I was really looking for,
but I decided I 'd go aheaci. and track Jaff a and
tak~ a few pictures of Jaffa as we went over.
You ha1re to real i ze that I wasn ' t using a
gunsight on my side , and I was also con t ~olling
the sp(v:..,,-~raf t and firing the camera at the same
time• So the tracking i.:;; probabl y a lit tle
rougher than it would. be f rom the left-h,m d side .

en IW't 0f·MT1~~

154

But I did get a good indication of the cap9.bili.ty
to tt'ack a target anci to pick a target up , and

I think tha~ I was quite surprised 4t the ease
at which you could track .

I also concurt'ed with

Ji:n 1 s conclusion that a goo,l prominent landmar.k
primer, preferabl;f a body of W9.ter somewhere to
nail do·,m your target, is the most desirablA
f eature .

I also feel that an important thing

that the next crew going up could do would be
to spend a lot of t.ime on jnst pla.Ln map study

fr the 30 degrees north to 30 degrees sou.th,
and try to p·L•::k up the prominent f ,~:1t:.2res to
permit them to become quickly adjusted to what
they can see and what they can I t see d·own
below.

I think that a 1-i.;;tle concentrated map

study prior to the flight woulci help a lot with
the D- 6.

Also a concentrated study on the

targets themselves wo·..lld be quite beneficial .
This is s~rmething that we really never got to
do.

The original 243 ~argets were too voluminous

even to ~onsider time to atudy each one, and
when we got the final 19 targets, it was pretty
late in the flight to be working on ::xi
exp-::riment that wasn ' t even on our flight.

C1"Jt~FIDEl>~ TIA

1
~

Even

155

with the limited knowledge t~at we had of the
targ0·I; ·.3 I felt that acquisiti.on and tracking of
the targf,b'1 w· ,::J a lot ,,>::i,:,:j_.~r than I had tho-.i.ght
it was going to be .
McDi·.ri t t

I
I guess thats
all.

The next target that we had was Ywna Tnternatinna1
Airpo:d .

Here again we had a tar.get that ·,1::i.::;

not a very prol'.linent lal'ld.nri.rk .

The time of

closest apprJach and acquisitio·:1 time and the
aiming 1.1ngles were adequate .

It gave m,1 a good

idea of what I should be looking f,:n- a,..'1d 1,hen I
should be looking.

I used the same maps again ;

I used the cutout of a WAC Chart plus a great
big world c~'lart .

'I1here was qui t0 a

discontinuity in the s0ul ~ of these two maps ,
I

I

but I m not really sure that we co·..1ldn t have
done t:'le job wlth just those two .

I think tnat

what we probably needed was a world map that
showed a little more detail and a WAC Chart
that showed a little bit more area.

What we

prob 1bly coul::l. ha"e used most of all was a
0

phot,:>grap1', rif ~~'le ar =1a .

As I came in across

the Califoraia coast. I )icked np the Salton
Sea and El Centro , just below the Sal ton Sea,
and then I mew that, Yuma was on the Colorado

(!l@)NflDEl'JTLll

156

River, which should ::>e a few miles to the east
of the Salton Sea.

There was a nice big bend

in the ColoraJr> River .

Unfortunately , the

Colorado , although it is a reasonably good
sized body of water - ..i'€ just plain do(-)Sn ' t
show up that w-all.

It was a little difficult

to see , but I finallJ pi~ked it up .
the bend in the river.

I saw

The river doesn ' t

actually go through the town of YumA., so I
started looking for Yuma, and I d:id w:1nder
aro~d a little bit before I finallJ found the
town.

Then

I

within the tow~1 .

was unable to find the airfield
When I was just a::>out d .'..::ectly

over the a.i.rfi8ld , I picked it up.

Here is

where I think the photog::-aph wo~;ld have been a
lot of help , because the mH.p t.h:it I had just
showed a yellow bl,)b indicating the city with
a circle to indic ~.te where the airfield ws.13 .
It sho,1ed the airfield to be to the s,>t! ~h :Jf
the town .

What I was looking at was a 1 ,rge

group of buildings , the to,..,.,, :_i.;self .

Then

as I went to the south , I saw even more
buildings and I wasn ' t sure whether the airfield
was south of tha: built-up area.

arco~~FIDE~TIAt

As it turned

157

out , it was south of the main built-up area that
actuall y had another large group of buil dings
south of it .

I did pick up the airport itself

at just about 5 degrees before the nadir , and I
tracked over to the targe t, probably just at the
nadir and just shortly past .

I had the 16 mm

movie camera going with the telescopic lens on
it .

I had t he gunsight on bright .

Pul se Control Mode .

I used

I got right on the target

and I managed to fly the spacecraft in such a
manner that the gunsight never deviated from the
target by more than a half a degree , I feel,
if it deviated that much .

I think it was

considerably less than that .

But there wasn ' t

any great difficulty in the tracking task , and

I managed to control in all three axes and hold
the target just about wher e I wanted it .

Here

again we had a problem with the contrasting
target; the water-land mass was quite some
distance away.

In this case, how f ar is it from

El Centro to Yuma?
White

I don I t know, Jim.

McDivitt

150 miles?

White

Yes .

158

McDivitt

It was a reasonable distance, probably something
on the order of 150 miles or m~be only 100
miles, but the problem was that between Yuma
and El Centro there weren ' t any identifing
masses that led you toward Yuma.

And I had not

up till this time looked down to try to find
where the Yuma airport was,because we ' d been
saving fuel .

So , this was the first time that

I'd seen Yuma airfield from orbit .

As I get

into the next target, I think you'll see what
I'm leading up to .

Having a first look at a

target like this, be i ng able to identify the
city , but then essentially wasting time before
I found the airfield within the city, I think,
cost some valauable time and consequently cost
some good pictures; because the best picture
is going to be that picture which is taken
exactly over the airfield .
White

That wouldn ' t happen again though , would it?

McDivitt

No ,

White

You ' d probabl y have it pretty wel l nailed .

McDivitt

No , it woul dn ' t .

So ,the next target I had was

Cairo -- Cairo Int ernational Airport .

Now ,

we'd been over Cairo quite a few times before

(MJ(1tf'F10'8'1Tli\ l

this , and I had l ooked down to find Cairo.

I

think we had had an Apollo Landmark or D- 6
type of thing ,where we were supposed to
loolc down and just acquire the target, but not
actually track it or take any pictures.

When

we did come by, we coul d actually look down and
find the city of Cairo the first time we came
by.

Later I found the Cairo Airfiel d , and Ed

and I were discussing Cairo Airfield and
Alexandria Airfield.

We both had one in sight .

When I picked up the Cairo Airfield(I was told
to pick up the Cairo Airfield),it had all the
ingredients that I think is necessary.

I had

seen it beforE . I knew where it was with respect
to the local landmark .

The local l andmarks

were the Mediterranean on one side , the Red
Sea on the other side , the Suez Canal connecting
these two l arge bodies of water , and a river
leading f rom near the Suez Canal over toward
the city and the airfiel d .

Then. knowing the

position of the airfield with respect to these
landmarks ,since I 1 d al ready seen it , I came in
over North Af rica along the Mediterranean Coast
with no pl atf orm on , just in Pulse Mode, no

160

attitude reference , found the Mediterranean on
my left , pointed the spacecraft on ahead ,
determined the direction I was going, picked
up the Red Sea, picked up the Suez Canal between
the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and followed
the river in.
out .

I started this quite a distance

I knew just about where the airfield was ,

but it wasn't coming into view .

Finally,at about

20 degrees before the vertical the airfield
finally came into view .

I tracked on the

airfield about 10 degrees before the nadir .

I

was tracking the area in which I believed the
airfield to be , so that I had already had the
pitch rate set up that I required of my
spacecraft .

As I got on the target I still had to

track in multiple axes , but I already had t he
rates built up , and I tracked f rom about 10 to
20 degrees before the nadir to 45 degrees past.
I think this will probably be the best tracking
exper i ment that I did.
one .

Later on, I had another

Later on I had another tracking task

against Basra in Iraw on the Pers i an Gulf.

Here

again,we had the ingredients that were
necessary to pick up the target .

eel fF tBE~~TIAL
1

We had a l arge

Cf3JS(FIOE~J

161

body of water , a river leading up to a lake, and
then the airfield sticking out in a very
prominent way.

Now I ' d never seen the Basra

Airfield before ·I

t r ied to take thi s picture .

But the landmarks near it were suffici ent so
that finding the locat i on of it was not difficult.
There wer en ' t any towns around .

It was pretty

obvious from the bodies of water where I should
look for the airfield~and I picked it up also
20 degrees before I got to the nadir and
on it by the time I got to the nadir .

was

I tracked

it from there out to about 45 degrees past .
Once again I had a reasonably good t r acking
task.

I t hink that on the tracking tasks on

Yuma, Cairo, and Basr a, I managed to keep the t arget
within the center half- degree cirl e of the
sight .

I used the 16 mm movie camera with the

75 mm telephoto l ens on each one of these cases .
Did you have any other targets , Ed?
White

No .

McDivitt

I don' t believe you di d .

I think the big

thing here is that you ' ve got to be able to have
a landmark that stands out long before you get
to the target .

You have to have a lot of contrast .

162

White

Or some real technique or type of familiarity
with the target .

I think if you were really

familiar with the area you might pick up
things that we don't pick up now , but we could
with a little more map study and study over
above .
McDivi t t

That 's right.

I think t hat the first thing,

though , that you need to help you find the
target is a really contrasting thing.

Now the

next thing is that you've got to be familiar
with the target, as Ed said.

Now if you have

never been there on t he ground and don't know
what it looks like from there, I think what
you need are a few passes over the target to
study it from the air, and look for it from the
air,and try to pinpoint in your mind the local
terrai n features and local contrasting features
that will help lead you to the airfield .
Because , it looks to me like it ' s easiest to find
a target when you're exactly over it .
White

Boy , you ' re right .

There ' s a point when you

pass over the top where everything really is
clear .
McDivitt

The big thing is either a lot of target study on

COt~F~DE~fflA l _
the ground or a previous pass across the target
so that when you go across it, you not only lmow
the general area thRt you're supposed to point into,
but the exact spot where that target is and
some identifying f eatures that wil l lead you
to this target.

So with the initial things

like a lot of contrast to get you in the area
and then a lot of detail gathered either from
target study or from a previous pass across the
target,I think that you could go ahead and
find it .

Once on the target the tracking

task in the Pulse Mode is not difficult at all .
I think you can track within just tenths of
degree s of the target without too much difficulty
whatsoever, in multiple axes .
without

having

the

And I found that

platform up

every.,

tracking task I did was in multiple axes , and
although you're going through some very
peculiar maneuvers, it ' s very instinctive to
track up and down, left and right, using the
gunsight,without any regard to what your attitude
with respect to the local horizontal is.

In

air- to-ground gunnery you sometimes find that
you ' ve got to pick your attitudes up from the

-CO~~FIDf~~

~DEt~TIAL ~
ground.

They sort of tend to be a constraint

on what you can do, but that ' s not the case in
this kind of a task .
White

The t hiug that really amazed me, Jim>is the
first time I saw an airfield from up there .
First time I saw one, I saw
overhead.
see

it directly from

I was amazed at the clarity I could

of f ield .

Although,of course,I saw no

airplanes sitting on it , I fel t t hat I was
seeing down to a resolution of 50 f eet or
better with my own eye when there was a contrast
of some type available to me .

In general, I

thought the clarity of things that you saw
was far better than it is from just flying at
40 000 feet.

Things a re

·a.re much clearer to me .
are much clearer.

mu9h

smaller . bu+ they

Also,,at night things

And over one town we passed

in Australia the lights were very , very clear
down there to me .

I think that with some type

of an optical aid

we

can

see a great deal .

I think that with cameras with higher power and
more capability ,we can take pictures of a lot
more down below.

I think t hat the only picture

I 1 ve seen so far that I thought would be nice

165

from a tourist standpoint is the one I took of
t he Cape , which everybody seems so excited about
right now.

That ' s one that was taken wi th the

sun on the window and at roughly a 30-degree
angl·e

down from the hori zontal , which indicates

you're shooting through a lot more atmosphere
than necessary.
even to me .

The clarity was quite surprising,

You can count t he launch pads and

see sizes of buil dings .

Because of the oblique

angle , you can actually measure the sizes of t hese
bui ldings .

I think we ' ve got a tremendous amount

of photographic potential from in space .

I think

that Jim and I ment i oned a little bit earler that
t he area capacity inside the spacecraft limits the
capability to carry a good size telescope or a
very big piece of camera equipment .

I think that

coupled with t he EVA capabilit y t hat we have , we
can carry some equipment back in the adapter- -some
nice sizable cameras and telescopes--and build
mounts on the outside of the spacecraft .

We can

go EVA , pick these pi eces of equipment up , bring
t hem out , and mount them on the sides of the
spacecraft so t hat we can take a series of

166
pictures and use really good, big, higher- powered
telescopes for observati ons.

If we do mount them

out there , of course, we should mount themsomewhere
so that if we had a failure of some kind and
had to come right in, or weren't able to open
up the hatch again , we could separate them by
some type of pyro.

But I think that is the one

way we can combine our EVA operations wi th the
desire to bring up big pieces of equipment and
operate them with our spacecraft .
McDivitt

I agree.

I think that the possibilities of

viewing things on the ground from space are
practically unlimited, and I was quite surprised
at the ease with which you can control the
spacecraft and take pictures and I was surprised at
pictures you get .

We ' ve got an awful lot of

work t hat we can do in this area.

I think the

technique of acquiring these individual targets
needs a lot of work.

I feel that the best way

to do it, if you're going to be limited to one
pass over the site, is to use a photograph of it made
from some previous time.

I feel that the need

for a large landmark nearby, especially
a water landmark, is pretty great .

I thought

167

that the information that we got from the ground ·
of what time we would be over the target and
what time it would be 30 degrees below the
horizontal were excellent pieces of information,
It certainly contributed a lot to finding the
target ,

I .think there ' s an awful lot of work

that we can do in this particular area.

You

have anything else , there , Ell?
White

No .

Oh , this is one thing that I have been

bubbling about the l ast week or so , wanting to
tell somebody, and haven't been able to tell
anybody .

I couldn't,of course,tell it in

the press conference.

I really didn ' t want to

talk too much about it at the meeting we had
before with everybody, but I think this is one
area in which a trememdous amount of capability
exists,and I think we ' d be very foolish if we
don ' t work further to exploit it,
Mc-Divitt

I concur.

168

9.2 Apollo Yaw Orientation
White

Okay, I 'll probably go into this a little bit, and
then we can go over the data on it.
fairly simple test.

This was a

All we did was start at a zero­

zero reference and establish rates of 3 degrees/
second simultaneously in all axes.

We had a sec­

ondary objective, to see when we established these
rates and put them in three axes simultaneously if
we got a scanner i gnor light.
one up real y quick .

And I 'll clear that

We put them in at t wo different

times and neither time di d we get a scanner ignore
light .
we?

We di d this at night the first time , didn't

That was really the only time we did it.

McDivitt

Jus t the night one.

White

That's right.

That's right .

We did i t once at night .

I estab­

lished the rates in t hree axes and allowed them to
bui l d up for about 30 seconds .

Then , I told Jim

to go ahead and take control of the spacecraft , and
using visual references to move to a retrofire attitude .
McDivitt

I did this in Pulse Mode, I believe , because we were
trying to save fuel.

I think I did it in Direct,

but I did not do it in Rate Command .

I did it in

Direct . The first thi ng I did was t ry to find t he
horizon so I would have some reference point to

fifffD Er>,TIA'l r

169
start from.

This was quite easy.

I just had to wait

for the spacecraft to move so that I could see the
horizon in any position, and t hen I went for it .
The yaw reference, though , wasn ' t present when I
got to the horizon, so I ended up level on the
horizon upside-down, but without a yaw reference.
I pitched on down well below the horizon so that
I could look down at the ground.

Watching the

clouds go by, or whatever was down below me , I
could pick up the direction of my motion .

So , I

rolled around such that I was pointing down at the
ground , probably 45 degrees plus or minus 20
degrees .

I rolled aroumd until my head came up,

and all I had to do then was pitch back to the
horizon to get to the 30 degree nose-down attitude
for retrofire.
seconds .

This took 2 minutes and 20

Now I did this trying to save fuel.

I

could have done it much quicker if fuel wasn ' t a
constraint .

Also, I think I learned something

f r om this in that I made a mistake by going
first to the horizon.

I should have pitched down

until I was pointed straight down to the ground,
picked up my yaw as quickly as I could in this

170

posit ion , rolled around so that I could just pitch
straight up , and end up at the horizon

blunt­

end- forward, heads up,and wings leveJ.

I think

I could ' ve gotten it down to about a minute a.nd
20 seconds.

I felt that I wasted a minute

doing this .
White

You were taking it slow.

McDivitt

Okay, now, 1 1 11 go through t he Apollo Yaw
Orientation debriefing here . The contro l mode, as
we said , was Direct when Ed put me into the
condition.

I used the Direct Mode , I believe .

I damped out the rate without any difficulty at
all .

The orientation, I ' ve already gone through .

What I should have done was to go nose-down .
What I did do was that I came to the horizon
first , tried to find a yaw reference and couldn ' t,
then went down to the ground.

I should have gone

straight down to the ground .

The time , as I

mentioned , took 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

I

f eel that I could have done it in a minute and 20
seconds.
light
get

We

due

did not
to

get

the

acceleration ,

the scanner

scanner
but we

ignore light when we

ignore
did
finally

171

got to a position where we were outside the
attitude constraint of the scanners.
White

There were a couple of things .

As far as the

initial rates were concerned, they were 3 1/2
degrees/second roll - right, 3 degreed pitch-down/
second, and 2 degrees yaw- right/second .

The final

orientation that Jim came to was such that his
pitch was on, his roll was on, and his yaw was
off by 18 degrees.

We found early in the flight that

a yaw reference at night on the stars, particularly on
a dark night , was very difficult.
McDivitt

Yes .

I still thought that the quickest yaw re­

ference was to go to the ground .
White

As far as the day check , we decided that the night
was by far the tougher case, adn it didn't seem
to be too diff icult.

So , we thought that since

the day was so easy we wouldn't even go ahead
and do it.

The orientation by day was a quite

easy t ~,ing.

9. 3 One Attitude 1'hruster Failure Check
McDivitt

Okay.

We'll

just

debriefing here .

go right

through

the

It was not difficult to

establish the rate as long as we had the roll
jets in the other axes .

We could damp out

the

172

rates .

We used the Direct Control Mode .

just pret ty straightforward .
to the simulator .

It ' s

It ' s identical

We didn ' t learn anything new

from this check except tha t the s imulator was
indeed correct .
White

No .

Tha t

Do you have anything to add ?

it was

pretty straightforward .

9.4 Horizon Scanner Track Check
McDivitt

Hori zon Scanner Track Check is next .

The

horizon scanner ignore light came on as expected
except t he attitude band ~hrough which the horizon
scanner operated was considerably broader than
we had e xpected .

The scanner ignore light went

off again at the proper attitud8 , considering the f ac t
that the scanner ignore c ircui t keeps the
scanner ignore light on
scanner has relocked .

7

seconds after the

So , we always had the

scanner ignore light go out at a different
attitude than where it came on because of the
fixed rates we were using.

We went through the

zero bank angle ,pitch-up and pitch- down .

We

went through the zero pitch,bank-left and bankr ight .

We then got to the r0E -..,i th pi tch,i.ng.

Here , I only banked to t he right and pitched up
and down .

I didn ' t bank t o the left and pitch- up

173

and down .

We did the pitch with rolling, and

here I pitched up and rolled left and right, but
we did not do the pitch-down , rolling left and
right because of a fuel limitation and a time
limitation .
be done .

We had another experiment that had to

We had to get the platform off and we

had a limited amount of time to accomplish this .

I sort of felt that the check was very well
accomplished at this time ,

data book .

The data is in the

I saw no need to waste time doing the

other two maneuvers , especially since we were
so limited on time and fuel ,

Did you have any­

thing to add to that, Ed?
White

No .

I think that the remark that the data is

in the book is adequate .

9, 5 Horizon Scanner Check
McDivitt

The first one is the sun .

I think the

best wasy

to do it is to have Ed read out the comments
that we wrote in the data book as we did this .
We started with the blunt- end into the sun.
White

We started blunt - end into the sun and we got
· the scanner ignor e light momentaril y as the sun

174

hit the scanner head .
McDivitt

It went right out again .

It went out in

7

seconds like it was supposed to?
White

Hight .

7

It was just a momentary light and

seconds later it was off again .

Going back

around to the 180.degree position , we didn ' t
get the scanner l ight again .

Again in here, we

got a scanner ignore light when we were
faced right into the sun with the nose , and it
went out again and came on once more,and then
stayed out .
McDivitt

So , sequentially, we started with the blunt- end into the sun and started a yaw to the left .

As

soon as we came around into the sun we got the
scanner ignore light , and it went out a short
time later.

We came around right into the sun,

and at this time the scanner ignore light came on ,
went out, and came back on again .

Is that

correct?
White

Yes , and then finally stayed out .

McDivitt

And stayed out .

Then we yawed back around till

1-,e were blunt -end to the sun again, and yawed
back into the sun ,and back around blunt- end to
the sun again , and we did not get any more

175

scanner ignore lights .
Hoon Scanner Check.

The next step is the

We did this with the

moonset and , Ed , you might add the time that we
did the Sun Scanner Check.
White

The Sun Scanner Check was at Greenwich Mean
Time of 11 : 50 ,

McDivitt

We ' 11 have to correlate that lat er·.

I think that we were supposed to be in the bluntend to the sun configuration at 11 : 54 and star+-· ~b c-.re,
but I 'm not really sure about tha t . Okay, the moon
check was performed just about like t he sun
check.

We started blunt- end to the moon and

made t wo cycles .

Blunt- end t o small-end and back

to blunt- end , and small-end back to blunt end .
Ed , go ahead and read the data.
White

Okay.

On the moonset , we started with the moon

quite high , so we had a good moon.
at 12 : 17 .

We started

We had no scanner ignore lights for

the fir st 180 degrees and,actually,throughout
the next cycle we had no llll'llocks or any lights
for two cycles .
McDivitt

So this was completely normal.

McDiv:i:tt

The Thrusters Check No . ; --we turned the
spacecraft , since the thruster f iring wouldn't
influence the orbit except to change it

OO~~FIDEt-4TIAL

176

slightly, and we went ahead and fired t he
forward - firing t hrus ters for

1

second .

We

didn ' t get any change in our scanner ignore
light configuration .

It was out and it stayed

out during the entire thruster check.
guess that it operated all right .

So I

We 'll

summarize all of our scanner comments at thi s
time .
White

You want me to read some of these?

McDivitt

Yes .

Why don ' t you read off some of the comments

you have in there .
White

They ' re in your writing.

You might read the

first page and I ' ll read the second, since
they I re in mine .
McDivitt

We went to Horizon Scan Mode of control for
about the last day of flight , and left it in that
mode just about until we retrofired .

I 'd like

to read out s ome of the comments that I made here
as we lost the scanner, when we got the scanner
ignore light .

At 16 : 03 Greenwich Time , or

atout 72 hours e lapsed time , I turned on the
Horizon Scan Mod e in about a 27degree nose down
attitude with a pitch up rate of about 2 degrees/
second .

The Hori zon Scanner Mode added pulses

GO~~FIDE~~TIAt

177

to the pitch up rate and increased my r a tes to
something considerably above that , but then
as we came up into the Horizon Scanner Mode
dead.band , it

started pulsing rapidly and

ki l led off this rather l arge pitch rate and held
the spa cecraft right in this attitude .

S~ we

had a very good acquisition of the mode from a
somewhat undesirable condi t ion .

At the first

sunset the scanners were pointed right at the
sun but did not break lock.

We did not get

any scanner ignore lights at this time .

Later

on, at 17 : 04, about an hour later at sunrise ,
the scanner ignore l ight came on with the spacecraft pointed in such a manner that the small end
of the spacecraft was pointed about 45 degrees
to the right of a line drawn directly between
the spacecraft and the sun.

So tha t., essential ly,

the sun was shining on the horizon scanners at
about a 45- degrell angl e .

The scanner ignore

lights stayed on for 10 or 15 seconds, and then
went out .

There were no false pulses from the

jets at all .

At 7: 55, just at sunse t , again in

about the same position, I was 45 degrees to the
right of a l ine drawn between the spacecraft and

J..Gt.qf:IDEt~JIAL

178

the sun .

The scanner broke lock.

We started

pulsing down for two or three pulses , then
stopped , but the scanner ignore light stayed on

7 seconds and then it went out .

longer than

We pulsed up one or two times

to start

recovering from these initial two or three
pulses that started us down , and then the l i ght
came on again .

3

It was only off for about

seconds, just a very short time .

2 or

We were

at about 30 degrees pi tch down at this time .

We

then started pulsing pit ch-down rapidly with
the scanner ignore light on.

We pitched down

and did a 360-degree maneuver in pitch; we
started just about horizontal, pitched down till
we were looking at the ground , continued pitching
down with respect to the spacecraft until we
were horizontal , upside down, now faceing
the opposite direction than we ' d started , and
continued pitching down with r espect to the
spacecraft .

The small end ended up stra ight up

and we continued pitching down again until we
started coming back back down to the horizon .

I

did not at any time during this maneuver attempt
to control the spacecraft .

The pitch- down

179
thrusters continued to fire throughout t he
maneuver at interval s like there was indeed a
signal coming from the Horizon Scan Mode .

As

the spacecraft started back down toward the
horizon , I thought sure that the horizon scanner
would catch the horizon , because a t this time
the sun was no longer right on the horizon .
However , we developed a slight amount of roll
during the l ast 120 to 150 degrees of pitch,
and as we went down through the horizon , we were out
of limits in roll and Horizon Scan did not pick
up the horizon .

I then took over the spacecraft

and maneuvered back to a position from which the
Horizon Scan Mode could r ea cquire and -put it
in t his condit ion . It s t ayed locked on .
a few notes here .
White

Ed has

We ' ll have him read his .

About the only notes that I ma.de on .the scanner
was tha t at sunset and sunrise it had a tendency
to break lock.
sunset

I have a note her€ that at 22: 22, at

with the sun right on the scanner, i . e .

90 degrees to the spacecraft , the scanner
broke lock three different times .

At 22 : 58 , a t

sunrise , the scanner put in spurious inputs
but was abl e t o control and didn ' t lose lock.

180

Sunrise seemed to be the time at which t he
scanner had the largest tendency to br eak lock ,
and if it didn ' t break lock, it would at l east
put in spuri ous inputs which were obviously not
required other than due to the confusion factor
that the sunrise was causing on the scanner.
Again, I have one at 11 : 58 , at sunrise , the scanner
60 degrees to the sun , broke lock once and pul sed
quite a few t imes extr aneously , but caught
itself and continued to track .

I think on the

whole that the scanner worked real well .
McDivitt

So do I .

As a matter of fact , I bel ieve in the

last 20 or 24 hours, however long we had the
Horizon Scan Mode on , that we only real l y lost
control of the spacecraft that one time, where we
did the pitching maneuver I've already discussed .
I think in every other instance , a lthough it
pulsed needlessly two or three times at sunset if
the scanner was pointed toward the sun, it never
really lost lock and it certainly never l ost
control .

The light would come on every now and

then , but it would --.
McDivitt

But , I don ' t thi nk that the light came on more than
three or four times in t hose l as t 24 hours .

C8NFtDE~~TIAl

181

White

No.

McDivitt

And even though t he light wasn't on , it seemed

They sure didn't

like we would get an extraneous puls e every once
in awhile at sunrise or sunset .

But I

thought that the Horizon Scan Mode worked very
well.

It certainly proved to me that it was an

excellent attitude-hold mode, or pilot-rel ief
mode .

9 .6 HF Transmission Reception Check
McDivitt

I think that I 'd like to start out with No. 3
in this case .

We received an update to start

and stop our checks and had no difficulty doing
this .

I think that the transmission and recep­

tion , No. 1 and No . 2 under this major heading, are
covered in our data book and I 'd like to have Fd
summarize them at this time.
White

We ran a one day and one night-long test on it
in which we attempted to have all stations contact
us.

The data in the book .

I think the data will

point out that the HF is a rather unsatisfactory
mode of reception.

It was difficult for us to

evaluate our transmission that ' l l have to be done
from the data from the stations.
far as reception was

But as

60~~FIDE~~TIAL

182

concerned, we got a little bit during the night
and just about nothing during the day .

We ran

also a sunrise and sunset check and we made the
long counts as indicated, and listened for any
return on all our HF tests from Thule and Elmendorf .
We could hear Elmendorf qalling us , but they were at
one time barely readable , and most of the time you
could hear somebody trying to call, but they
were very broken and difficult to read .

More

detailed data is in the Flight Da ta Book.

9. 7 Orbit Navigation Check
McDivitt

Following the format in the debrief ing guide, I
think that the maps and overlays that we had
were excellent .

I f elt that the concept was a

very good concept.

It gave us a good check on

where we were throughout the flight as far as
accurate times went.

We used a t times the other

track charts tha t were printed before the flight .
We found that these were off some fair amount ,
although they furnished good information also .
Once we had the time error that we could apply to
times listed on t he map , we found that we were
able to use t hese quite well

also.

I think t hat

the map and t he overlays tha t we used in our

Orbit Navigation Checks was

a very good scheme .

The control mode we used was Pulse, and the
timing was just the GMT timing we had in the
spacecraft.

I ' d like to have Ed discuss a

little of the technique now.
White

Actually we had a form in our book that we had
made up to make these tests, but I think it
became apparent to both of us as we came along
that this is a fairly simple thing to do .

If

you want to just try to update your map without
having an update from the ground, it was
quite simple to point the spacecraft straight down
to the earth and get a point which you could
recognize on the ground., and actually plot this
right out on your orbit map .

I think we could

probably make checks in this manner and update
our map almost as well as we could by having a
longitude and time called up from the ground .
I ' d like to make a comment right now that I
thought the little map that we had with the
orbit plot on it was

very useful, but it

was weak in one respect ; I was always wanting
more detail on what I was seeing doWlll there .
We,fortunately,carried a map with about two to

184
three times the detail of the section cut out of a
Mercator Chart , which I found very useful .

By prop­

erly folding a map , I think I would prefer to have a
map of even higher detail with me.

It didn't seem to

me to be a drawback to have a large map in the cockpit,
as long as you kept it gelded down in the proper
manner.
McDivitt

Do you have any comments on that?

Well , I agree with lli .

I thought that this was a

relatively simple task.

I felt it would have been

much eas ier to do if we had the platform up so we
could point the spacecraft down using inertial reference and using the platform, but it wasn't difficult to do it just visually.

It only took a short

time to plot up a couple of points and run back and
determine your own ascending node .
White

You kn.ow, another thing that I found very interesting
was when they called up plot points and they' d give
you 30 degrees right , down 45 degrees .

Even without

the platform, those meant a lot to me .

I could

visualize very easily where I was going, whether I
was small- end-forward or blunt end forward.

I could

visualize quite well, without a platform , 30 degrees
down and yaw 30 degrees over, looking for a point .
It seemed I could check points nearly as well wi th

COt'4FIDE~~TIAL

co~~FIDEl'JTIAL
or without the platform.
McDivitt

185

It wasn't hard to orient.

I think that's probably true .
this is a good scheme .

I do think that

I ' d like t o see us continue

it on future spacecraft .
White

Yes.

I ' d t ake it again if I had 11\Y druthers .

What do you fe el about a bigger map?
McDivitt

I think for this kind of thing , this Crbit Navigation C.1eck, the map and the over.1ay we hud were
about the right size , but when we got around to
looking for things on the ground , I t hought the
maps and charts we had were pretty inadequate .
I ' d like to see us get something with more
detail on i t , just the way Ed says , and I think
we will cover this in better detail when we get
over to the Apollo Landmark thing.

9. 8 Relative Humidity Test
McDivitt

Another operational check that I 1 d like to discuss
at this time is the Relative Humidity Test tha t
we did during the flight .

All data is in the data

book, but the t hing t hat I ' d like to say most of
all is that the relative humidity was considerably l ess than anyone had ever expected . The
cabin temperature was less than anyone had ever
expected, and although we were instructed to

CO~~FIDE~~TIAL

measure the cabin wall temperature with a thermistor
tha t was on the end of our r elative humidity gage ,
I found that this was pretty difficult to do since
they ' d covered the entire inside of the spacecraft
with the sponge rubber..

We couldn 't find a good

place where there was just bare metal .

I took some

measurements on t he inside of the left- hand side
food box.

I took one or t wo readings off of the

metal frame that went around the window .

Those

are the only t wo places I was r eally able to
contact spacecraft metal.

Do you have anything

e lse tha t you want to add to that , Ed?
White

No, t he data is pretty well lai d out in the data
book .

I don ' t think there is anything else .

It

did surprise me, and it was a very pleasant surprise because I was interested in taking my
gloves off and putting my visor up.

.I sure

did as soon as I found out i t wasn ' t ·going to get wet.

9, 9 Zodiacal Light Check
McDivitt

I ' d like to have Ed describe this .

White

Okay.

We did this one on the fourth day at 22:42

Zebra , and i t was one on which procedures were
called up,

What they wanted to do was find out

if the thrusters firing could cause any inter-

187

ference on some z odiacal l ight photography that
was planned on later fl ights.

The first test

was to pitch straight down toward the earth,
open the shutter on the Contarex camera ind
actuate the pitch- up with the shutter open. Then we'd
take another picture and actuall y open the
shutter again and activate the pitch-down thrusters,
to see if these two thrusters would cause some
type of light interf erence to the photography.

On the pitch-down part of the phase, we waited
till the moon had set, and as we were pointed
down toward the earth, we came upon an area fa±rly

~i ear of clouds.

But,unfortunately,there were

a few soattered lights from homes or cities down
bel ow us , which might have caused some
interference.

I don ' t think so .

very , very scattered .
was sa tisfactory.

They were

The pitch-down test

The next one was the one in

which we were actually level with the horizon.
Again , Jim opened the shutter, I actuated a
pitch- up, and closed the shutter.

He

opened it again , I actuated a pitch-down thruster ,
- ·• . j .

and he closed the shutter.
simple test .

It was a pretty

We took four pictures.

~◄ FIDEt'~TIAL

188

10.0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS

10.1 Countdown
McDivitt

During the countdown the visual sighting I had
was a multitude of wasps sitting on the Rand R
section and crawling all over the windows.

Aside

from that , the sky was clear and I didn ' t see
anything else except the gantry going up and down .
White

That ' s about it .

somewhat confused.

It appeared to me the wasps were

They felt that the RCS

nozzle was a very large beehive for them.
10.2 Powered Flight
McDivitt

The first topic is lift-aff .

At lift-off I was

looking at the instruments and didn 1 t -see a
thing.
White

I think Ed 1 s got something here.

From the lifk-!£--I cou1d actually feel when we
lifted off -- the vibrations decreased a great
dea1

McDivitt

What about visual sightings?

White

1 11 get to that.

1

As we started to move, I felt

I could see the relative motion.

We had a clear

blue sky above us; there werentt any clouds ,
but I could see the motion in the sky.

I could

also, as soon as the roll program started ,

EO~~FIDE~~TIAt

189

definitely see the rotation of the booster and
spacecraft combination.

As we continued on up,

I was watching within the spacecraft and outside,

I could see the pitch program initiated .

also.

I could hear Jim call it out, and I could
actually see it on my instruments and also see
it out the window .
McDivitt

BECO's the next topic.

Why don't you go through that .

I think I just

looked out one time to see the horizon for just
a second .

Why don ' t you go through the rest of

those there and read them off?
White

Okay, at BECO I was looking in also .

I was

waiting for the staging and I had my attention
inside , and I didn ' t see the big sheet ·of ••
flame that John and Gus described coming from
around the separation of the first stage.

So,

there wasn't anything other than the. normal feeling of the separation.

As far as :'visual aight­

ingt- were concerned, I didn ' t see anything else
at staging.

As we started to nose over, I saw

the horizon coming up and I called that out to
Jim .
McDivitt

I think that might have been ~hen I looked out,
I

but Im not really sure I could see anything at

COt-4FIDE~◄ TIAL

190

the time.
White

I had to say something.

It is quite an impressive

view when you 're up there --the very the first
time you look out and you see it.

I looked out

and all I could see was the horizon and the
blue down below us.

You probably couldn't,

because as I think of it now, we were on the
side .

I could see the horizon and you couldn 't.

All you could see was the sky.
McDivitt

Right .

White

So I could see a little of both.

I could see the

clouds , the water , and the whole smear.

The

first time I saw that out the window I called
that out to Jim, and it was quite an exciting
view.
White

Engine No . 2 ignition-- I didn't see anything
that had to do with lighting the second engine
off.

The horizon view, I just discussed .

At

SECO, there was a lot of debris going by.
McDivitt

That was at spacecraft sep, wasn't it , rather
than SEGO?

White

You1',re right.

You ' re absolutely right.

At

SEGO, I didn't see anything other than that
the acceleration profile went down to zero.

COl'JrlDE~~TlAL

At

191'

spacecraft separation I think Jim and I both
noticed a lot of stuff coming by the spacecraft.
McDivitt

Right .

White

Just plain debris was all it was .

Just

pieces of whi te junk came by.
McDivitt

Probably little bitty pieces of the adapter there.

White

In fact , when I got out and looked later on at
the spacecraft separation plane , there were pieces
of the same kind of white stuff still
back there attached jaggedly to the adapter
section.
that .

Fairing jettison - - I couldn't see

Did you see anything on the fairing

jettison?
McDivitt

When I jettisoned the fairings , I saw the
I

horizon scanner fairing go whipping off, but I
couldn't l ! ok at it and the nose fairing both.
S~ I only saw the one go, but there were some
more pieces flying all over the place , and they
went just as soon as I punched the .FairingJettison Bit ton.
10,3 Orbital Flight
White

Boy!

We've been talking about these things for

t he last ten days .
The f irst one is geographical.

EO~~FIDEl>-JT.IA L..
McDivitt

Yes.

Geographical.

ships.

We could see wakes of

We could see roads.

We could see towns .

Although I never saw any individual houses , I
could see an industrial area with what looked
like oil tanks and a few other things .
see canals very well.

We could

We could see the Suez

canal very well from the air.

I don't think I

ever saw an individual ship.

I never saw any

individual cars or airplanes, but you could see
runways very well.

But the thing that you could

see best of all were long lines.

I'm sure that

if you had a road that was 50 f eet wide , or
however wide you make roads, and it was long,
you could see it .

Whereas, if you had the same

thing and it was just a square down there,I
doubt very seriously that you could see it unless
you were looking for it,specifically.
White

I think perhaps also there is the contrast between
the colors .

The things that I saw with very high

clarity were runways.

As you looked d~un at the

runways you caught a high contrast between the
green or the brown, or whatever the color that
it was laid out in.
clearly.

You could see it very

I was impressed by how clear you could

J
see things .

193

They were small; there ' s no question

that things don ' t get any bigger when you ' re
looking down at them, but in my opinion things
were much clearer.

I could see with a higher

detail than I could when I fly over in a normal
airplane,as far as the object itself being
clearly defined.

I also noticed this at night

when I looked down on it .

In the clear stretches

the city lights were much finer defined than the
lights are in a city when you're flying over at
40 000 feet.

Things are small but have a much

higher definition.

I think it would be

interesting to find out in-mu- photographs the
degree of resolution that you have .

I feel that

the resolution , if you have the proper contrast,
would go down to 50 feet or below.
McDivitt

Yes .

I ' d agree with you there .

Geographically,

there were just so many things that we could see.
I think that we took pictures of most of the
things that we thought would be interesting.
White

I ' m dying to look at those pictures.

McDivitt

Me , too!

White

I agree with Jim that if you look at a city,

__

particularly if you look a t a city in a desert

~~◄ FJD.E~JTIAL--...,...
~

194

area where the houses are brown and the
surrounding terrain is bro~m, everything' s kind
of small and it all blends together .

Unless

there was some type of contrast between them ,
it ' s pretty darned hard to pick up a city right
out in the middle of the desert.

We had

trouble when we came to El Paso in finding it,
and Cairo blended right in with
McDivitt

-- blended right in with everything.

You could

see the air}!urt at Cairo--I ' m not sure if
I ever did really see the city.
White

I think I could .

When I was looking in that

area at Jaffa, as soon as I saw that airfield
out there and was concentrating on looking at
it , I saw more detail.
McDivitt

Yes.

The thing of it all is that ,geographically ,

you have to have a real large feature to be able
to see it very far out in front of you , like the Red
Sea.

Now when I was trying to find Cairo

one 1;ime, I looked out I was having trouble
finding the Red Sea.

Pretty soon I found the Red Sea

about 30 degrees below the horizon or maybe a
lit tle more.

As I got closer, of course , the

Red Sea stood out very well.

iK

FIDE~~TlAL

As we get closer

195
and closer and closer, these things really star t
standing out, but when you ' re looking from up
around 125 or 150 miles , and you 're out 60 degrees ,
you ' re a long way from your target .

It ' s just

that you can ' t see that far through all that
atmosphere, I guess .
White

I think one more comment on the geographical is
that I think we ' re r eall y going to see some things
down there when we get some type of magnification.

McDivitt

Yes , a telescope is what you really need .

White

If you can get some kind of telescope to help , I
think we can really see something.

I wonder if

there isn ' t some way that, while we know we can't
carry some things inside the spacecraft , we can
work with something outside the spacecraft- camera equipment or some kind of optical equipment.
that we might be able to have mounted on the outside .

We can store it somewhere and mount it on

the outside after we get up there --mount a
te l escope right through , with the eyepiece on the
inside .
McDivitt

Boy that would be great ! Wouldn't it?

White

And then when it comes time to come in, you just
punch the thing off and forget about it .

But

196

while you ' re up there you ' ve got this thing with
the long eyepiece. I think we can do this with
EVA.

Stow the thing back in the adapter , go back

and get it mounted up , get back in, and you ' ve
got yourself just about as long a telescope as
you ' d want to put up there .
cameras .

Same way with

I think you can take cameras up .

We

can take some of these big cameras that we ' ve been
wanting to use..

We can have a sighting device so that

we can mount this thing on the outside of the
spacecraft after we get up there , and then point
it with a pointing device at the ground and get
some of these pictures that we ' ve been wanting
to take .

I think we've got some possibilities

there.
McDivitt

Okay.

Celestial .

I think in the nighttime you

can see the stars without any difficulty.

In the

daytime you just can ' t see the stars if there ' s
any sunlight whatsoever on the window, or if the
nose of the spacecraft is in the sunlight, or if
the horizon is in the sunl ight , or if some of the
earth is in the window.

I think all these things

tend to limit your night vision.

c_Q ~~FID£:hlIIAL

They crea te

197

an optical barrier , practically, between you and
the stars .

The difference between the day sky

up in orbit and the day sky here is, as far as
we were concerned, was practically nil, because those
just weren ' t any stars visible.

It didn't have

anything to do with the atmosphere; it just had
to do with t he optics of our window and the
nose being shiny.

We couldn't see any more stars

in orbit than we could here in the daylight, but
it wasn' t because of the atmosphere up there.
It was just because we had that coating on the
window tha t reflected the sunlight,and because
the nose reflected sunlight into the windows , and
t he same thing with the horizon or the ground .
When it was lit up, it reflected light into the
windows.

Actually , you had to get that window

in total darkness almost before you were able to
see anything.
White

Pull the shades.

McDivitt

Pull the shades .

And then when you did that , you

were able to see some stars.

On a few occasions

when I got the spacecraft into this particular
attitude, I was able to see some stars in the

198

daylight.

How about you, Ed? Were you able to

see any stars?
White

Yes.

I called them out a few times.

You did

have to maneuver just , as ca refully-McDivitt

That ' s right .

You had to be just exactly in the

right spot.
White

Let ' s go into the magnitude of the stars .

We

had set ourselves with the Corona Australis
as a kind of calibrator for us , and this was
composed primarily of fifth order stars.

That

was very clear, and I could see without a:ny
difficulty s tars
than that.

of lower ma gnitude

I could see , without question , stars

to the seventh magnitude .
McDivitt

And that ' s exactly the same magnitude I would
guess .

You could probably see th~m down to a

magnitude of seven.
White

Now, another thing , though , was that the sky
wasn ' t any more f ull of stars to me there than
it is when I ' m flying at about

40 000 feet

on a real da r k night .
McDivitt

No, as a matter of f act , it didn't really seem to
be as full of stars .

co~~FIDE~ffiAL

199

White

No .

On the night when we were flying with that

eclipse of the moon ,

I

saw

more stars than

I ' ve ever seen in the sky.
McDivitt

Yes, and as a matter of fact, I wouldn ' t doubt
that we could go out here and fly

tonight

and see seventh order stars.
White

I bet we could see lower than that .

McDivitt

That ' s right .

What I ' m leading up to say is

that I don ' t think we could see as many stars i n
orbit as we could flying around in an airplane
at 40 or 45 000 feet .
White

That ' s exactly my conclusion a.J:so .

You could

see down to the seventh order stars.
McDivitt

Yes , and I think the reason for this is the
coating on the windows, don't you?

White

I think so.

I felt like there was just a little

shield of what I was really seeing.
McDivitt

If we ' d just gotten that coating off , we'd have
been in great shape .

White

I also noticed a tremendous difference if I
turned those lights off in the cockpit .

It was

just like turning those stars on on the outside ,
and I don ' t think we should take those red lights
out .

C¼MftDE~~TIAb

€Ot'4FIDE~~TIAL

200

McDivitt

No .

I don't think so either.

You know , the

thing that did look brighter to me was that
planet right over by the sun .

When the sun set,

that planet would really stand out.
White

I noticed another thing on the planete, I didn't
notice--which one is in Leo now?

McDivitt

I don ' t know.

White

It ' s Mars.

Mars is around Leo now, and it

didn ' t look as orange .

To me it looked roughly

the same color as Venus did, and remember I
remarked on that up there, which is a very
interesting thing now .

I presumed that the

color should stay the same.
McDivitt

I didn't notice any difference between it up
there and here on the gTOund.

White

It didn't have to me the characteristic orange
color that it has when I look at it from down
here .

It looks more like a regular old--

McDivitt

A regular old star , huh?

White

No, it looked likr the planets, and remember I
remarked on that.

McDivitt

I think you did, now that you mention it.

White

And we probably went on doing somethi.n g else and
forgot about it.

Let ' s talk about the air glow.

co~,FIDE ►~TIAY

201

McDivitt

Why don ' t I discuss t hat thing that I saw those
two times at night .

White

Yes , I saw it too , so you weren ' t seeing things .

McDivitt

This phenomenon occurred in the dark and I think it
\./a.S

near Austra.l.ia., each t.iine, but I 1m not really

sure. We ' ve got it recorded on the voice tape,so
we can go back to the voice tape and see where
it was.

They were just paral l el r unning lines

of lights radiating from the earth up toward
us but at a distance away, and i t sort of
looked like a curtain.

All of these lights

rays seemed to be sor t of parallel t o each
other.

They looked a lot like the Aurora

Borealis, except that they were down below us and
they were coming up toward us .

The first one

we saw was considerably brighter than t he
second one and i t was sort of wiggly.

It

probably had five or six curves in it, at least,
and I thought it went like this a couple of times,
and was bent up around like this .
White

How about in the air glow layer?

McDivitt

Was it in the air glow layer?

No .

think it was in the air glow layer.

I don't
It looked

like it was down underneath -- it looked like it

Cilt-lFIDEt;JIAL .

202

was right over land and was considerably closer
to us than the horizon was .

It was, maybe,

half- way between us and the horizon .

I got the

impression that it was a lot closer to us and
it was definitely not in the airglow layer.
Both times I had this impression .

It l ooked

like it was coming up out of some clouds .

I

could see the clouds down on the ground, and I
had the impression that this was coming out of
them , but it only got to an altitude of maybe
half of ours.
miles .

That would be up to 50 or 60

This is the impression I got .

some pictures of it too,
White

I took

didn't I?

I had the feeling that the first time you took
it you had the wrong setting.
at an f11.

You had

about 250·

I don 't know what you did the

second time.
McDivitt

I don't remember, either.

McDivitt

This thing was in motion, too .
stationary thing.

It wasn ' t a

It continued to move the way

the lights on neon signs do.

It was wiggling

back and forth .
White

When it came around over toward my side it was .,to
me, closer to the horizon, and it looked more

<!tlP-ifFIDE ►~TtAt ~

.CO~~FIDE~~TIAL

203

like it -was below and in the air glow.
McDivitt

It looked like it was in the air glow to you? When
I saw it, it definitely wasn't in the air glow.

It

was a lot closer to me.
White

Of course, it started on your side and you talked
about it for

3" • or

4 minutes or so.

Then as

we drifted around, it went over, I guess, to my
side.

It was irregular shaped and it was out

toward the air glow layer.
McDivitt

Well, the second time it was a lot less bright.

White

Are we going to talk about the air glow layer now?

McDivitt

Okay.

We' re going to talk about the air glow layer,

but it comes under "horizon".

Let's talk about

that under "horizon".
White

Okay .

McDivitt

Do we have any other celestial observations?
fire

The

flies that we had around the spacecraft con­

tinua.lly--Sometimes you'd be able to look out and only
see one, and you couldn't see them too well at all
at times.

You could see them in the daylight occa­

sionally, but I don't think you could ever see them
at night.

But the place where you could really see

them was at sunrise and sundown, because here you
had a black background of the sky a.nd you had the

GQ~~ElDE ►-~TIAL
• -'.1

GOl>~FIDE~~TIAL

204

sun shining on them .
White

They picked the sun up .

McDivitt

They picked the sun up and reflected the rays .

They

r eflec t ed t hem just as bright as stars, I thought .
White

Didn ' t they ! Well, you know the thing that was most
interesting to me was the time I called you and said
the sky was full of stars , and you said it wasn't ,
the sky.

We were pointing down at the earth.

That

was my first exposure to having your window in t he
daylight and mine in the dark .

At this time we had

a l l the fuel particles from the fuel from the boosters
spewing out all over, and my whole view out t he window was j ust completely full of these reflecting
particles .

They looked kind of like one of the s t ar

fi elds we had past off on us as star fields .

It

looked kind of like a star field, but it looked
kind of unreal , too . That's exactly what it was .
McDivitt

One of the prettiest things was when. we had a urine
dump at eunset,because we just had mil lions and
millions and millions of these fireflies or part icles
outside .

When you put them all out like that with

the sun shining on them,as we 'd mentioned earlier ·
with the black background, it just l ooked marvelous.
As a matter of fact, we took some movies of them·,.

E..-0 RFIDE~~TIAE
1

205

and I think we might have taken some stills ,
but I'm not sure .
White

I hope it came out.

McDivitt

Yes , it was r eally spectacular !

So we could

just about make our own stars when we wanted to .
Is that all on celestial?
White

That ' s all I can think of , Jim.

McDivitt

I couldn't see the zodiacal lights .

I couldn't

see the r~genschein and I could not see the burst

of zodj acal lights that you get just as the sun

White

sets.

Go ahead , Ed .

Okay.

I saw one during the las t few sunrises .

I watched the sun very carefully.

trom the time

it first started to come up till it finally
popped up , I was looking all the time for that
shoot of light that 's supposed to come up just
before the sun pops up .
see that .

Well , I could never

All I could see was the glow as it

came up and a very rapid ris e as the sun did come
up .

There 's something that I did see that was

quit e interes ting t o me .

Several minutes before

the sun came up there would be a shaft of light
that would shoot up , and I

watched it on two

cer~FI

206

different occasions.
sleep.

It was during your last

I was taking a few final movies and I was

watching for this very phenomenan.
first time I saw it .

It was the

It would be a little shaft

of white illumination and it was a long time before the sun came up.

I don't know whether that's

what they were seeing before or not .

But when the

sun itself actually came up, I didn't get much of
a big ball of light--just some big, bright lights
coming up from behind the earth .
McDivitt

That's all I was getting.

I didn't see this other

thing.
White

I saw quite a few shooting stars.

McDivitt

Oh, yes.

White

They seemed to fall and burn up considerably below
our altitude.

They looked a half or a third as

high as we were when they were actually being
consumed and being burned up.

I never saw one

above us , did you?
McDivitt

No .
Okay cloud coverage--

White

There was a lot of it.

McDivitt

There was lots of it.

There were a lot of times

when there wasn't any.
we can sal about this .

I don't guess there's much

co~~IDE~~TJAL
_J

207

White

I think we took some good pictures of the clouds.

McDivitt

Yes.

Well, throughout the four days we had

cloud coverage over things we wanted to take
pictures of.
all.

Other times we didn't have any at

It was a variable thing, and w.e just got

a lot of good cloud pictures, I hope.
Horizons.

Well, at night there was a definite

dark horizon, which I assume is the earth 's
horizon.

And then there ' s a dim band, and then

above that there's a br ight band that is much
narrower than the dim band, and above that it is
clear, and

then

nothing.

I guess there are

really three horizons.

There's the top of what

I think is the earth.

There's a top of the dim

band, and then there ' s a top of the bright band.
In the daylight you don't see these dim and bright
bands.

I t's just a gradual decreasing in

intensity of light.

It starts out with a very

light blue at the horizon and just gradually
goes out to the dark blue, and it finally just
goes t o black.

Right at sundown,if you're

pointing 90 degrees to wher e the sun is, you
can see t he light blue of the day sky coming

GQ ► •fiJDEN l -JA k~

208

down.

lt' s much, much higher than the air

glow that you see at night .
McDivitt

If you're looking over at the daylight side, it
looks l i ke the light tl..:ie , goes up probably
three times as high as the air glow does.

What

do you think about that?
White

Let me go into my impressions of the air glow in
the evening.

I saw the same thing you did, of

course , and it looked like to me that the dark
part was roughly t wo or three times as thick
as the lighter air glow layer below it.

We

were both impressed with the phenomenon of the
apparent rise in the air glow as you go from the
daylight to the dark, and as soon as you get out
in full daylight, the earth 's layer is all gone.
But as you transition between the daylight and
the dark, you see the layer start out and narrow
down to what you see as you get into the dark
side as the air glow layer .

And when you

initially get into the dark area, the air glow
seems to disappear for a moment, and then the air
glow layer pops out when you get into full dark, ,
very clearly.

209
McDi vitt

I agree.

Okay.

Do you have anything else?

White

That horizon isn't very good on the daylight side,
either.

McDivitt

No, the horizon isn't very good on the daylight side.

White

The horizon's not very good anywhere, really.
We ' ll go more into that on D-9.

McDivitt

You could see the lights of the attitude thrusters,
and it didn't seem to make any difference which ones
you were firing at night.

They weren't blinding

by any stretch of the imagination.
White

They looked like lightening maybe.

McDivitt

The attitude thrusters lit up the sky a little
but not a great amount.

Little flashes ·.

They weren't blinding either.

Not much to say about that.

Okay.

I want you to

discuss '· adapter separation that you saw .
White

Okay .

On the adapter separation, Jim and I agreed

to separate the electric and the OAMS, and then
pause between the adapter separation so that we
could dwell a little bit on the separation and
absorb as much as we could about it.

When it did

separate, we got a very clean feeling of separation
between the t wo and a very definite feeling that
the adapter and the spacecraft had separated .
There wasn ' t much question in my mind.
much in yours, Jim?
~

..i-O~~FIDE~fftAt •

Was there

CQ~◄ FIDEt~TIAL

210

McDivitt

No, not at all.

White

There were a few pieces that came around from it,
but not as much as there was at spacecraft separation after insertion .

McDivitt

No .

White

All right .

McDivitt

The equipment adapter.

Did you see anything?

I didn ' t see anything off the adapter .

I just saw it off of the

retro adapter.
White

Why don't you go to retrofire then?

McDivitt

Okay.

White

Do you have anything else on the adapter s epar ation?

McDivitt

No , I don't think so.

White

I was impressed with the cleanness in the feel ,
and I didn ' t even want to look around .

I

just happened to be looking over at Jim ' s window at
that time , and , as I said, I could see pieces
go around , and I could especially see pieces
to this side.

What I saw looked like a

mount with two round things on it .

I had been

briefed on this thing by John Young and he
said it looked like two pump packages .

So,

I said it looked l i ke two pump packages , too .
Looked like just what I expected it to .
And there was lots of debris around it as it whistled.

211

off to the side , and then it went out of my view.
McDivitt

Okay.

On retrofire there weren't any sightings

to observe .

Did you see anything outside, F.d?

Did

you see any flames or anything like '. that?
White

No, I didn't.

McDivitt

I don't think there was much there. The retro pack
jettison- -we didn't see it jettison, but shortly after
that we had rolled upside down and we were flying in,
and I saw the retro adapter floating around on the
left side.

It had turned around so that it was small­

end-forward rather than blunt-end-forward. You could
see the whip antenna sticking out the side, the four
retrorockets, cross-beams, and the plumbing around
the edges . It was quite a sight.

It drifted out

behind us until it got out a couple or 300 feet. It
started glowing a little on the leading edge. It
started fading farther and farther behind us as we
reentered.

It finally went from a dull glow to a

bright one, and finally you could see the leading
edge of it eroding away. Finally, it vre.s just a
ball of flame back there.
White

I thought that was quite a sight, too. It kind
of set the

modus

for

our

reentry,

of observing

212

very interesting things all the way down ,
including ourselves .
McDivitt

We didn't observe anything in particular that
happened at 400 000 feet.

The ionization· was

where we really started picking up the fire.
White

I

think we kind of timed that with what you

were talking about the retro adapter up there .
You said , "Hey , look at it starting to burn.: 11 ,
and about that time we were starting to throw
a sheath around us to .
McDivitt

That 's right.

It looked l ike to me that it

went from pink to orange and then went out to
a reddish-orange, and then in the mids t of the
reddish-orange you could see little tongues of
green occasionally.
White

It was quite pretty.

I think another thing about it too is that there
wasn't as much of it as I thought there would
be .

I can 't say that I was disappointed in not

seeing more fire, but when I first heard about
John ·Glenn's

reentry,

more fire coming out .

I

envisioned

In this case you might

call it just a sheath.
McDivitt

That's right .

There wasn' t a big blaze , by a

C0~51FIDE~JIAL

213

long shot.
White

It was almost like a veil of silk.

There was

no flame .
10 .4 Reentry
McDivitt

Well , in -:reentry we r olled .

We didn't have any

trouble in seeing the· horizon as we went around,
but

we

were

rolling all the way down .

We did see ourselves crossing the ground, since
wE'.l were

heads-up a fair amount .

We could look

out and could see anything we wanted to see.

I

saw the Gulf Coast , and then out a cross Florida.
White

A little bit of dizziness was associated' with
the rolling reentry as far as the visual--

McDivitt

Yes .

It wasn't really dizziness .

It was just

t he fac t that you could tell that you were going
around in a circle at a relatively high rate .
It didn't bother us.
feel it .

It's just t hat you could

The spacecraft didn't oscillate very

much during reentry.

Anything else there , Ed?

White

No.

McDivitt

When we deployed the dr ogue, it really made the
ride interesting.
very well .

I couldn't see the drogue

Ed could see it probably better than

GO"' FI DEf'~TIAb...

214

I could .

At this time I didn't !mow where the

sun was.

We oscillated back and forth on the

drogue probably as much as plus or minus 40
degrees.

I never did see the drogue dereef.

I couldn't see up to the top to see if it was
reefed or not .
McDivitt

I don ' t think there's much else about what we
could see on the drogue.

Can you think of

anything?
White

I could see it up there whipping back and forth ,
and I was sure hoping that it was going to hold
on and not pull the front end of the spacecraft
off, the way we were oscillating.

McDivitt

At Rand R-separate I saw parts of stuff out in
front .

My window was pretty well clouded over,

and I couldn ' t see that well .

I did see something

separate , and I did see the chute start off.
wen t all t he way up.

It

At main chute deploy I saw it

come out in a reefed condition, I checked the
chute and I didn ' t see any panels missing.

I

checked t he little circle in t he middle in the
parachute , and it seemed to be in fine shape.
I was expecting that we had a good chute .

It

215

finally just dereefed and we had an excellent
chute.

It popped out and came back in .

About

a quarter of it along the edge folded back in
and then popped back out again and we had a
beautiful chute.

Do you have anything else on

the main chute?
White

No.
reef.

I couldn't see it until it started to deFrom the dereef on, I could see the chute

and was very happy to see it.
McDivitt

During our descent to landing I could see the
Rand R can with both the drogue and the ~ilot
chutes attached to it. ,floating off to one side.
After we landed, I noticed that there was steam
coming out of the RCS thrusters.

This steam

didn't last very long.

I could see the sea dye

marker in the water.

I could see the parachute

in the water .
White

I think you also ought to indicate that the
windows steamed up quite a bit.
out a little better than you.

I could see
You couldn't

even see '50 •• feet out in front of you on your
side.
McDivitt

No, I sure couldn't. • There was

a hole down

216

at the bottom of the window that I could see
through.

F.d wasn't having too much trouble seeing

through his.

It was real nice to see the heli­

copter and the swimmer.
White

Both the windows were pretty foggy, though .

EO~~FIDE~~flAI!"

EO ►~FI DEISJ TIA L

217

11 • 0 EXPERIMENTS

11.1 Two-Color Earth--L.imb Photography (MSC-10)
White

This is one in which we had our first example
of poor flight planning.

They scheduled our

MSC-10 experiment so that it actually confl i cted
with some Horizon Scan Tests that we had to
make.

And since our Horizon Scan tests were

being made in conjunction with the platform,
which was only going to be up for a limited
period of time , we had to interfere on the
tail end of MSC-10 to go ahead and start
working on the Horizon Scanner Check.

Anyhow,

we went ahead on the MSC-10,starting at 11 :04,
and went through eight series of pictures.

This

was the time that we had trouble with the event
indicator.
McDivitt

Didn't we have ten series?

I t hought we had ten .

White

I 've only got ei ght indicated here.

Oh, yes,

wait a minute; it says 10 1/2 runs.

I only

have eight recorded here, and
·being run at 11 : 57 ,

a final one

We should have 9 1/2 runs.

McDivitt

Yes.

White

We should have 9 1/2 runs, and only nine were

GO~~ FIDE~~ TfAL

218

required.

We should have it all .

On the firs t

three runs the event indicator wasn't used, because I was having trouble with the Hasselblad
shutter working properly in conjunction with
the event indicator .

About 11 : 19, I got the

event indicator working all right, and the rest
of them were run pretty well.

The early runs

were taken pretty much in night conditions .

I

doubt if much will come out on that one . The .next one,

at 11:09 ,was taken with the sun right on the
horizon , right into the camera, so I doubt if
that one will be too much more than a big
washed-out mess .

The rest of them were all

taken with the horizon in the proper position and
utilizing the ring sight.

The last part of the

experiment was interrupted by the Horizon
Scanner Tes ts .
the sunset .

In other words, we didn't get to

I think actually the sunset would

have been one more series of pictures .
McDivitt

I would think so .

White

Okay.

McDivitt

Okay .

White

Do you have any comments on that?

I guess that's all for MSC-10 .

cQ ~~ Fl DDtTIAt
McDivitt

219

No, I don't have any comments. I think we
logged the time and the weather along the route,
such as it was, and we got all that into the book.

11. 2 ~ ! i c Terrain and Weather Photography (S-5 and S-6)
McDivitt

I think we had a lot of unusual and significant
subject matter, and it's all in the pictures.

We

had one camera that wouldn't wind the film too
easily, but other equipment operated fine.

We

didn't get the data reviewed properly--too late.
White

And we used the voice recorder as often as we
could record.

I don't believe we have all of

this S-5 and S-6 photography recorded.

I

think ss we go over them, tho"Ugh; .the ones we
didn't record will be pretty obvious .
McDivitt

Yee, I think that those two experiments are
really in the photographs.

The Hasselblad

camera operated fine except we had one magazine
that didn't wind up too well, but it never did
jam up completely.
it.
White

I guess that sort of covers

Wouldn't you say, Ed?

I would too.

All the data that we got for it

is recorded in our data book. Let's see
Simple Navigation with the Sextant. Ha.!
11.3 Simple Navigation with the Sextant
McDivitt
I ~
we might as well cover it.

.-,~~fJOa~TIAb

D-9.

220

White

Well , in the Air Force portion of it , we can start
right off by saying that the stars they wanted
Ui

to run the operation on--I

think , Series

No . 4-McDivitt

No , that was the last one .

They gave us Series 1

to start wi.th.
White

--which was the daylight .

The daylight operations

didn't prove feasible at all .

We couldn ' t see

the stars and if we could have , we didn ' t have
a good horizon to r un them on .

So it became

apparent to us that that run was los t right in
the beginning,when we first came out of the
darkness and lost a ll the s t ars .
t he big picture

We also got

t hat t he sext ant was not going

to be too easy to use .

It was going to be

impossible to use without using some fuel , and
it was going to be dam hard to use when we used just
pulses of fuel . We needed some kind of stabilization .
McDivitt

At least I thought so .

We might say that the lightbulb in the cormter
readout for the angle was burned out .

White

That burned out within t wo seconds a fter we got
up there , I think .

COt'4FfDEt~TIAL {

221

McDivitt

Did it ever light?

White

First time I turned it on it lit and it went
"flit" , and then the light just went bzzz-bzzz.

McDivitt

I didn't know it ever lit.

White

It lit and then the light went out.

McDivitt

Okay.

So we lost the lightbulb in the angle

readout, which made all the rest of the measurements very difficult.

And the Air Force portion

in daylight was completely unusable.

You couldn't

see the stars and the horizon at any time.

In

the night portion,we initially had great large
angles between the stars and the horizon, and
we found that about 25 degrees was the maximum
star-horizon angle that we could handle.

Would

you concur with that, lli.?
White

Sure do.

McDivitt

As we mentioned when we were talking about the horizon
and the air glow.

We really had three horizons.

We had the true earth horizon.

We had the top

of the dim air glow layer, and we had the top
of the bright air glow layer.

I think that I

always used the top of the bright air glow layer,
except where I specifically called out in our

222

notes.

Ed tended to use different types of

horizons, dependent upon the type of filter he
had on.
White

Why don't you discuss that a little bit~

I tended to feel that the bottom of the bright
air glow layer gave me a little finer defined
horizon for a no-filter operation .

When I put

the blue filter on, though, I didn ' t have much
horizon at all.

When I put the green filter on,

it gave me, as far as the top of the air glow is
concerned, a better horizon to measure to.

I

thought that the horizon was certainly not a
very defined point to measure to, and I think
accuracy would be lost in trying to measure to
a horizon like this .

It 's just pl ain hard to

take a fuzzy old horizon and try to make an
accurate measure to it .

That 's exactly the kind

of horizon that you've got at night .
McDivitt

I concur.

There must have been at least a couple

of minutes of fuzziness in that horizon , and I
don't think that you would ever expect to
measure to the horizon within a couple of
minutes.
White

No.

Do you?

You'd have to calibrate yourself down pretty

COt~FIDE~~TIAL

GOt'4 FI t, Et'4TI
close to measure.

223

You know it would be just

pure luck if you kept measuring properly to it.
McDivitt

Yes, the thing of it all is that even if Ed
got himself calibrated so that he would always
measure the same angle between the star and the
horizor--it wouldn't be consistent between One
person and another.

I'm not really sure how you

would ever go about measuring to this horizon
with any accuracy at all unless you had some way

that you could-instead of attenuating the lightbuild it up in some way and then filter out one
particular line that happened to be an extremely
sharp line .

The horizon I like to measure

to

best was the top of t he dense air glow layer with
no filter.

The next horizon I liked was the top

of the dense air glow layer with the green filter.
I liked least of all the blue filter , because it
just completely eliminated the horizon .
White

Yes, I don ' t think the difference between. the
clear and the green was enough to argue over a
preference between .

I thought maybe I had a

clearer one in the green, but I tended to take
far more measurements with the clear one, so

•

Cetctf lDE~~TIAL -.s..~

224

perhaps they are so closely matched that it
really didn't make too much,.- difference .
McDivitt

Yes, I did most of mine with the clear one.

White

For the runs in the Air Force portion , I found
out that the stars had too big of an angle between
the star and the horizon. To actually follow
the format, for the runs as given , turned out
to be too difficult . We did make runs on stars
and horizons if we took the time on it and took
the measurements . It seemed like the angle was
fairly well limited between 20 and 25 degrees. This
was due to the limited maneuver capability impos ed
upon us and the lack of having enough window space .
If you get behind the sextant, behind the window, and
try to make a measurement, you might be able to
theoretically measure something out to 50 to 60
degrees . Theoretically , this may be possible, but
you must can ' t get yourself up above the console
circuit breaker panel or down into the foot well
area, which would be
ments of

this

required to

magnitude.

There

make

measure­

were definite

Cet-«:IDE~~TIAL~

225

limitations on hitting the side of the spacecraft
and trying to make a sighting and losing the
object out of the upper window as you cranked
the periscope down to bring the star down to
the horizon.
McDivitt

In trying to accomplish the Air Force portion
of the experiment, we found ourselves completely
unable to do the daylight star-horizon measurement.
So, to get some insight into the operational use
of the sextant, we took a great number of star
to horizon measurements at night.

They are in

the book in quite a bit of detail.

As we mentioned

earlier, the helmet was an impediment to use with
the sextant, so on occasion we had to take the
helmet off.

The greatest angle that we ca~ld

normally get was about 25 degrees between the
horizon and the stars, but on occasion we got up
to 30 degrees. This meant a certain alinement
of the spacecraft was necessary so that

you

could get the largest piece of glass between
the star and the horizon and still

get

the

226

sextant in there .

We found out that to do the

star to horizon measurement, you had to be
right - side-up.

If you tried to do it upside down ,

the filter blanked out the star and not the
horizon . I think that there are a great number
of measurements in here, but I do feel that the
Air Force portion of the D- 9 Experiment was more
qualitative than quantita tive . Maybe I ought
to talk about the Apollo portion.

We made one

Apollo run where we used two stars .

I held the

spacecraft fixed to within about plus or minus
2 degrees, and

Eld took a great number

measurements .

Ed made a great number of

measurements between two stars .
our 30
were

runs on one
quite

started
ings

close

of star s

pair

got

that

Then we

another
of

stars

Scorpi .

I

20

sight­

that

were

think

they

apa rt .

They. were all

in

were about 12 degrees on the
about

And we

together .

with about

on another

further
White

out

pair

of

first

22 degrees on the second one .

one and
There were

Antares and S0 orpi i n the second s er ies , and it was

227

Scorpi and the third star up in Scorpio in the fi
first series.
McDivitt

Again , we found that the angle that we had
selected to operate between was too large, and
we ran our first group of stars in about 12 1/2
degrees, and for the second pair we tried to
pick stars that were farther apart so t hat we
could get a better feel for l arger angles.

This

pair of stars was a little over 21 degrees apart.
We were too optimistic about the angle between
stars that we could see by looking through the
spacecraft window.

What do you think about the

voice r ecorder usage during this experiment,
F.d.?

White

I don't know why we had to do i t .

McDivitt

No, we actually hand-recorde most of t he information here .

The one t hing that certainly delayed

the experiment was the loss of the lightbulb
within the readout.

We changed the batteries and

bulbs from the cross-hairs and never could get

i 0t~FIDE~~TIAL :J

228

this particular light to come b~ck on.
White

Did you ev8r flgure out why we needed to handr ecord all these things-why we had to record them
on the recorder--the times and all that jazz?

McDivitt

No, we h~d to r ecord the angles some place and
we h.ad to correlate it to a time .

White

Well, it says to prepare sextant and photo-event
indicator for meas,.1rem<'!•1ts .

What do t hey mean

by photo- event indicator?
McDivitt

The photo-event indicator was to get the exact
time .

Remember , when you were doing star to

horizon measur~me~ts you had to have-White

No , but this is just for the star.

I don't

understand the photo-cvant indicator.

I think

that just clobbers up our data.
McDivitt

That ' s right.
all.

Yes, that Wlisn't applicable at

It didn't make any difference wha~ time it

was at all .
White

In fact, when I made a second run on this while
you were asleep one time, I didn't put the photoevent indicator on.

McDivitt

No , there wasn't any need to put the pho~o-event
indicatoc- on this.

229

11 , 4 Electr ostatie Char ge (MSC-1)
McDivitt

I think what we could say here is that we turned
MSC-1 on and off when it said in the flight plan
and when directed by the people on the ground.

11 , 5 Proton- Electron Spectrometer and Tri- Axis Flus-Gate Magnetometer
(MSC- 2 and MSC-3 )
McDivitt

We turned off MSC-2 and -3 according to real time flight planning from the ground and whenever the fligh t plan in t he air called for it.

White

We had one time when I ran a double small-endforward set of runs through the Anomaly.

The

f i rst time , I fel t that the heading had not been
accurate enough for the small-end-forward
requirement.

We were doing it without the

platform on the stars , and the first time
through I wasn ' t satisfied with it .

S~ I called

down to the ground and told them that I wasn ' t
satisfied with the run and that I ' d make a
repeat run the next time.

This I did , and I

left the equipment on throughout both runs and
for an hour after that.

So, we effectively have

two small-end rtms through the South Atlanti c
Anomaly.

COt~FIDE~~TIAL

230

McDivitt

Okay.

We didn ' t have any operational problems

with it .
White

Did we use the voice recorder with it?

Yes , I guess we did .

It should all be recorded

on the voice recorder.
times in the book.

If not , we've got backup

Our voice recorder was our

prime means , and our book was just a backup.
McDivitt

Right .

11 , 6 Radiation (D-8)
McDivitt

I think one time you were sleeping, and you
didn ' t get it that pass, but you got it the
second pass , didn't you?

White

Well , we got them logged when we did it .

They

can go back and get it .
McDivitt

Right .

Ther e were no operational problems.

We

did use-the voice recorder to record the information.

11.7 Inflight Exerciser (M-3 )
McDivitt

We didn't have any stowage problems with it
bes ides those is associated with all the other
equipment.

'rhe outside thin rubber layer broke

on the exerciser about the end of the f irst day.
White

Yes .

McDivitt

Go ahead , Ed ,

I've got a comment or two. ·

CO I>~ FI DE~~TIAb

231

White

I had the feeling that my capacity and my desire
to do strenuous physical exercise decreased
during the flight.

Actually,it kind of decreased

to a point and stayed at that point for the
whole flight.

Shortly after I got up there , I

really didn't have any big desire to do a great
deal of physical exercise.

I did do the exercises

as indicated, and I did about eight extra series
of exercises with the exerciser, but I noticed

a definite lack of interest in doing heavy
physical exercise.
McDivitt

I concur with what Ed said, although I'm not
really sure this came about because of the small
amount of sleep that we bad or just .:w -a.n effect
of the zero- g thing.

I did use the M-3 exerciser

to do other exercises.

I used it to exercise

my arms , not oql.y in the manner that was de.mon@trated
but by holding on to one end and pul ling the
other end with the other band.

I used it to

exercise my legs also.
White

I did a few other exercises , just with the
exerciser.

I yanked around a little bit on it,

as Jim indicated.

But , I also did some exercises

in which I pressed pretty bard up against the

G€>-MFIDE~~TIAL 1 ~

COt'iiflDE~~flAL

232

front end of the spacecraft; I tried to tense my
legs and tense my stomach and arms , and I tried
to exercise in this condition .

I probably did

that a lot more than I did anything with the
exerciser.
11 . 8 Inflight Phonocardiogram (M-4)
McDivitt

To the best of my knowledge we didn't have any
equipment problems.

About the end of the second

day my sensors started itching a little.

I don't

know if it was my phonoca rdiogram or my other sensors .
11 . 9 Extravehicular Activity
McDivitt

Extravehicular activities have been covered
in great detail earlier in the debriefing, I
don't think we have to go over that again.

11, 1 OMiscellaneous

McDivitt

In the external observations I did observe three

satellites , but I think that these were covered
in detail earlier, and I don't believe we need
to go over that again here.
White

I think that we'll comment again (we've commented
on this point before) that the tape recorder is
the most important piece of equipment that we
have onboard the spacecraft to record our ob-

COf',FIDeNTIAL

233

servations , times , and other information concerning the experiments .

I think the one we have

onboard wi th the light located down underneath the
pilot's right elbow is entirely unsatisfactory.
I feel t hat we lost some information on our
flight due to the light 9oming on and not being
observed. We were going ahead with information
for the tape, but were losing it in this manner.
I think we ought to correct this deficiency
prior to the next flight.
McDivitt

I concur heartily.

CO f'J F. IDE f'J +IA L

234

12.0

PRE-MISSION PLANNING

12 . 1 filssion Plan (Trajectory)
McDivitt

It is pretty difficult to debrief this pre-:-mission
planning because we had so many pre-mission plans
that we couldn't keep track of them all.

I think

that we started too late on the mission planning
for GT-4 , because everyone was concent:r:ating on
GT-3 .

Then in the two and a half months that we

had to do the mission plans , we changed it about
three or four times , drastically.

We nqt only

changed the trajectory, but we changed the altitudes
of insertion; a t one time we were shooting for a 87-

145 orbit and then a 87-161, and then we changed it
from 90 degree launch azimuth to a 72 deg:cee launch
azimuth.

We changed how we were

decay of the orbit .

going to handle the

All in all, I think our

mission plan changed just too often .
12.2

Flight Plan
McDivitt

Same with the flight plan.

We kept changing it

around and changing it around and changing it
around.

It was r eal ly unfortunate .

Up until about

ten days before the flight we were really prepared
for about two different flights, and finally we got

COt>~FFDEt-~TIAl

235

the flight plan nailed down.

I think our r.light,

though, was somewhat different than other flights in
that we did have some real major changes about
two and a half months prior to the flight .

Con­

sequently, we had to expect these things .

So,I

think I'd be the first to admit that I lived with
these changes, because I had a great desire to do
the mission that we set out to do.
White

We both kind of got to the point where we knew
that we had a mission to do, and we knew it was
going to be tough as far ae getting a good flight
plan was concerned , a.nd we were just trying to get the
the best we could and go.

McDivitt

That's right.

I think that the situation that

we finally ended up in was that we tried to have
a very good launch and first couple of orbits and
a good last orbit or two.

All the stuff in the middle,

we knew we were going to have to handle re&l-ti.me.
I finally found myself forced into the situation
where I couldn't even worry about the middle fl~ght
plan.

We had to lay it out in general and expect

a great number of changes.
we did.

This is exactly what

We handled it in real-time.

I'm not

suggesting that we do tnis ~for future flights, £or

€0f'~FIDE~~TIAL

I really hate to see us go right on down

until

the last minute before •·we get this information
prepared .

I think it ' s too bad , but I think on

our flight a l ot of this just couldn ' t be helped
because of the drastic changes in the flight plan
in the last two and a half months.

White

I don't fee l we ' ve got a big beef coming to anyI lmow a lot of people were working pretty

body.
ha.rd .
McDivitt

That ' s right.

There were a few things on our

checklist that could have been done earlier , but
I think the total miss ion plan ,as such ,was modi fied
at a late date to change the objectives by a great
amount .

We in the crew agreed with the change .

It

almost doubled the amount of work that we had to
do in those last couple of months, but I think
that by accepting it and trying to make the thing
work , we were abl e to overcome the pr oblem , and it
-wa~

indeed

a major problem.

A situation that I

hoped wouldn ' t occur and did occur on our flight
concerned the checklist, the data books , the procedure books, the map for the orbit navigation and
our charts and graphs .

We didn't receive the check­

list and the pr ocedure and data books for our flight

<ie¥~ Fl D'E'NTIA L

237

to look at until 8 : 00 o'clock the night before the
flight .

Consequently , we didn't have a l ot of

time to go through them the way we should have.

We

should have had these books and charts in our hands
no later than two weeks before the flight .

Here

again there were some extenuating circumstance, but

I 'm not sure that the circumstances were really that
great .

I still think that we should have gotten

these out earlier.

The people down at the Cape

doing these things worked themselves to the bone
night and da1 ,practically , to get these things done.
I have nothing but ~he highest praise for the people
from FCSD that came down to do this job ,

I just

sort of suspect that we should have gotten started
on it earlier and that maybe we should have had a few
more people down there doing it .

Any comment on

this, F.d?
White

No. This is the thing that I think I was harping
about a long time before the flight, because I saw
the same thing happen on GT-3 ,when the checklist
came in at the last minute .

In fact, the last

night before the flight , I remember John walking down
the hall looking at hie flight plan and his checklist and commenting on this surprise and that

~{flDE~-.tTIAL

238

surprise , a.nd there wer e a few surpr ises in ours .
I wouldn ' t say there was much we didn ' t know about ,
because we had gone over it pretty thoroughly . But
all our experimental procedures a ~d our books--we ' re
partially to blame in some reepects also , because
we were running the show and knew exactly what
we wanted .

But I concur very heartily with Jim ' s

recommendation t hat we get these t·ni.ngs ma.di~ up
at least t wo weeks ahead of time so th~t we can
use them in t he simulator , and that we ~1se the
little hand-held checklist exclusively in the
simulator that we are going t o fiy with if yo11 could
get them n~iled fown th~t well ahead of time .
what I would have liked ~o h~ve done .

That ' s

That ' s what

we didn ' t do, tbo1igh.
McDivitt

Yes , I don ' t really see any excuse for dragging it
out to the last day.

If t hese things would hfl.'l '~

been eight hours later than they were , they wouldn't
evBn h.~ve made the flight.
White

I think ,'l.'1,1ther thing, too , is t hat right now we've
got a good set of books and checklist.

I recommend

heartily , unless the cr ew that comes beb-ind ·1s h .1.s
som8 very strong diverse opinions , that they use
som~thing similar so that they can get somebody
started making t hem early enough to be useful.

C~EIDEl'4TI/\Lr

-COtslFIDE~◄ TI-Al~

239

McDivi tt

I concur wholeheartedly.

White

They may not like everything about them , but I think
that they proved their value with us in our flight .
I sure would rather use something,and use it wel l,
than use something that may be a little bit better
and use it poorly.

McDivitt

Okay.

I think that covers the flight plan topic,

don't you?
White

Yes sir.

12. 3 Spacecraft Changes
McDivitt

Here again we had some changes that were brought
about by the change in flight plan, but I think we
handled all of these adequately.

I just don't think

that we ought to use GT-4 as an example as to what
should be done on a flight, as far as no change and
things like that .

I feel that if we don't have the

equipment onboard the spacecraft checked out and
ready for service by the time the spacecraft leaves
St . Louis, they shouldn't fly on the flight .

I ' ve

felt like that since the time I got assigned to this
flight, and I still feel that that's the way to do
it, unless you have a maj or change for a worthwhile
r eason .
White

I was sure wondering r ight to the very end if they

240

were going to get these final changes in that were
required for our flight.

They sure waited a long

time to put them in.
McDivitt

Yes, two or three days before the flight we still
had a lot of things missing.

In fact, when I got

into the spacecraft, about the first thing I
noticed was that the velcro wasn't around the
8- ball.

About

30 minutes later, while we were

lying there waiting for the launch, El looked up
and pointed at the 8-ball at the place where the
velcro was not.
White

Yes, there wasn't velcro in several places where I
had wanted it, and in several places where I had
actually drawn in the lines where I wanted them to
put the strips. Inst~ad, they put them 90 degrees to
where I had the lines . I can ' t believe they would do
something like that.

I'm not really complaining.

I think they did a pretty ,good job .
McDivitt

Do you have anything else on spacecraft chan.g es?

White

No.

12. 4 Mission Rules
White

I thought this was one of the smoother points .

McDivitt

What? Mission rules?

White

Mission rules .

241

McDivitt

So do I .

I don ' t really have any comment .

I

think we had a very good set of mission rules, and

I don't have much else to say about it .
White

I concur .

I think we set a record on running

through the mission rules review, and I have one
recommendation to make. I recommend highly that the
crew review their rules thoroughly prior to the
meeting and send their disagreements to Flight
Opera tions Division, so that they can either concur
with them and incorporate them.or disagree and then
iron the differences out on the major things before
you come to the mission rules meeting.

Then,

you ' ll find that you sail right through in just
the first meeting , and this is exactly. what we did.
12 . 5

ExPeriments
McDivitt

I think we had some pretty good pre- missi on pl anning
on our e:xperiments, e~cept D-6 , and I think the
people in FCSD, specificall~ fe l l down on the job .
They did not prepare the ns.rget ;cquisition Folders
that we needed .

They arrived down at the Cape

about two weeks be.fore the launch v i th a .footthick pile of maps for us to memorize .
White

They had a WAC Chart of every place that we were
going to fly over, the -who l e 30 degrees north to

242

30 degrees south, and that sure isn 't what we needed .

McDivitt

I think that there wan't any imagination used here .
I just feel that the people who were responsible for
perfonning thi s duty fell down on the job completely ,
and did nothing whatsoever but t alk about it .

When

we really got around to flying t his thing they didn ' t
have a thing for us .

It turned out tha t t he peopl e

who finally ginned up the maps for us were the
peop le f rom the Department of Defense Off ice here
who were monitoring the thing from the technical
standpoint.

I sort of felt that this target '

acquisition stuff was a function of FCSD , and as
a matter of fact the people who were concerned with

it led me to believe this.

When we got around

to flying the flight, we found that there wasn't
any way to acquire these targets .

They hadn ' t done

any work with it at all, so I think t hat this is
a real low point in the FCSD.
White

They didn't even have what I would consider a
satisfactory method of calling the i nfonnation up
to us.

McDivi tt

No, to put it bluntlY, it was screwed up and unworked upon.

I think the planning for all the

other experiments was adequate.

243

White

We had one area where we were a bit too ambitious,
and this was in the stars for the Air Force D-9.
We reviewed this, also, so there was no lack of
pl anning.

It just turned out that using these

stars in the sequence that we had for them , with
the type of fuel constraints that we had imposed
upon us, we just couldn't effectively run the experiment without using a great deal of fuel.
McDi vitt

Yes .

And I think that this came about just because

of a lack of lmowledge on everyone's part , on just
what we could handle in the spacecraft and the
rates that the stars move through the skies .
White

That was something t hat we learned on this flight.

McDivitt

I think so .

I think that's part of the qualitative

da ta that we brought back for D-9, but I do feel
that the pre-flight planning for D-6 was completely
inadequate .

Anything else on a:n.y of the other ex­

periments?
White

No , I think the other experiments were we ll briefed
to us .

We understood them quite ~ell and I think

the procedures were well taken care of.
McDi vitt

That's right .

Let me clarify one thing.

I t hink

t hat the technical aspect of D-6 was one of the
best briefed of all the experiments.

The DOD people

244

who were responsible for it had some of the most
detailed and thorough briefing guides and forms for
us on the equipment, and we were more briefed on the
equipment.

It was just the procedures that were

lacking.
White

Yes, I felt that I knew the equipment and its assembly end
usage on the D- 6 backwards and forwards .
for conducting the experiment

Procedures

were quite clear to

me , but the only thing that we didn't have was a good
method of passing up the targets and target acquisition once we got up there.

Also, just handing me 243

targets was a pretty simple-minded approach in trying
to solve this problem, I thought.
McDivitt

I don ' t think I have anything else on experiments .

White

Nope .

245

12.6

Training Activities
McDivitt

Well, I wouldn ' t do anything differently .

White

Jim , I wouldn't either.

That 's one of the

highlights, I think , of our mission that we
were well trained for it; and I felt in all
respects we were well trained.

I don ' t be­

lieve I ' d add anything extra, and ther e 's
nothing I think I ' d take out, either.
McDivitt

Well, I think that the training went along just
about as we'd planned it and hoped it would
work.

I do feel that the simulators didn't

provide us quite the training that we needed
early enough in the program.

I think the

simulator here in Houston was too busy interfacing with MCC and switching from one
building to another and updating to

"5"

configuration and a whole bunch of other things .
We never really got it the "4''. configuration.

The one down at the Cape took too long too convert
from the GT-3 to the GT- 4 configuration.

As a

matter of fact, as ea~ly as about two weeks
before launch I had done four reentires on the
s imulator down there .·

CO tsl FIDEt\JTIA L

246

White

I did four for the whole time.

McDivi tt

Is that right?

Whi te

My total reentries wer e four.

I remember I

got three that day before the launch.

I have

one thing, though, Jim, that I think that I
would do differently .
McDivitt

Okay, what's that?

White

Now that I know what kind of checklist I need
and what kind of procedures books and data
books that I need , I'd have those things ready
a month ahead of time .

I 'd use them and get so

familiar with them and iron any little bugs
out .

We still had some bugs in our books .

McDivitt

That's right .

White

It was a little hard to use.

It was a little

hard to locate things in there.

And if I did

anything differently, I'd put my emphasis real
early on getting my checklist and dat a books
up even though I know fully well that they 'll
change in some little respects r ight up to the
flight, but I ' d get them out so I'd have them .
We didn't have anything up to a week or eight
days before t he flight.

247

McDivitt

That's right.

The things like how to do the

experiments shouldn' t change.
stay exactly the same.

They should

The operational checks

should remain the same, and maybe t he flight
plan will change a little, but you really
could have most of those books done long in
advance.
White

·Then you know exactly what information you' re •
going t o take up on the f l ight with you and

can get thi s lai d out l ong in advance.

I t hink

this is one bi t of experi ence t hat we could
pass on to the guys coming behind, particul arly
the ones that haven't flown before, at least
in Gemini.-just what informati on we took a l ong
and the reasons why we took i t and what our
recommendations would be and what we would want
to take now.

Because remember you and I sat up

there the night before the launch and sifted
through a pile of stuff and decided just exactly
what we really wanted to take.
McDivitt

Of course, on t he other hand we knew what we
wanted.

I think we were j ust looking for i t

in that .pile of junk that we had on the table.

248

White

Yes .

McDivitt

We had t hat list of things that we'd made up.

White

Decided we were going to take ,

If I had it to

do over again , I think I'd have this all in
mind earlier.
McDivitt

Yes.

White

You and I , t wo weeks before the flight, I don't
think ,fully knew exactly what we wanted, and it
wasn't ready for us then, anyhow .

McDivitt

Yes . You're r i ght.

Matter or fact , some of

the stuff we t ook was our own personal stuff ,
l i ke those s t ar charts.
White

Yes .

McDivitt

And t hat polar star chart was mine and that
Mercator was yours.

White

Right.

co~~FIDE►~TIAL

249

13.0 MISSION CONTROL
13.1 GO/NO GO 's
McDivitt

Okay.

Mission Control.

next major topic .

Mission Control is the

It says describe and discuss

updating on the status of the spacecraft on

White

the mission.

GO and NO/GO 's, I thought , went

pretty well.

You have any comment on that?

No .

Sure didn't.

13.2 PLA and CLA Updates
McDivitt

White

PLA' s and CLA updates, I thought, went extremely
well.

You have any other comments on that?

No .

We used the form and they're easy to copy

down.

There ' s sure a lot of information they

can get up in a short period of time.
13.3 Consumables
McDivitt

The conswnables, we bad--

White

I got some comments on that .

McDivitt

Okay.

White

Okay, I thought that their monitoring of our

Go ahead .

electrical system was deficient .

I don ' t

believe they gave any indication of what our
electrical consumption had been , up till very
near the end of the fl ight, and they informed

us that we were 130 or 150-McDivitt

160, E:d .

White

--amp-hours over , a.nd I would've liked to know
this at discrete times throughout the flight .

McDivitt

I t hink ,really,this was our fault.

I think we

should 1 ve called down and asked them.

When

they did give it to us , they gave it to us
because we did call down and ask them .
White

Yes, okay.

Maybe that was~ · but

ing f or it more often than that.

I was lookMaybe we

could have t his part of the GO/NO GO, and they
could say you're on your electrical profile
and your OA.MS profile .

This might be a part of

it to be sure.
McDivitt

Yes .

That woul d be a good i dea .

13,4 Flight Plan Changes
White

Flight plan changes.

McDivitt

Flight plan changes .

Well , we had a few.

I

think that i n general t hey all came off where
they should.
White

I don' t really have any comment .

We had one area in which they wer e deficient
with t he MSC-10.

McDi vitt

I've already talked to Jerry about that .

He

251

says that there was a misunderstanding between
us .

They sent up to do the MSC-10, and then

they said not to do the MSC-10.

Do it later.

We didn ' t get the message.
White

I didn't hear that.

McDivitt

Yes .

I thought all the flight planning was

good except in this one instance that we ' re
talking about.

We were directed to do MSC-10

in one pass, and then before it was done, we
were directed to start another check.

We got

this information pretty late before we started
the experiment and hence didn't get it.

We

didn ' t check over the times ours elves and I
gues s we should have .

So that when we got

around to doing it, we found ourselves running
into t he situation where we were supposed to be
doing two experiments at the same time.

Fortun­

ately , I think we wer e able to accomplish all
the objectives of both experiments, but there
was no need to hurry when we were up there for
f our days.
White

Jim, I've got another one too .
a lot about it.

I've thought

I thought about this one before

EO~~FIDE~~TIAl

252

,,

the flight, and I think about it right now.
I thought about it during the flight.
time to start a crusade.

I think it's

I think it's time to

start a crusade on the elapsed time.
clock.

And

Get us a

It's going to cost money, but I think we

ought to get ourselves a good elapsed time clock
inside the spacecraft.
elapsed time.

Get FOD to start going on

And here's another funny sounding

one, but I don ' t see why we couldn ' t do it--why
we couldn't have a flight watch in ten-hour increments.

Let somebody build a ten-hour watch

with a counter on ten hour increments .

And then

we'd have the timing system that we need on the
spacecraft.

What do you think of that?

I know

you and I have talked about this before but I
think it's time-McDivitt

Yes.

We were forced to run our mission using

both elapsed time and Greenwich Mean Time and it's
almost an insurmountable problem.
White

I think it's really got our data all fouled up
right now , too .

I think we'll unsnarl it all

right, but, boy, if we could've been putting
all our times into those tapes and on our data
books in str~ight elapsed-time increments, and even

~~ FIDEt'4TrA L

253

when it gets into long time, you lmow, fourteen
day flights, you can still put in 430 and 20
seconds as well as you can the regular Greenwich
Mean Time.
McDivitt

Yes .

White

I think that it wouldn't cost us any more to
have Omega make us a ten-hour watch and fix
these dials up on it so that we could keep
track 9f good elapsed time.

McDivitt

You've got to leave the minutes and seconds
alone there .

Well, let's not argue that here

or even discuss it.
right .

I think what Ed says is

We were forced to run the mission in

both elapsed and Greenwich Time, and · r don ' t
think that was the way to do it.

I think we

ought to really start after this elapsed time
thing quickly and get on with it.
White

Right .

It's time to get on with this.

it's time to make a crusade on it.

I think

I think

everybody ' s ready for it .
McDivitt

Yes.

White

Except the few people that are fighting it,
and I think we can overcome them.

254

13 . 5 Systems
McDivitt

Okay.

Mission Control System.

I think the

Mission Control on this flight was nothing short
of excellent.

We got all the information from

the ground that we needed.

We didn ' t get

bothered by them unnecessarily, I don ' t believe .
White

They were there when you needed them .

McDivitt

They were there when we needed t hem.
right .

I have nothing but praise for the ground

control on this flight .
White

That ' s

How about you , Ed?

I did too, and I had the feeling up ther e that
I had confidence in what they wer e doing down
there and in the decisions that wer e being made .
I felt that when I needed information that the
source was available down there and I could
always get it. That's a very good feeling.

GO~~FIDE~TIAL

255

14. 0 TRAINING
14.1 Gemini Mission Simulator
McDivitt

Okay.

Over on Training now.

The first topic

is Gemini Mission Simulator and I think we

I

touched lightly on this subject already.

think that it's an excellent trainer for procedures, system knowledge, launch, orbit,
retrofire, reentry, and crew stations.

I think

t he big problem with it is that it takes too

long to turn it around.

I think that we're fool­

ing around with it too much, c~mmitting it to
supporting other functions besides flight crew
training.

The simulator at the Cape was sup­

posed to have been turned around at roughly
two weeks after GT-3's launch, and about six weeks
after the launch it still w~en't doing it~s job.
When we went down there to start flying this
completely checked-out simulator, we found that
the launch phase worked, the orbit phase did
not work, and the reentry phase did not work.
After we got the orbit phase squared away, we
found out that· we kept losing reentry eomm;:i.nd
system.

We couldn ' t use Direct Control Mode

in anything.

We never did fly reentries

OOi'IFIOEttlJiA ~ ~.

~co~~FIDEr~TIAt 1-'"

256

until shortly before the actual flight , at which
time I think I had four total reentries about
a week before the flight.

Ed said he only fl ew

four reentries on the simulator at the Cape in
total .

I probably flew fifteen, I would guess .

That ' s total , so I think that the Gemini Mission
Simulator fell down completely in preparing us
for this flight .
White

Well , not quite that bad, Jim.

McDivitt

Well .

Okay.

We did get a lot of training

from it, but I think that the tum-around time
is completely inadequate.

It made the job for

the flight crews a lot tougher than it should
have been.
White

I don ' t know really what the problem is, but I
think the people down there are working hard ,
and when things were working right, the training was outstanding.

But, gee , there 's just too

much time when things weren't working right .
McDivitt

That's right.
make.

I think that's a good point to

People down at

the Cape try very hard,

and I don't think it 's their problem.

The

program for the Cape Simulator was done here .

co~~FIDE~~TIAt

. COt'4FIDE~~TIAL

257

When it arrived down at the Cape, it was completely inadequate for the job , and I can ' t
understand why that program wasn ' t checked out
in better shape when it went down there ..
White

I think , also, they 're caught as second- rate citizens as far as keeping their simulators up to
date and getting the latest spacecraft changes
in them.

They seem to be way behind t he space­

craft and indicated to me that the system did
not permit them to update the simulator wit h t he
speed with which it ought to be updated to t rain
the crews properly.

The things that were

characteristic of Gemini 4 were being incorporated in the simulator down there in t he last
two or t hree weeks when they should have been
incorporated in the first two or three weeks
after the changeover from GT-3 to GT-4 ,

I think

we just have to work on a faster processing of
the changes in getting the pieces of equipment
and the changes out to the simulator so that
they can be incorporated in it.

Once they got

the changes down there , they got them incorporated into the simulator, seemed like, pretty

-COIS~FIOEI\ITIAL

GO~~FIDEt~TIAL

258

f ast .

As long as t hey weren 't there , they

couldn ' t update that simulator .

Another thi ng

that I 'll,for the life of me , never understand
is wher e in the world the food boxes were for
that simulator down there.

I think somebody

should explain just why it took about one month
to locate a pair of food boxes and put them on
the simulator down t here.

It was the only way

that we could actually work on the storage of
the pieces of equipment for our flight, and we
didn't get a chance to look a t that until what
I consider too short a period of time prior to
launch.
McDivitt

Yes.

It seemed like t hese food boxes were ordered

a year in advance , and they never showed up .

It

looked like there was a complete lack of followup on somebody ' s part here .

Then it turned out

that they did find the food boxes but didn ' t
release them to the Cape simulator quick
enough.

I came home here to Houston and found

that we had a complete set of good food boxes
in the Houston simulator; whereas,the one down
at the Cape did not have any at all .

This sort

259

of goes along with putting the following
missions in front of the mission that ' s about
r eady to go .

One last comment that I would

like to make on the simulator is that we made
a mistake in building it so that it t-JOuld only
tilt up 30 degrees .

This lying on your back

in a simulator is for the birds.

You can sit

up in it a lot longer than you can lie on your
back .

Also, everything that you have to do

when you 're lying on your back is about five
times harder than it is when you 're sitting up-nothing at all like zerc g.

I feel strongly

that we should look into some method of making
this simulator go all the way up to a 90-degree
point .
White

Here , here!

One other thing on this simulator ,

too , whil e we're thinking about it .

I think ,

there 's no question in my mind, the most effective
trainer we have is our mission simulator.

I

think it could be made about a third more
effective if we had a decent out- the-window
horizon provided .

We didn' t have anything that

I ' d call satisfactory available to us prior to

co~~FIDEt~TIAL

260

flight .
McDivitt

I agree.

14.2 LTV Simulation
McDivitt

LTV Simulation.

I think that on the t wo trips

that we made to LTV to do the a bor t simul ations
we got as much for

a.n hour of time spent as

we did in any other part of our t r aining.

We

were able to do a great number of runs in a
very short period of time , and we got all our
abort procedures down pat in just a very shor t
period of time .

I think that I can ' t say

enough for this .

I certainly will be glad when

we get this type of a simulation i t MSC so that
we don't have to travel out of town to get this
kind of training .
White

I hope t hey can get it so it works as well as
i t does up t her e ,down here , because one thing
that impress ed me was that you could go up there
and be able t o run 70 runs.

McDivit t

That's right .

White

And not sit around waiting for t hings to get

In a day .

f i xed all t he time .
McDivitt

I think on the one day we went up t here , Ed

GOE Ii IE HilUI 1¼.t-

261

and I together ,in one day,had about 160 runs .
White

Yes .

Pretty close to that .

14.3 Centrifuge
McDivitt

Centrifuge . . I think that t he centrifuge
contributed very li ttle to our mission.

I

sort of feel that once you ' ve been on the
centrifuge and you ' ve learned what the effect
of g's are and how to counteract their effect~
that there's not a great deal more to be gained .
I didn't really feel that I got that much out
of the centrifuge t ime.
White

How about you , Ed?

I think that your orientation in the centrifuge
is very impor tant .

In other words, I think that

it does give you a feeling for what the g 1 s are
going to be like and what the g 's on the liftoff and reentry are .

I don' t believe there ' s

any necessity for beating your head on a centrifuge over and over, running it up there .

I

certainly wouldn't want to go run a series
of runs just before the mission so I ' d know
how it ' s going t o feel on launch , because Ialready
know how it 's going to feel on launch. The first
time you run a few runs on a

ce~trifuge,

you

262

know pretty well what it feels like.

I t hink

that it ' s good in moderation, but I certainly
don ' t think that you should over-train on it .
It's not something that you need to train on
every time for every flight.

14,4 Translation and Docking Trainer
McDivitt

Translation and Docking Trainer .

I thought

that the Translation and Docking Trainer was an
excellent trainer for the D-6 pass that we did ,
the Apollo Tracking Pass .

I think that the

simulation that we set up at Martin Denver was
also an excellent tracking task f or this , and I
sort of felt that we got the techniques from
these two t rainers that we needed to successfully
perform this experiment.
White

I have a couple of comments on that .
same way.

I felt the

Of course, we didn ' t have this trainer

used too much for the docking phase, but I thought
it was quite good for the tracking aspects and
also for thruster failure.
McDivitt

That ' s r ight .

It gave you a dynamic simulation

of a thruster failure and what you could do and
what you could notice when you actually have a

thruster that fai led .

I used it quite a bit

short ly before the flight to pract ice t he docking and the station-keeping that we never r eally
got a chance to perform in flight .

I felt that

it was quite valuable for this .
White

Yes .

I think that it ' s a very good simulation ,

too , of the actual way the spac ecraft really

moved.
McDivitt

Yes.

I think it is t oo .

I t hink it is too .

Anything else on Transla tion and Docking
Trainer ?
White

No .

14 . 5 Planetarium
McDivitt

Planetar ium.

Whit e

I think it's ver y valuable training.

We used

this one down here in Houston , and we used the
Morehead Planetarium .

There ' s not a bit of

question in my mind which one you ought to use,
and it ' s Moreheady because the display of the
stars is about as close as you can get to the
r eal stars out in the sky; wherea s,in the one
down in Houston the projection of the stars
just doesn't have the quality to provide the

~f,g[p IIITffl_~

264

information that you want to get.

I have one

other comment , though , as far as the stars are
concerned.

I think that probably we got as

good training with our stars during our night
flights as we got during the planetarium work.
McDivitt

I f eel that's true too .

You've got to go to

those planetariums to see all the stars in the

sky, but the night flying we did with our ttar
chart was probably the thing that really imbedded
the location of these stars in my mind.

I kept

looking at them night after night after night
after night , and when we flew I was convinced
t hat I could go up t here and find all those
stars that I needed t o find .

I think I had no

trouble at all finding them .
vfhi te

Yes .

We saw every one that was out a t night.

I think we saw them all .

I think we can come

back wit h good i dentification on them, and whatever informat i on they want us to tell about
them,we can tel l them.
McDivitt

That's right.

And where we di dn't know the

exact name of a particular star in a constellation,we could always tell which star it was in

265

the constellation and be able to find the name
of the star after we got back here to the ground.
But I do think that the star training we had
was worth every minute of it .
White

Yes, I'd go back some more, too .

I'd go back

to the planetarium some more.
McDivitt

That's right .

It 's one of the things that you

really have to keep at all the time, because you
can never go out at night and look at al l the
stars in the sky.

You can only see a certain

restricted area, and it takes a lot of looking
to see the whol e sky.

By the time you look

long enough to see the whole sky,it 's six months
since you've seen certain stars, unless you
want to stay up all night.
White

Spacecraft orientation. I think the little devices
they ginned up at the Morehead Planetarium are
real good in this respect . You can sit there and
they can simulate your orbit.

They can put you

up in the barber chair and ;you look out and see
approximately the number of stars you can see
out the spacecraft, and I thought that's about
what I could see out of the spacecraft.

When I

266

actually got up close to the window, when we
wer e up flying, I could see more stars , as I
thought I could.

I thought that the training

we received was good .
McDivit t

Yes .

No doubt about it,that was all time well

spent.

14.6 Sys tems Br iefings
McDivitt

Sys t ems Briefings ,

We actually had briefings on

every system in the spacecraft , and there are
quite a number of them.

The schedule was such

that we had a general briefing here at Manned
Spacecraft Center on each and every one of these
systems .

I think we had a second briefing here

at the Manned Spacecraft Center on certain
systems like the ECS before we went to the
altitude chamber.

We had a number of briefings

on the systems again up at McDonnell by
McDonnell engineers in St , Loui s.

We went dovm

to the Cape , we had another general briefing by
the McDonnell engineers at the Cape probably six
weeks before the flight , and then about ten days
before the flight we had a final systems
briefing where they just discussed any changes

~

El~

.

267

that had been made since the previous briefing
and brought us up to date on some of the things
that had occurred duri ng this spacecraft systems
testing. I thought every one of these systems
briefings was worthwhile, and I think without
each and every one of them we would have been
much worse off than we were .

I think that if

I had it to do all over again, I'd schedule them
just exactly the same manner we did this time .
One or two here at the Manned Spacecraft Center,
then again up at the contractor, then a couple
of them down at the Cape.
White

No .

Any comment on that?

I iiked the manner in which they were presented ,

as a buildup of details as we went along~ The
final ones down at the Cape were just certainly
not systems briefing, They were details of the
system briefings .

14 . 7 Flight Experiments
McDivitt

Right ,

Flight Experiments .

Simulations . We

didn ' t have to do any simulations on MSC-1, -2 ,
and -3,

They were just throwing switches .

The

medical experiments , the Calcium Deposit Experiment and the Bone Demineralization Experiment,
required that we have a number of x- rays taken

\ =--- t•tJFQ: I~

268

and we did indeed go make a couple of dry runs
and a couple of wet runs on the x-ray table to
make sure that we could get it done quickly. I
think this paid off.

We never had any delay due

to these x-rays .

We certainly all knew how to

use the exerciser .

And the phonocardiogram

needed no practice.

S- 5 and S-6 did not r equir e

any training here on the ground , because these
were supposed to be photographs from orbit .
That thing was impossible to simulate on the
ground. The D-8 required no simulation , so it
boiled down to D-6, D- 1 , and D-9 as the exper i ments that required simulation prior to flight.
As we said earlier, we felt that the. Translation
and Docking Trainer and the Martin Denver simulation for the D- 6 experimentwAre very valuab l e .
·They gave us the techniques that we needed to
perform this thing in space.

Gemini Mission

Simulator was invaluable, too, for everything-for experiments , operational checks and for the
whole mission.
White

As far as any really D-9 work, though , with the
simulator , all we could go t hrough wer e kind of

269

cursory procedures .

There was no star field or

anything to utilize , which I think would be
useful . If we had a decent star field , we could use it
out of the GI'1S . Also , on D- 6 the GMS did not provide
us anyt hing we could use . Ther e were procedures ,
right .

And like you said, the Translation and

Docking was all right for D-6 , but, practically,
we had no simulator anywhere that gave us anything that I could get out for D-9 .
McDivitt

Okay.

Are we through with t he briefings?

We

had a real major briefing that lasted t hree or
four days here at the Manned Spacecraft Center
about four months prior to the flight .

Wasn' t

it , Ed?
White

Yes .

Well , was it that long?

or April-- March wasn ' t it?

It was in March

Somewhere around

there .
McDivitt

I t hought it was later than that .

We had our

first real major briefing three months before
the flight,on the 8th

of March , and we had the

experimenters come to Hous t on and go over their
experiments in great detail to explain what they
wanted and how they wanted us to go about get -

270

ting it .

I thought this was very good.

We had

another briefing on experiments in the flight
plan review about six weeks before the flight,
and we had another experiments review about
ten days to two weeks before the flight .

Again ,

I felt that each and every one of these was
certainly time well spent.

I think that,

probably,the first experiments briefing might
have taken place a little sooner .
White

I've got a comment on D-6 here .

Ten days before

the flight, they came in with the infor mation
for D-6 and said, "How do you want to run the
tracking on D-6 and send the infor mation up? "
This was not the time to bring up this type
of information or try to make this type of
decisions.

These decisions should have all

been firmed up at the six- weeks briefing, and
this is what the six-weeks briefing was for .
It was to tell us how we were going to run our
experiments.

After that time there weren 't

supposed to be any changes to the procedures ,
and 10 days before the flight was just to
incorporate any last-minute changes a.nd solidify

271

any things that might not be understood too
well in the procedures .

So this is where , I

think, that t he people giving this information
in D- 6 never were with it--as far as get t ing

the information ready for us for it .
McDivitt

Very good .

I concur completely .

White

In the future I think the experiments should
be firmed up by six weeks prior to flight and
the procedures should be well in hand at that
time .

They shouldn ' t drag on and be dragging

on right on down to a few days before the launch ,
which is exactly what happened on D- 6 .
McDivitt

Okay.

Equipment .

We had some of the equipment

a vailable to us as early as six or eight months
before the flight .

Other equipment kept dragging

in until the very last day , just about.

I don ' t

bel i eve that you can get the training equipment
avai l able to the crews too early.

We found our­

selves , in many cases , with the training equipment locked up out at the Cape for safe keeping-so safe that we couldn ' t even get to it , and we
didn ' t get a chance to use it the way we should
have .

I think only by a lot of noise ma.king, I

272

guess, were we able to ever break this stuff
loose.

Training equipment is just what it says--·

it should be used for training and it shouldn ' t
be kept under lock and key away from the crews.
White

I had that same feeling down there , Jim.
think we both kind of got on this one .

I
It

seemed like they'd want to get all the t r aining
equipment all together and say, "Ha , ha, 'we've
got it all together.

We're all up to snuff.

There's all of our training equipment.
all in that locker over there . "
way it ought to be.

It's

That ' s not the

The training equipment

shouldn't be in that locker at all .

It should

all be out to the crew.
McDivitt

In t he hands of the crew.

White

And I think up in the crew quarters is where the
training equipment belongs and down in the
simulator.

It should be out and being used .

I

think that one of the keynotes to our success in
having a decent amount of photography taken on
the flight was that we took the cameras that
were available, whether they were flight type
or the commercial types of cameras that we car-

273

ried, and became very very familiar with them
in the months before the flight.

I recommend

very highly that crews that follow in the future
get the equipment and utilize it so that it
becomes second nature to them prior to the
flight.
McDivitt

Okay .

I don't think we need any more on that ,

do you?
14,8 Spacecraft Systems Test
McDivitt

I think that we learned quite a bit from our
Spacecraft Systems Tests .

We had a great

number of them in St . Louis and then down at
the Cape .

I think that the amount that we

learned and the time we spent was a little low.
I think the rat i o of what you got for your hours
spent was low, but I do feel that it's a necessary thing and that you really should participate
in this spacecraft testing.

There were long

periods of time when we learned nothing,
absolutely nothing, but on the other hand we
got a feel for our spacecraft and saw how a lot
of the systems were working and the only way
you can do this is to actually partici pate in

274

the tes ting.
You know, it doesn't seem to fit in here

White

anywhere else, but I think maybe at this point
we ought to indicate we attended every one of
the management meetings up there at McDonnell
while our spacecraft was up there progressing
along through the assembly line.

I recommend

that all crews in the future have representation
at all those meetings.
That 's right.

McDivHt

The most important meetings I've

ever gone to in my life, at least since I've
come here to the Manned Spacecraft Center , were
those Gemini management meetings up at McDonnell .
I can't express Pnough the· need for a represent~tive
of the flight crews to be there at t}).e meetings.
14. 9 EgTess Trajning
McDivitt

Egress Training.

I thought the briefings were

excellent , the flotation tank work was excellent,
the Gulf exercise was excellent, and the survival
gear briefing was excellent.

I can't say how

glad I am that we've had this training when we
plopped down out in the Atlantic Ocean and we were
sitting there.

Even though we were about to be

rescued , I knew that even if they didn't rescue

~ EL&liffilBf!.t W~

275

us right then , I f elt fully confident about
being able to take care of mys elf out there in
that water.
White

We were well prepared in this area ,

14 ,1 0 Parachute Traini ng
McDivi tt

P~rachut e t raining.

I thought t hat the parachute

training that we had was good .

I thought that

t he parachute training into the water wi t h
pressure suits on was by far the bes t t hat we
had .

It was the most realistic and it was the

kind of training that we would need during
actual flight .
White

And I recommend highly that all crews do this
and they go in suits as close to the same kind of condition that you ' re going to plop down in that water
with, and go through the full inflation and not
skimp on a thing.

McDivitt

You get all tangled up in a parachute just the
way you're going to get all tangled up in the
parachute when--

White

That's right .

Inflate the life rafts and inflate

the Mae Wests and inflate the whole works every
time .

And if we don ' t have enough life rafts

276

to do it every time , see to it t hat we get it .
14 .1 1 Launch Simulation
McDivitt

Okay.

Launch Simulation. I think that the

launch simulations were excellent.

I think t hat

was the first place that we really had a chance
t o work with the people who were going to be
controlling us during the flight .

I think we

got a lot out of it , and I think they got a lot
out of it .

What we really had t o do was learn ,

I guess , r espect for each other , and I guess the
only way we could do this was to see how each~
of us was going to handle a situation that arose .
I don ' t have any ot her comment on it except that
I think t hat it was certainly worthwhile .
White

I 've got a comment .

Not on t hat, but a thing

t hat f its right in .
McDi vi tt

Shoot .

White

I think that the reentry simulations that we did
should be made a regular part of the preparations
for flight .

It's just as important to me as the

launch simulation.

I t hink t here should be

regular reentry simulation for the preparations
prior to the flight in the same manner as the

277

launch simulations.
McDivitt

I think so too.

I think those reentry simula­

tions we did that day were certainly worthwhile .

..

We only had to do a few of them to learn the
procedures for getting the information back and
for th .

We tried one one day , and it was so

horribl e that I ' m certainly glad that something
like that didn't happen during flight.
after we had done a couple of more
out,

I

But

it smoothed

had no doubt in my mind whatsoever

that we were going to be able to pass the information back and forth.
White

That's right.

I felt that they were equally

as important as the launch simulation .
14.12 Network Simulation
McDivitt

The Network Simulation.

We didn't actually

participate in the Network Simulations , and I
don't think we missed a thing.

I think, though ,

that something that was r equir ed was a discussion
with the Network Controllers . We came back to
Houston to tell them our points of view and
explain to them the kind of information we
wanted passed back and forth and the for mat of
~ h lante.d this infor mation given to us.

~ •F1tiltRf11l~ :

I

~ J i ilat.

278

think that during the flight it certainl y
proved that it was worthwhile, because that was
the way we got it, and we wer e able to get this
information in a usable

manner in a short time .

We didn ' t have to go over and over and over.
don ' t have any other comment on that .
White
14 , 13 Zero- G

I

F.d?

No .

Fl i ght

McDivitt

The zero- g flights are the next topic .

I sort

of feel that the zero-g flights were one of our
most valuable training tools , es pecially since
we were going to do the extravehicular activity
portion of t he flight .

Without this we wouldn't

have had the confidence in ourselves in getting
in and out of the spacecraft and opening and
closing the hatch that was required , so that we
probably wouldn't have even done it .

F.d ,

do you

have any other comments on that?
White

Concerning the little bit of a hatch problem
that we did have, I think that the work t hat I
had done on the zero-g airplane sur e prepared
me well to meet the problem t hat we had.

I

recommend very highly that for any egress work,
in which we 're going in and out of the space-

JJit;FAO'~

-

•

279

craft zero-g , that you get up there and work the
procedures out thoroughly between not only the
guy getting in and out but between the two guys
that are sitting in the seats .

•

we flew it .

This is the

way

We didn't go up there and fly just

one go.y jumping in and out the batch.

We went

up there and flew wi t h the gu:y in both seats,
whether the man in the left seat actually worked
all the time or not.

There were t imes when he

had to help , and in our flight it paid off,
because there was a time when Jim had to help,
and he knew exactly what the probl ems were and
was able to give the help necessary .
McDivitt

Another thing that might have helped here was
that I ' ve been in and out of t hat right-hand
hatch almost as many times as F,d had .

White

So we knew just what the pro.blems were .

McDivitt

So we knew exactly what the problems were.

14 ,14· Flight Plan Training
McDivitt

Next topic is Flight Plan Training.

I think we

had such a great number of changes in our flight
plan that it ' s really no t fair to discuss this
in any great detail .

The approach that we did

take , as I mentioned earlier, was t hat we would

>i::ut IFl □-ti --

fr llliE.

280

have a good launch and first few orbits, a good
retro-preparation , and a good retro and r eentry ,
with the center of the mission being taken care
of by doing the experiment or doing the operationa l
check by itself without regard to what went
before or what went after.

I think this is the

kind of training you really need on these long

duration flights.
White

No.

Anything else there , Ed?

I concur heartily.

I think that practicing

it piecemeal is the only way you can do it .
McDivitt

You have any concluding comments?

White

I think we've been ma.king conclusions all day
long.

I t hink to try to conclude them all ,

we'd never get them .

f