NASA-UAP-D020, Gemini 5 Technical Debriefing, Part II, 1965

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GEMINI V

Technical Debriefing
Part ~I_I__________________

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COt~FIDEt~TIAL

PRELIMINARY
GT- 5 FLIGHT CREW DEBRIEFING TRANSCRIPT
PART II

Prepared By
Spacecraft Operations Branch
Flight Crew Support Division
September 2, 1965

This material contains information affecting the
national defense of the United States within the
meaning of the Espionage Laws, Title 18. U.S . C.
Section 793 and 794, the transmission or revelation of which in any manner to an unauthorized
person is prohibited by law.
Group 4:

Downgrade at 3 year intervals
Declassified after 12 years

co~~FIDEt'4TIAL

('

PREFACE
This preliminary transcript was made from voice tape recordings
of the GT- 5 flight crew debriefing conducted August 30, 1965 thru
September 2, 1965 at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida .
Although all the 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 .
This document contai ns a transcript of the second part of the
total debriefing.

A prel iminary transcript of the first part was

publi shed on September 1, 1965 , and it contains the crew' s description
of the mission from an operati onal standpoint.

; CAts4flOEt!!IIAb
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page number

Par agraph
8.0

SYSTEMS OPERATION
8 . 1 Pla t f o:rm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . . • • 1
8 . 2 O.AMS •• ..... . ....... . . . ......... . . . .....• .. •. •• ••••• 16
8 . 3 RCS •....... . .. • ....•..... . . •. .••. .. .... . • .•••••• • • • 47
Environmen t a l Control System ·•· •·• ··•·••· · ··•••••• • 54
8.4
8 , 5 Comm.1.lllications .... . . .. ............... . .. . ...••••••• 66
8 . 6 Electrica l Sys tem ... . ... . ......................... . 80
8 . 7 Computer ..... . .. . ... ... ......... . ........ . .. . . . ... . 82
90
Cr ew Sta tion
8. 8

.................. .... .................

9,0

OPERATIONAL CHECKS
9.1
Apollo Landmark Identifica tion • ••• • ·••·••·•••• • •• · 132
9 . 2 Cabin Lighting Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . . • . • . • • 146
9 . 3 SPADATS Tra cking Check . .. . .. . .. . . .. . . . . .. • .. • • . . .. 147
9 . 4 UHF Antenna Pa ttern Test ..... .. . .. .. . .....••.•.••. 147
9 . 5 Thrus ter Illuminat ion Checks ........... . . •....•••• 148
9. 6
Dual Command Transmitter Tes t ....... . .. .... ...••• • 148

9. 7
9. 8

Radar Test s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . • • .
ID1 Eva llla.tion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • • . • .

148
150

10. 0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS
10 . 1

Powered Fl ight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152

10 . 2 Orbital Flight ...... . ... . ....... . .... .. ....•• . .• . . 153
10 . 3 Reentcy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

11.0 EXPERIMENTS
11 . 1 Visual Definition of Celesti al Objects (D- 1) ,
Nearby Object Photography (D- 2) , and Terres t rial
Features (D- 6) ••···· • ·•·• •· ··• · • •• · • · ··• •••• •• •• • · 210

11. 2 Cel es tia l , Space and Terrestria l Ra diometry ..•.••• 222
11. 3 Synoptic Ter r a in (S- 5) and Wea ther (S- 6)
.

J?rl.otography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . • • • • • • • • 228

11 . 4

Vis ual Acuity and As tronaut Visibi lity (S-8/D- 13)
and Vision Test (M- 9) .......... .. ..... . ......... . . 233
11. 5 Electros tati c Charge (MSC-1 ) .......... •• . . •.•• • •• • 242
11 . 6 Zodiacal Li ght Photography (S- 1) .... .. .......• •• .• 243
11. 7 In- flight Exer ciser (M- 3) ........... . .... . ........ 243
11. 8 In- f l i ght Phonocardio gram (M- 4) ••••··•••••••· • ··•• 244
11. 9 Cardiovascular Refl ex Conditioning (M- 1) . •••••••• • 244
11. 10 Cloud Top Spectrometer (S- 7) •·•••••··•••·•• • ••· ••• 246
11. 11 Miscel laneous ............. . . . ... . .•...... . ...••••• 248

CQ t-4 F-1 DEt-4TIAL
12 . 0

PR.EMISSION PLANNING
12.1 Mission Plan (Trajectory) .. . .. .. .. ..... .. . ......... 255
12. 2 Flig}lt Plan .. ... .. ... ... . ..... . . ..... .. . . . .... . .... 255
12.3 Spac ecraft Changes . . .. .. ..... . ... .. .... ... . . .. .... . 255
12.4 Mission Rules . . .... . . . ..... ........... .. ...... ..... 256
12. 5 Experiments .. .... . .. . . ...... . .. ..........•......... 2 56
12.6 Training Activities . . .. . .. .. .. .... .. . ....... ...•.. . 257
MISSION CONTROL
13. l

GO/NO GO ••. . ... •. ....... ... ... . . . . ...... •• •. •• • ... . 261

13. 2 FLA and CLA Updates .. .. .... ... ... ....... . .. ... .. . .. 261
13. 3

Consumables .•.. . .. . . . .. ... ....... ..... .. . . ......... 261

13.4 Flight Plan Changes •. .. ... . . . . ... . .. ....•.. ... .. . •. 264
13 . 5 Systems .• •. .. ... . ............ .. . .... ..•.•..•• . . . . .. 267
13. 6 Experiments Real - Time Updates .. .. ........... . . . . .. . 268
TRAINING
14. 1 Gemini Mission Simulator . . ................. .... ... . 270
14.2 LT\T , DCPS • , . ... .... . . . . .• .. . .........•• . .••. . • •. .• • 284
14. 3 MAC Engineering Simulator •• • ••·•·••· • · •·• ••••••· • •• 285
14.4 Centrifuge ... ...... . ... . .. . ........................ 286
14.5 Translation and Docking Trainer ••• · •····•·• · ··•••·· 286
14. 6 PlSlletaritllD. .. . . . .. . . . .. . .... . .. ....... . . ... . ....... 288
14 . 7 Systems Briefings . .. .. ...... . . .. .. . .. . . .. .... .. . . . . 292
14 . 8 Flight Experiments .. . .. . . ... . . .... . . .........•. .. .. 293
14.9 Spacecraft Systems Tests . .. .... . ... .. . ..... ........ 294
14 . 10 Egress Training ..... . ..... . . . . . . . ...... .... . .. ..... 296
14.11 Parachute Training ......... ... ... . . .... .. .......... 297
14. 12 Ia.unch simulation ............. . . . . . .. .. . . .... .. ... . 298
14. 13 Network Simulation .. ....... . ... .. ... . . . ...... . .. ... 298
14. 14 Reentry Simulation . ... . ... .. ...... .. ... .......... . . 298
14. 15 Simulated Network Simulations . . ... . . ....... . ...... . 298
14.16 Zero "G" Fligh.ts ............ . .. . . .... . . ........ .. . . 299
14. 17 Flight Plan Tra ining ... .... .. . . . . . . .. ......... .. ... 300

15. 0 CONCLUDING COMMENTS
15.1 Crew Qu.arters .... ; ....... . .. . .. . .. . . .. •.... . .... .. . 30 2
15 . 2 Physical Training and Aircraft Flying . ... ..... ..... 303

15.3 Sea I.a.b . . .. ........ ... ....... . . ... .. . . .. . .... .. . ... 304

15. 4 Wa tches and Clocks . .. . .. ....... . ....... ...... .. . ... 304

15.5 Miscellaneous Discrepencies •• · ··•·• · ·· • • ••••••••••• 306
15. 6 Medica l Aspects .. . .. .. .. . . . . . ........ . .. .. .... . .... 310

1

8.O

SYSTEMS OPERATIONS

8.1 Platform
Cooper

By day we used standard procedure of finding a
zero yaw, which is a little easier to do down at
about retro position.

The nose is a little bit

in the way for determining zero yaw unless you
pitch down just a little past nose low in zerozero- zero position.

When pitched down just a tiny

bit, zero yaw was very readily apparent to within
a fairly reasonable degree of accuracy, and then
ease it right on up .

We had lines for the zero­

zero position to give us our pitch and roll on the
horizon.

This was the regular day alinement.

Night was pretty much the same except we 1 d get
zero yaw by a star, get roll and pitch by the zero
lines on the window (or knowing where they were
approximately) line this with the top of the airglow or the horizon.

At that point you'd go into

Cage, hold it there at that position until it
caged) then uncage the platform to BEF or SEF
whichever the case might be, and then to to Platform and Attitude on the FDM and FDI's.

Then

aline the platform fine aline SEF or BEF by keeping

,

2

the needles zeroed.

It would slowly gyro torque

itself and correct out the small errors for fine
alinement.
Conrad

Anything to add, Pete?

Well, I didn ' t hear all of that, but I think the
alinement is straightforward.

One thlng I had not

read in either the GT- 3 or GT- 4 debriefings on
this subject on out the window alinement was that
we have a window gage that you can us1i t hat will
put you right on in roll and pitch ancl, of course,
for yaw you still have to use the same out the
window reference.
Cooper

One thing that I think that should very definitely
training wise be readily available anc. we looked
and looked and looked and couldn't fir..d any was an
actual scale picture of the left hand wi ndow and
the right hand window with what the hcri zon should
look like at zero-zero-zero and at retro attitude
and at minus 90 degrees left and 90 degrees r ight
and at 60 degrees left and 60 degrees r ight and
this type thing .

I've never seen an a~tual drawing

showing the horizon line on a window a·'ld what i t
should look l ike .

3
Conrad

Yes

Cooper

I think this would be a tremendous benefit and
shouldn't be difficult to come up with.

Conrad

If you place your eye so that it goes through the
lower left corner of the right window or the lower
right corner of the left window and run that eye
position right through the front RCS yaw thruster,
the lower yaw thruster in the front ring, I guess
that's ring A, anyway, you take a line between
your eye, the corner of the window and the front
RCS yaw thruster, right through the middle of it,
and put that line on the top of the airglow or the
horizon.

Then the spacecraft, and this looks like

an excessively nose up attitude, but it's not,
you're zero degrees in pitch then the window frame
is just about vertical to the horizon and it forms
a perpendicular angle.
Cooper

The inside edge of the frame .

Conrad

The inside up and down edge of the window corner
makes a perpendicular angle to the horizon and you
can use that as a roll gage.

If you set it up

4

that way that platform isn ' t off 4 or 5 degrees
i n roll or pitch.
Cooper

So, i t r eally looks like, when you fir3t start
lining it up, it appear s to you that f ::-om the
left seat that you ' re actually rolled l eft ,

Conrad

Yes, that's right .

Cooper

And f r om your seat it would look l i ke j t was
actuall y r olled right .

Cooper

It doesn ' t look horizontal at al l, but that ' s due
to the fact t ha t you 're sitting off by thi s offset .

Conrad

One other thing that you might say about platform
alinement is that if you ' re not on in roll and
pi tch, mainl y roll, t his really will ea t you up
in alinement time .

Cooper

Roll and yaw are t he bad errors creator:, .

Pitch

you can be off a l ot i n and it' 11 corr ec:t r ight
out.
Conrad

Not if the other two (roll and yaw) are off .

Cooper

But if you 're off in roll and/or yaw th€n it
really takes a long time and its real rcugh .

5

Conrad

You don't want to be deceived by the fact that
the needles are holding in the center pretty well.

Cooper

That's right, one thing that we found when we
were going through this real, real long platform
alinement prior to getting all l i ned up for retrofire was that we had the needles all alined, t hey
were sitting all glued out .

But you have to s i t

there with them for a little b i t glued out .

They

sit there all zeroed out, it looks like everything
was all alined and al l of a sudden yaw begin to
ease off quite a bit showing that we weren ' t
alined.
Conrad

At one time we went to Orbit Rate when we had not
pulled the yaw all the way in and, boy, it showed
up in r oll as we started moving around.

Cooper

Orbit Rate and Horizon Scan.

Conrad

I mean it shwed up in the roll axis .

Cooper

Oh, yes.

Conrad

You have to take t he time and be careful with the

Right .

platform alinement, no doubt about i t.

° CSf*fDEt◄ TIAl

,

6

Cooper

And i t takes t ime to do it and do a r ~ally good
job on it .
Modes .

The only thing I can say about Cage is

that it takes an excessively long tim1; to Cage .
Conrad

I ' ll comment on this even though we d:i. dn't get a
chance to do the rendezvous , but even in simulation, it was apparent and the l i ttl e bit t hat
we did in flight caging the ~latform, getting
ready for alinements and t hings l ike -;hat, it
was very time consuming .

I think tha ·; you could

find use for a f ast slave cycle .
Cooper

Very much so.

Conrad

Fast Cage cycle is what I should say.

I 'll say

it's a luxury item but it sure could be helpful .
Cooper

SEF and BEF worked j ust like advertisEid .

SEF

for fine aline and small- end- forward, BEF for
reYersing your phase angles so that you ' re still
steering to and fine alining blunt encl forward .
Conrad

J i m and Ed made the comment that t hey never alined
BEF, that t hey a lways alined SEF.

We alined SEF

normally through the flight and when ,:e were ready

60 ►◄~ ~

7
to retro, we wanted to save as much fuel as
possible, so we alined BEF and I think alining
BEF is easier than in SEF.
Cooper

Yes ,

Conrad

I think you can tell yaw better going backwards
than you can going forward.

Cooper

Yes.

Conrad

I don't know why, maybe it was just psychological .

Cooper

I agree with you, I really think you're right.
I think you can tell it better.

It streams away

from you a little more .
Conrad

Yes.

It was easier to pull in in yaw .

I thought

it was a little more comfortable feeling .

I

enjoyed the riding around alining the platform
BEF much more than when we alined it SEF, and I
felt we were closer to being on most of the time
when we pulled it in in yaw.
Cooper

Of course, we had a little better control system
there, it does help.

Conrad

Yes .

Mt ◄ FIDE►~TIAL •

~NftDE~~TIAt·,_

8
Cooper

I think either way (SEF, BEF) is good, both worked
very a dequately and it just depends on which way
you want to aline for what you ' re going to do .
BEF is certainl y a t least as acceptable as SEF.
ORBIT RATE was not bad off a t all .

We di dn't

have any l arge errors in it due to t he f a ct that
we had more nearly circulari zed our oroit from
t he burns that we did .
Conrad

We were about at 171- 60 at that time p<=:riod .

I

don't know what t hey ha d picked as an orbit rate
number at the end fina lly for the REP .
Cooper

We were about 107, 166 .

Conrad

Yes .

I was really surprised with how ,..,ell the

platform stayed on after just t a king a quick look
at zero- zero- zero, not even trying to ali ne these.
We j u st passed freely through this in dr ifting
flight and uncaged the platform right into Or bit
Rate, and it didn't get off five or ten degrees
in any of the three axis .
Cooper

For about 20 hours .

'i0 ►~FIDE►~TIAL

G©t◄ FIDl!~~TIAL
Conrad

9

Yes, for about 20 hours that we drifted around .
It was finally off the most in roll.

It got about

15 degrees off in roll .
Cooper

Orbit Rate worked very well .

Conrad

Other than inertial work, I just didn't see any
big advantage in free.

You'd still think in

terms of the local horizon up there most of the
time.
Cooper

Yes .

Conrad

We just never had much occasion during the f light
to use FREE.

Cooper

Platform displays .

Conrad

Bal l oper ation through the poles was just
fantastic!

It was so smooth.

The only way you

could tell that you were going through a pole
is you could see the roll index, vehicle is on the

,,

roll gimbal, flip .
Cooper

Yes.

This is something we had trouble finding

out, whether this was the case or not and we
deliberately ran several specific checks of this.

<!rJ~~FIDEt~TIAL

10
Regardless of which way you approachec. it from,
whether you approached i t fast or slm.- or whether
you 're going through the 90 or 270 pojnt on the
ball, you can go right smack through the middle
of it, you can sit right in the middle of it,
you can move up or down, r ight or left and the
ball doesn 't jump, doesn't j itter, doesn't do
anything .

It's just beautiful .

Conrad

Yes .

Cooper

We did a burn right through each one of the poles .
I think the controls are pretty simila-r to what
they are in the s imulator .

There are t wo

exceptions, one of which I think i s valid and
which I think may be influenced by the fact that
we had a lot of s low degredation in ou:~ OAMS
system.

I thought that the PlJISE system in the

spacecraft had a lot less torque, a reasonable
amount less torque and it got a lot leBs, as we
went along it got less and less and leHs .
Conrad

Yes .

Cooper

But even i nitially, it felt like thP- PlLSE system

11

had less authority in the spacecraft than it does
in t he simulator.

On the other hand, I felt the

RATE COMMAND system had a heck of a lot more
authority in the spacecraft than it does in the
simulator .
Cooper

That RATE COMMAND just flat snaps you in.

In the

simulator, when you come around in RATE COMMAND
and you let off it will go through 5 to 10 degrees.
You have to let off on it 5 to 10 degrees early.
By golly, in the spacecraft you didn't have to

let off even a degree early.

When you let go,

it stopped right there jus t like you put on the
brakes.
Conrad

Yeah.

Cooper

It was so tight that you almost had to - -

Conrad

That was OAMS Rate Command.

Cooper

You almost had the feeling that the OAMS Rate

It was good and it was tight .

Command was almost bending the Adapter Section .
I t had such high torquing rate .
Conrad

On day 2 and 3, our OAMS system was working
completely correct.

I was extremely impressed

•

12

with how nice a control system i t was.

We made

several maneuvers using this control Eystem and
didn 't have any gripes on that sys tem at all .

As

Gordo said we were really impressed wjth the
Rate Command system.
FCSD REP

When you turned around 90 degr ees in crder to get
rid of the REP, did you use the 8-ball ?

Cooper

Yes .

Conrad

FDI 's are on this Gimbal flip bus i ness too, you
see .

They do that in the trainer, but they were

steady as a rock in the spacecraft .
Cooper

Yes, we used the FDI's for t he fi ne al ine .

Al­

though to get there we used the 8- ball .
Conrad

We had trained to use the IVI ' s .

FCSD REP

That 's right.

Cooper

We used the IVI ' s , not t he FDI' s .

We used t he

I VI ' s as the real fine measure of being l i ned up .
We used the FDI 's too .
Conrad

You can use anything in the spacecraft.

•
Cooper

13

You can't use the FDI 's or the 8- ball as a
reference in the mission simulation because you
have this gimbal flip which just gives you fits .

..

We didn't use Ra te Command very much, mainly just
for the burns .

In fact, t he burns are the onl y

times we used Rate Command.

I used the Dir ect

system several times and I thought the Direct was
really good.

It was good and crisp and you had

good authority with it.
Conrad

I had the impression that the spacecraft was a
lot more stable vehicle in Di rect than it was in
the simulator .

Cooper

Tm t' s right .

Conrad

In t he simulator you tend to sit there and go
too much and go too much .

When Gordo'd stick a

shot of Direct in to go someplace, it never
showed up in another axis .

An equal shot i n the

other direction would stop it r i ght now .
Cooper

Yes.

Conrad

The effects momentum of the spacecraft didn ' t seem
to be as great in flight as they were i n the

~f:HDEt◄TIA ~

"t OMFtDE~ ◄ TIAL

14

simulator.
Cooper

You didn ' t have to lead a :, much.

That's right .
The Direct system was a much more precise system
in the spacecraft than it i s in the s ' mulator .

Conrad

I thought it was quite easy to fly, but there's
no doubt about it, boy, that Rate Corrunand eats
up the fuel .

•
Cooper

Direct uses quite a bit of fuel also.

Conrad

We did use a little fuel t hat one day.

15

We were

doing so many experiments in a row that we had to
very rapidly get the spacecraft back to a zerozero- zero or a pitch down 30 posi tion.

When you

track one of these targets and come through the
nadir and keep on going, boy, you're really smoking
towards a rearward direction.
Cooper

You're sitti ng i nverted BEF.

Conrad

That's r i ght, you ' ve got rates built up going away
from you and you ' d have to use Direct to stop those
rates, get yourself moved all the way back up here
and s top them again.

Maybe it'd be so tight that

you'd use Di rect to get down and start on it, and
then switch to Pulse and track in Pul se and then
r i ght back up and start doing something else.

Well,

we di d eat up a lot of fuel that day, but we got
everything done that day.

We hit darned near all

targets.
Cooper

Di rect i s a real responsive , real fine way to
maneuver.

60t~Fl0Et.t:tAt

16

•i Q:M f~Cf1stI IAla
Cooper

..

Platform controls were very straight fc,rward.

I

thought they all functioned as expected.
Conrad

The Platform took the full 25 minutes to go through
the fast heat, and the first time on it was really
cold and took another 3 minutes worth before start
of the Cage Cycle.

After that, it seemed to stick

right around 25 minutes to get the platform up and
on the line and start into Cage .
Cooper

Right now, I've got extreme confidence in that
Platform.

Conrad

I really think it does well.

'.Ihe platform did an outstanding job during the
entire flight.

Cooper

I t sure did.

8. 2 OAMS
Cooper

We fired the OAMS on the pad and it was mushy.
couldn't hear them fire just gas mainly,

You

About

the third round of firings however, you could really
feel them fire off, they were all good.
Cooper

During flight the OAMS started out very good and in
about the third day began to degrade.

~:he f i fth day

~ l i U iiAL

17

i s when we found the two thrusters that were not
operating correctly.
Conr ad

'Ille number 8 thruster was working real good when we
found that the number 7 thruster was out.

So we

shut the sys tem down again and had a big talk with
Houston about this .

We went one more revolution

and they gave us some tests to perform on 7 and
that 's when we di scovered 8 wasn ' t working.
Conrad

'lwo of them quit , within an orbit of one another.

Cooper

We had already run complete tests on it and
number 8 had been working on the previous tests and
quit on the next one.

'Ille story of the old OAMS

inflight system was that gradually as the days went
by there was more , and more that went wrong with
it unti l f i nally at the end we had less than half
the thrusters left and they were pretty bad.
Conrad

I realized a couple of heater blankets were probably
out on the OAMS system, but I'm still convinced
unt i l somebody convi nces me otherwise, that the
thing that shot the OAMS system down, was the
decision to turn off the OAMS heater.

I had ques­

ioned the decision in the air to only point that

18
I could.

I didn 't think we were in that much

trouble for electrical power.

I still think it

was a mi stake be cause I think even with a couple
of blankets out, if we'd have kept the ,3ystem warm
wi th the rest of the heaters, we'd have never froze
them up.
Cooper

'llie thrusters themselves were actually ·vorki ng
because you could actually get a glow off of them.
There was a little bi t of fuel or oxidiier coming
out of it and burning , but it wasn't getting the
proper amount of mi xture ratio.

Conrad

Now, they could have been dirty.

That :ould be it,

but it was purely in the valves i n the thrusters
themselves because they were putting out thrust
even at the end.

I f you wanted to hold it i n full

D:Lrect wi th 7 and 8 circuit breaker e ngs.ged , you
were getting wet f uel thrust.
Cooper

Yes .

You were getti ng a little wet thr~st.

Conrad

let's go into how the whole thing occurred.

We

had shut the heat er down a long time ago and we
really hadn't agreed wi th that, but there wasn't
much we could do about it.

We were i n the mi ddle

,

19

of doing experiments on the fifth day, and we had
had a little trouble alining the platform.

What

was happening, apparently was the number 7 thruster
was getting cranky, but we also knew we were venting hydrogen and we knew this because we were
getting some torqueing out of that .

At the t i me

Gordo was having trouble ali ning the Platform, we
thought it was because the hydrogen was venting.
Finally Gardo said, "There's something wrong with t
the control systems. "

Once we deci ded there was

something wrong wi th the control system, that ' s
when it went just like back i n the simulator.

We

shut everything down, went to Direct, thought about
it for a second and turned off all the circuit
breakers , turned them all back on one at a time ,
tested all of the thrusters and, sure enough , when
we got to number 7, it was out, completely out.
Conrad

So then I tri ed secondary ACME bias power.

We

tried the seconday yaw and the secondary attitude
drivers with no effect so we were relatively as sured that something had happened in either the
hand controller or the fuel was not feeding.

We

decided to power down r i ght there , which we did ,
and we advised flight of what the problem was .

£ 8.M&HW~Jl~i

I

20

think that's about the time we really decided the
s canner wasn' t a ny good , or had we already tol d
them about that?
Cooper

Yes.

We 'd already t old them about that.

Conrad

Yes , you ' re right.

I know what it was .

That's

when we discovered that the voice tape was out.
We were right i n the middle of s everal experiments
and it occurred

approximate l y like 16:30: 54 on

the f i f th day.

We r eported to Houston that the

voice tape was out, the number 7 yaw L~ft thruster
was out and that I had turned the OAMS heater back
on.

I was suspicious of that all the ·;ime .

That's

when they called up a nd gave us this m:i.nimum power
down.

Why did we go i nto that?

They had us power

down everything.
Cooper

At about the same time that we came up with this,
they came up with this idea that the hrdrogen was
boiling off s o fast that we were going t o be out of
hydrogen by about the end of the f i fth day at the
rat e we were goi ng i f we d i dn't power down and stop
the usage of i t .

.iO~~FIDEMTfffl:

•

21
Conrad

Yes.

That's when we came around on the next

revolution.

'Illey had us fire up everything again

to take a look at i t and that's when we found out
number 8 had just gone down the tubes too.

But

number 8 was still givi ng us something; number 8
was stil l burning, but it was burning off mi xture.
You could see a flame .
Cooper

You could see a glow out of it.

Conrad

You couldn ' t hear it like you could hear the other
thrusters, but you could see lights on the ni ght
side so you knew something was coming out.

'Ille

drivers j ust weren't openi ng all the way or something.
FCSD REP

The fifth day at 16:30 is the first problem you
had with the OAMS, is that right?

Conrad

No, earlier.

When we first powered the system

up, we were having trouble with that very f irst
platform alining and we felt we were having some
hydrogen venting problems.

'Ihat's when we drifted

way off, and Gordo said, "'Ille Pulse system isn't
going to hack this hydrogen venting. "

He went

t o Di rect and blipped the yaw l eft thrusters .

•

22

All kinds of garbage came by the spacecraft.

It

looked like we blew a whole bunch of junk out of it.
I remember distinctly seeing gold balls .
Cooper

Great b i g balls of l iquid.

Conrad

So it must have been raw fue l .

Something at this

time wasn 't working right , but I guess number 8
was putting out full thrust and number 7 was still
work i ng but not all the way.

Now mayb<? right then

and there if we'd have really worked that system
over; fired all the thrusters in Direc1; and a
couple of good healthy loads throug it ,., and put
the h eater s back on the line, we might have salvaged thew
vaged the whole system. It must have been right
at the point of freezing up.
Cooper

This was early i n the fifth day.

.£:Obi:EIOEttllAL

23

Conrad

We didn't hit the direct thrusters long enough to
heat them I don't think.

I do distinctly remember

saying to Gordo "We blew all this junk out of there . "
Conrad

We ' d never seen anything like that before and we'd
been up there 5 days and seen all sorts of things .
We could see liquid oxygen when we vented it, if we
vented i t under the right light conditions .

We

could see when we vented hydrogen under the right
lighting conditions.

It would all float by the

spacecraft and at low sun angles, either at sunup
or sundown any one of these quantities, ECS o ,
2
CRYO o2, or RSF hydrogen, you could see it come
whistling by the spacecraft.

We were continually

floating around in these old silver balls of either
hydrogen or oxygen.
Cooper

Okay, well that was pretty well the background of
what happened.

Some thrusters that had checked

out good would subsequently check out bad or be
completely inoperative as the days went by.

So

finally we wound up with maybe half of the total

OAMS thrusters still operating properly.

24

•
Conrad

We had some thrust remaining in every axis but yaw
l eft .

We had some in yaw left if you just wanted

to dump raw fuel overboard .

I don ' t know whether

it was fuel or oxidizer.
Cooper

Generally, what we'd do is roll and pitch to get
our yaw left .

Conrad

I f we were tumbling and wanted to damp we just
waited until we translated into the right axis in
whi ch we had some authority .

Cooper

The one axis that always seemed to work pretty good
so far as control authority was pitch.

Conrad

Yes

Cooper

Pitch up and pitch down seemed to work reasonably
well all the time.

Conrad

Yes .

I wonder i f that had something to do with the

pitch thruster lines on the manifold being close
to the source.

Pitch was always good .

Our trouble

was mainly coupling in the yaw thrusters both right
and left.
Cooper

Source pressure was easy to monitor .

SJurce temper­

ature we could monitor and it was too CJld .

25

Conrad

It ran down in the 48 degree area .

Cooper

It showed that it was running too cold .

That's why

we questioned turning the OAMS heater off ,
Cooper

Regul ated pressure was fine .

Conrad

Right on the money .

Cooper

Propellant quantity seemed to read r easonably good
until it got down towards the end.

At that point

(from about 10 percent on down) the propellant
quantity just went on down to the bottom of the
scale .

It was reading below zero and yet ground

readouts indicated OAMS propellant quantity remaining .
Cooper

Monitoring of OAMS propellant r emaining onboard
information was fairly good .

Conrad

Yes.

I thought we were fairly close.

Cooper

Gr ound i nformation agreed fairly good with onboard
information in general .

Conrad

The whole OAMS sy stems got to be reviewed .

I

think that they think we wasted a lot of fuel and
I think that on day 3 we probabl y were a little
overgenerous with our fuel usage.

ret◄ FtE>Et.~TIA ~

I

But I ' m still

COt--1 FID Et◄ :r IA~

26

,;

convinced that because we went so long with the
OAMS heater off that we were not burning a nominal
fuel to oxidizer ratio.
Cooper

Yes .

Even though we were in a

rush to get a lot of
...

these things done, I was still extremelr conscious
of fuel usage .

Although I'd used Direct to get

i t started, I wouldn't just fire all the way around
in Direct input, let it coast around, a~d then stop
it right there.
Conrad

Yes.

I never saw fuel usage in the sim1lator like

we saw in flight .
Cooper

I t just seemed to go down very rapidly on the gauge
during that one period of time.

Conr ad

And yet we went night after night all night long in
Horizon Scan or in Pulse and would hardly use any
fuel at all .

As a matter of fact, the ground gave

me the figures.

Thi s was when we were ::unning all

ni ght long in Horizon Scan so that we had a nice
reference .
a night.

11

They said "You' re using about 2 pounds
Now, that seems like a r easonable amount

for what we were doing.

•

27

Cooper

We were using it for Attitude Hold and for getting
pictures and to get through the day side .

Conrad

Oh Yes.

We never used Rate Command except for the

maneuver burns.
Cooper

We were tracking the missile using Diredt.

Had to

get on it in a rush so I went to Direct .
Conrad

I questioned propellant quantity prior to lift- off.
It was 87 percent at lift- off,

I thought we were

supposed to be 100 percent on the gage at lift- off .
I thought we had propellant quantity loaded to the

maximum?
Cooper

Well, they said we were about 50 pounds under .

Conrad

Yes, they said we had about 50 pounds less fuel
than we were supposed to have.

Cooper

We asked them about this before we l ifted off,

Cooper

At about 4 or 5 minutes before lift- off, we asked
them about this.

Conrad

We got a "We ' re checking" and that's the last we
heard from it.

And off we went .

28
Cooper

So then we asked again when we wer e in orbit,
"About this under load on GA.MS fuel" .

I su spect

t hat something was fouled up because we didn ' t get
a full 0AMS load .
Cooper

That was pretty bad .

I think monitor ing onboard of propell~mt r emaining
t o compl et e the mission was pretty good.

The fore­

cast fuel for mis si on completion of GE,m ini V ought
to be reviewed because somebody didn ' t quite come up
with the right fuel figures .

Twenty- six percent

remaining after the REP would not havE been nearly
enough to have ~one the r emainder of the mission .
Conrad

Yes .

I t hi nk t hat in computing the a.mount of fuel

used t o perform a maneuver, they figure out how much
to get the r ates going but they must s top there .
They must not f i gur e how much fuel it takes you to .
get back to, say, zer o- zero- zero .

Appirentl y t hey

assume that whenever you get done with a tracking
maneuver, you j ust drift to get back to zero- zerozero.

Over the U. S . we had maybe 6 or 7 minutes be­

t ween a 30 degree pitch- down target to the next
30 degr ee pitch- down target .

You ' ve got to t r ack

it all t he way through, bing the spacecraft all the
way back up and then go to and track the next target .

29

Cooper

And stop your rate at the back .

Conrad

As a matter of fact, that's about twice the fuel
usage .
it.

Cooper

They may take this into account, I doubt

They're very conservative on their estimates .

Selector controls and switches were all right .
Attitude controller was fine .
(

Maneuver controllers .

We had every intention of checking the right one and
we never did check it because of other problems .
Inflight malfunction irregularities we've already
covered pretty well .
Cooper

Attitude Control Modes, Rate Command was excellent .
Reentry Rate Command we never checked .

Conrad

I don't even think you need it .

Cooper

And I think it could be removed from the spacecraft
as far as I ' m concerned .
the simulator .

Conrad

I never used or need it on

I never liked it.

Pilots aren't going to tolerate these higher r ates .
They will damp before these rates are reached.

Cooper

Direct is a good mode.
wrong with Direct .

There ' s nothing at all

I thought it was much crisper,

much crisper in the spacecraft than in the simulator

30

shows that it is .

The Pulse mode was very economical

on fuel and I felt that in the sinru.latc,r you had a
little more authority than you actually did in the
spacecraft .

The spacecraft had slightly less

authority in Pulse than the sinru.lator does .

Inci­

dentally, you can use Pulse just for a month of
Sundays and never see the fuel go down on the 0AMS
gage at all.

You can use Pulse all day long with

using little fuel usage .

Horizon s can, the primary

Scanner was inoperative as was stated e3.Tlier .
Secondary Scanner worked fine.

The

The sca::m ers, I

think, operated quite satisfactorily.

We had a lot

of scanner dropout in the primary and eiren in the
secondary.

We had some dropout in the :iecondary

when we first were going in and out of i;unlight
areas .
Conrad

But then it seemed to work allright .

Cooper

Horizon Scan Control Mode worked fine .

Conrad

It's a loose mode but it still works fir..e .

Cooper

It's got wide limits on it of course, -which i s
okay .

The mode itself works fine.

Real good.

There was s ome­

thing really fouled up in the platform rnode .
work at all like it's supposed to.

It didn't

The platform mode

is supposed to be plus or minus 5/loth of a degree .

..

it was plus or minus 10 degrees I ' ll eat my hat .

•

If

31
Conrad

I thought it held to about a degree and a half .

Cooper

Not in yaw , you remember .

It allowed yaw to wander

off by probably a good 10 degrees there.

Remember

it allowed right yaw to wander off by about 10 degrees
and just sit off there in right yaw several times.
It wouldn't even bring it back.
Conrad

Yes .

FCSD Rep

Do you think this had anything to do with your con­

That was the trouble .

trol problem?
Cooper

W-ell, it may have been .

It may have been that con­

trol was somewhat intermittent right there .
know, but it might have been .

I don ' t

But Rate Command sure

worked good using those same controls.
Conrad

Yes .

I suspect that being the first time that it

was cranked up since spacecraft number 2 , it may not
have been tweeked as well as it could have been.
Conrad

It certainly didn't work like it did on the simulator ,
I ' ll put it that way.

Cooper

It didnlt work properly, and it was no good the way
it was.

We never used it after we originally tried

it out and after we 1 d tried doing this one burn on it
to see if it would hold.

The one that it did hold

on, our first perigee adjust, it held beautifully.
During the next one, it got so bad it wasn I t any

32
good .

Ther e again , it might have been a f unction of

the thrusters going out .
In any event , I think that 1 s an error ,;hat somebody
needs to look i nto .

I ' m n ot sure that pl atfor m mode

is doing what i t should.

I know that , t heoretically ,

and by t he diagrams on it and the limit s that it
ought to be a ver y pr ecise control modE! .
Cooper

Spacecraft separation at SECO + 20 couldn ' t have been
better , jus t fine .

Translat i on per igeE! adjust went

like cl ockwork.
Conrad

Tha t was our fi r st r eal burn and I thi r.k we got
something like 9 . 6 f t/sec on t he IVI ir.stead of
10 . 0 , but t he burn wasn ' t that crit icaJ .

Conrad

I checked accelerometer bias and it seE•med like the
accel er ometer bias incr eased l a t er in the f light .
I specif icall y checked it f or the REP end it was
okay .

I 1 d just set up zer os in the wirdow and

went to Catch-Up and they stayed zero for 3 or

4 minutes or longer .

So that satisfied me .

I

checked it l a ter on in the f light and I don ' t think
we r an more than a minute and we clickEd up a
f oot per second on the fore - aft window .
be checked on the tape .

That can

In the beginning it was

entirely acceptable for the REP .

•

33
Cooper

I think we had some bias, just how much I don ' t lmow.
The timing of the translation was fine , updating was
fine.

Operations and checklist were okay.

Computer

usage, okay.
Conrad

It was easier to make a burn on the simulator that
had no up- down or left and right in it than it was
in the spacecraft .

Gordo did a real good job of

tracking on every burn and I didn't see it wander
hardly at all .
Cooper

And all the IVI ' s would be zero .

Conrad

And all the IVI 1 s would be zero, but we'd have .4. of
10
a foot in one axis and ~O in another.

Conrad

Yes .

8

The worst cross- coupling, we had 10 in one

axis, and when we burned in the platform mode, but
we were checking that .

It could have been accelero­

meter bias again, or, the spacecraft is more sensi- •
tive to picking up up- down and l eft - right velocities
than I thought it was .
Conrad

Gordo did a real good job of tracking.

He tracked

as well as he did in the simulator and we never had
this show up in another axis in the simulator .
Cooper

It would be zero , zero , zero in the simulator.

Conrad

It was hardly worth my time checking address 81 and
82 in the simulator because I could just tell he

34
wasn't going to have any velocities in there , and
very seldom did .

But we never fail ed t o have fairly

si zeable ones , like

fa and fo fps, in another axis

and I'm not quite sure how it got therE·.

I guess

the spacecraft is extremely sensitive .

If you ' re

going to make pr ecise burns , you I ve gotta really burn
precisely and i f you want to take out the errors , take
out the addre ss 81 and 82 errors so that you don ' t
introduce anything else .

During the difficult ren-

dezvous maneuvers, you have to plan on more
f uel usage because you're going to have to take it out
with the up- down thrusters .
Cooper

I think what you ' re going to have to do is stop
short of burning off all your forward or aft velocity,
particularly the forward velocity, and then use the
canted thrusters to burn off the right- Left and up- do,m
and that will take out part of the remaLnder of the
forward velocity.

If it hasn ' t taken it all out ,

then bleep out the rest of the f orward .

I think

that 1s the only way you can do it if you want to
burn them a l l t o zeros.

I don ' t believe you can t r ack

any more precisely if you keep all your IVI ' s zeroed
right down the money.

If you burn it off and stop

just at the right time so that everything should turn

35

;CO tsifH0E1t~I IAL
• d up wi· th .1_ , 2-, or
up zero , then youst i·11 win
10 10

6
in all your windows.
10

I just don t t know how you I re

ever going to do any better than that .

(Unless you

use the above procedure).
Cooper

Translation REP deployment was passable .

FCSD Rep

This one you didn ' t .

You didn ' t fire back at the REP

after jettison?
Cooper

No.

FCSD Rep

Let's replace this maneuver with the simulated operation (phantom rendezvous).

Cooper

We did deploy the REP and the radar did operate
properly.

FCSD Rep

Originally when the debriefing guide was made out,
this section covered the translation back after REP
deployment and the subsequent translations .

Cooper

Okay .

FCSD Rep

We ' ll just have to use the translations that they
made on the simulated run .

Cooper

We kicked the REP out at 90 degrees right yaw .

Conrad

We kicked it out at 02 07 + 15, or 15 seconds l ate .

Cooper

The reason we were 15 seconds late , as we stated
earlier, was that going into the night side the night
before , after all our careful platform alinements ,
all of a sudden the horizon scanner began to drop

out on us and we began to drift off in yaw.
Conrad

Dropping out wouldn't have been bad, but when it
dropped out it also commanded some thrusting.

Cooper

We got some real good blips out of it .

Conrad

We were alining i n the Horizon Scan Mode and I got
the impression that it pitched us up .

Cooper

We wer e already alined , and we had gone to Orbital
Rate and Horizon Scan, just to come alcng there in
time to go in .

As soon as we had the Ilatform all

al i ned , and before we went in on the night side , I
decided I would realine the pl atform ji.:st very
briefly .

So I had gone to SEF and to IULSE and I

was checking and pulsing it . • But becai.:.se t hen in
SEF position all your torquing is done f rom your
Horizon Scanner.

When t he Horizon Scar,ner began to

drop out we began to get real erratic needle display
and it looked like our platform alinemEmt was deteriorating.

I was trying to correct thiB , but

obviously, it was really kicking us off .

That was

when we went t o CAGE , tried desperatelr to get it
caged and realined in time , and thought we had i t
realined .

We may have had it reasonab:.y well alined

by the time we f inally yawed right .
it was .

I ·; looked like

The needles wer e all zeroed out and

everything was settled down .
.was working at that point .

The Horizon Scanner
It quit working properly

after we turned to yaw right .

We had already gone

into Orbital Rate, so we could care less about the
scanner at this point .
already in Orbital Rate .

We got it alined, and we ' re
We yawed right , got squared

away and 15 seconds late ejected the REP on the
IVI's all zeroed .

We then used a couple of DIRECT

pulses , zipped back around , picked it up going around
to the 270.

It was going right straight out to 270

on our ball .

We could see the REP light whenever we

were passing through the 90 degree point .
I could see it flashing on the nose .

On my side,

By the time we

got around it was in quite close, we could see it
going out with a very slow tumble rate, flashing .
FCSD Rep

What would you estimate the tumble rate to be?

Cooper

It was tumbling very slowly, I would say maybe a
half to 1 degree per second .

Conrad

I 1 d say a degree per second.

Conrad

I couldn't tell what it was in roll .

It didn't seem

to be tumbling in more than 2 axes .
Cooper

That was ha.rd to tell .

Conrad

When I saw it , you could see the dipole come around .
We couldn 1 t tell anything about roll, but it was not

38

tumbling in the other axes.

The blanket was sitting

_r ight next to it .
Cooper

The blanket went out and was sitting ri1sht by it.
went right on out with it .
it .

It

That was thi~ funny part of

The blanket was between the REP and us .

Conrad

Yes.

Cooper

The blanket goes out first.

The REP ha:3 a lot more

mementum , apparently the REP had gone b;r the blanket:
Apparently it had either hit it or moved it over or
something because the blanket was betwe,m us and the
REP .
Conrad

Yes.

I don ' t know exactly what happenecl there .

Cooper

It was just a few feet outside of the REP .

The REP

went straight on out to 270 , radar was working fine ,
r eading out everything just right , lock1~d on, and went
out to the point where it should have s·~arted s l owing
down .
Conrad

This is where I had a mistake in the fl:.ght plan and
didn't catch it .

The computer was in PHELAUNCH and I

was wondering why I couldn't get any digital readout .
I t took me a few seconds to catch on to that one and
I realized that I had to get the computEir into
CATCH- UP.

We had never run into this problem where

we'd gone through a complete insertion checklist

39
which calls for putting the computer to CATCH- UP.
I had gone through and zeroed 25 , 26, and 27, talcing
the ascent routine numbers out of it .

So that I knew

that we were getting the right readings .

I had put

the computer back in PRELAUNCH, also had this discussion at that time and that ' s when I didn't blow the
cold IR doors until the REP was out .
Cooper

I've said it before, and I also said it after my
Mercury flight ; that is , "If you continually shove
things in on people very early in the flight, the
quality of it is going to be degraded."

You need the

first two or three orbits to check the systems over,
to get oriented , learn how to aline the platform, to
learn how to use the systems , to learn where things
are, to do these things before you start giving
-p eople complicated tasks .

You just aren ' t going to

get the quality out of them unless they're flying
exactly the same vehicle for the second or third
time and they 1 re very experienced in it and they 're
familiar with everything that 's onboard and there ' s
no change in equipment , no change in control system,
no change in any of these things .

Then , perhaps they

could leap right off and go right into the first
orbit and do these things .

iottf

~~

But to put somebody into

•

40

a strange vehicle, with strange control systems tha t
you've only simulated as about best you can , and no
visual simulation available for doing anything outthe- window ; you just cannot expect people to stay
right on top of things when it occurs ir. the firs t
part of the flight .

This is an ideal eYample ; we

had worked and worked and worked and worked and
worked to have our timing down just rigl:.t.

If noth­

ing had happened , we would have had our timing down
just right and everything would have gor..e just perfect .

Pete would have been right on hi~ checklist

and blown the cold IR doors right on tirre.
Cooper

I I d have been right exactly on time on g·etting the
REP out and everything would have gone reach- keen .
Just that one thi ng , the Hori zon Scanner failure ,
really threw the skids to the thing and caused us
to be running s l ightl y late .

There was added con­

fusion in trying to f igure out how to get t hings
going and salvage the whole thing really threw the
skids to it .
Cooper

The REP went out and it continued going out instead
of slowing down as it should.

It cont i nued to move

on out at quite a separation r ate .

The thing that

still has us a little puzzled , instead of slowing

41
down and coming to a null out there , it appeared to
s t art moving s omewhat at the same separation rate to
the south of us slightly towards a trail position very
slowly.

We tracked it f or a long t ime .

We were track­

ing it straight out and then all nf a sudden , it began to loop around slightly to the lef t .
1

Conrad

It di d something like I d never seen before!

Cooper

I d never seen this happen in the simulator, and

1

it still doesn ' t seem quite f easi ble to us that this
could ever happen .
Conrad

One pos sible answer, and it ' s r elated to something
that we saw later in the flight , Gordo , where we
alined the platform and had -yaw error couple into
roll .

Might not this have given us bad steering in­

formation as far as our radar needles were concerned
if the scanner wasn ' t working properly? We didn ' t
have the platform alined right .

We went along

30 minutes , almost one- third of an orbit .

I f we

di dn ' t have an alined platform, that would start
coupling up in some other axis like roll and we
woul d be off in yaw .

Then when we thought we were

pointing at the pole , we reall y weren't.

Maybe it

didn 1 t reall y drift behind us , maybe it stayed out
on our wing.

We must have put it out fairly well

42

out of plane , in that it hung around us so darned long.
Cooper

It stayed with us for 20 orbits !

Conr ad

We saw it until the light burned out .
f ar away from us .

I t was never

During five night cyc les it was

close enough that the flashing light illuminated the
spacecraft .

At the proper times, when we would get

nodal crossing, when we turned around and actually
s aw the REP it was very close .
Cooper

We t hought we were going t o hit i t .

Conrad

It was bright enough t o illuminate the spacecraft and
the flashing light r eally impress ed me .

FCSD Rep

Did you take pictures?

Conrad

Ye s , I think we have some 70- mm Hassel blad pictures
and I took 16- mm moving pic tur es .

Cooper

That was the last of the REP exercise .

Conrad

I understand all t he movie film came out, too.

So

you ' ll have pictures of it .
Cooper

At this point , we wer e rapidly running out of cryogenic fuel cell oxygen.

We decided t hio.t the only way

we were going t o salvage the f l i ght waE to stop
using it at this rapid a rate .

We had to make the

choice whether we were going to power down and cont i nue the f light , or whether we were gcing to end
the flight very abruptly if i t continuEd going down

we@t.tf 1!9 l!l'it~~.

43
at this rate .
Cooper

We had a short discussion on t his and decided that we ' d
better power down and forget the REP because we were
in trouble .

Cooper

So we tearful ly decided to give up the REP and power
down .

Houston agreed with us when we got in touch with

them that we had done the right thing.
REP.

That ended the

We did see it for quite a few orbits later .

Then Houston came up with the simulated Agena rendezvous exercise , which they put on one of their
computers .

The three burns they gave us to do went

off very satisfactorily, the thrusters worked very
well .

They would not allow us to use anything but the

aft firing thrusters because they wanted to keep the
cryogenic oxygen in the right position in the cryo
tanks .

Apparently the burns went to their satisf ac-·

tion too .

They seemed to feel that it put us right

where we should be .
Cooper

We tried one of these burns with the Platform Mode .
It did not work satisfactorily so I used Rate Command
which worked very well .

Conrad

1
We t ried to take the errors out and thats
where we got

fo error left and right
and a fo error up and down , so Gordo fired off the fo
into trouble .

We had about a

tG~~FIDE► ,•♦♦ L.

44
left and r ight .

We wound up wi tr. too much going

forward and we s tarted to back up and suddenly we
remembered we couldn't back up s o then we
decided well , we 'd j ust leave thEi errors on
the burn and burn i t the best we could
because no matter what happened He're going
to translate i nto forward and what we should
have done and we didn't think of i t at the
time--but you learn--we shouldn ' t have
burned all the forward--we should have
burned down to about a foot of what we
were supposed to have forward ancl then taken
out the left , right , up and down and go
ahead and burn the forward again.
FCSD rep

The updates that they sent you on--

Conrad

That worked fine.

There was no problem.

We copied the numbers down , entered the
computer.

We had plenty

the maneuver.

of t i me to make

We btuned r ight on the cl ock

as advertised and we seemed to have gotten
approximately i n the positi on they wanted
us to get to .
FCSD rep

What burns did you s i mulate?

Conrad

Well, we did a-- I ' ve got them r ight here.

@oM~lA

Al

co~~r,ocr~r,At ,
Cooper

45

We did a separation burn and we did a cl osing
burn and a coelliptic burn .

Those the ones

we did , Pete?
Conr ad

Well , i t was--

Cooper

We did not a standard coelliptic--it was

a-Conr ad

No , we did a maneuver burn , which as--wait
a minute--we did an apogee adjust maneuver
which was a retrograde of 20.1 feet , then
we did a phase adjust maneuver which was a
forwar d burn of 15 feet .

No .

Cooper

Yeah.

Conrad

15 . 8 feet , then we did an out- of- plane
burn , yawed left 900 of 15 feet and then
we did a reverse coelliptic burn- -

Conrad

We burned- let's see--we burned 16 . 4 feet
forward and we di d four burns altogether.

FCSD r ep

Aft thruster s for all?

Conrad

Aft thrusters for all- -on out- of- plane- and that was the only t ime that we did
ever , ever f l y the translat ional l eft ,
right , up, down thrusters.

We used them

to take out some of the IVI readings there

a couple of times.

And they were very

straight forward--left, right , up, down .
Cooper

We even fired the forward-one quick l ittle
blip .

Conrad

We fired the forward one then we suddenly
remembered we weren't supposed to .

FCSD rep

What kind of visual out- the -window did
you see on these translations?

In other

words-Cooper

Left/right lights things up real w?ll- I could see the glow from the aft--they
were- -

Conrad

J. B. is referring to visual cues )n the
horizon and we were on the gages--

Cooper

They were at night--middle of the night-everything we did was in the middl 1~ of the
night--this spacecraft only ran in t he
middle of the night (laughter) .

Conrad

I really don't remember making a burn-­

Cooper

We never did anything in the day--

Conrad

Yeah , I think one or two of them were on
the day side--but by and large--

Cooper

I never did so much night work in rzy- life--

EONFIDEt~ AL,.

COt~FIDE~~TIAt
FCSD rep

47

OK- well , I don't think there is much we can
add then--did you get all of these readings
out of--

Conrad

8O- 81- 82- 58- 59- 69- Yeah, that stuff works
just like the simulator.

Cooper

We got the readings .

OK - On to 8 .3 - RCS .

8 .3 RCS
FCSD rep

Let's go into the RCS - yeah , I don ' t think
there is anything more--

Cooper

This is all--

Conrad

Yeah, this is all we can do on the REP .

Cooper

OK- RCS Operational Checks - We did just like
we had planned in our little book.

We

a ctivated the RCS and Check Ring A and ACME
and direct--al l three axis- Ring B - Check
Ring Bin ACME and direct--all three axis
and they worked beautifully.
FCSD rep

How about the pad checks--were they-­

Cooper

Negative

FCSD rep

No pad checks?

Conrad

Not with the sealed system--

Cooper

A sealed system - I'm glad it was-­

Cooper

Control Modes - We used pulse and we used
horizon scan--

tQEt◄Ttl<L

48

Conrad

We didn ' t even check reentry rate command-­

Cooper

We used direct, UBed pulse .
rate command .

Conrad

We uned the

We used hori zon scan .

I know what it was--why don ' t you tell
them about this--and I ' m going to see if I
can get the fuel f i gures--

Cooper

OK.

And they all worked very ade quately.

I thought the rate command system, I mean
the RCS system was an excellent system.
It was really crisp and just really, I
thought, it was a real good solid system.
Rate command was much more-FCSD rep

What about the retrof ire - how did i t
hold retrofire?

Cooper

Beautifully , it was just no effort at all- hold--

FCSD rep

+ 1 degree or less?

Cooper

Oh, yeah , easily.

We had a litt le offset

in number 3 and number 4.

I could feel

them offsetting us .

I just cranked in a

little bit of RCS :

Boy, it just glued it

right in there, it just wasn ' t about -I felt like we could have had four or five
times the offset we had--and never have

,.

GQt"EIDE~~TIAt
budged it off there .

49
RCS , I mean the rate

command--One thing on rate command before
retrofire and just after retrofire, waiting
for retrojet , and then starting the pitch
up to go up and roll over inverted and go
to zero lift , the dual ring rate command
is just mor e than you can handle.

It ' s

just a lot more than control authority than
you want--you tend to over- shoot on things
because there is just so much control
tor que in there .

As I had stated, after

I f ired retro and jettisoned the retropack
and pitched up to roll over then from
ther eon I went to s i ngle ring pulse, and
used that .
use .

Reentry rate command--we didn ' t

Direct - used direct t o do the reentry

on single ring direct and used the pulse
mode from r etrojet to 400K.
FCSD rep

On the single ring direct reentry did you
have--did you feel like you had all the
authority you wanted?

Cooper

Yeah--until very late--as I stated some
time down , oh, half way thru the reentry

,_C~ Ji Hl:EttT

50

where you really begin to get the high g ,
after your high g , in fact, along about
coincidental with a real high g, when you
begin to get some fairly good oe1cillations ,
very r apid rate, I had no problE'ms damping
them at all but I didn' t have tt.e time to
keep switching back and forth f rom rate to
attitude and go back to rate anc. damp them
real quick and then go back to &.ttitude and
decide where I was on the guide and then
go back to rate and damp them and go back
to guidance , so I finally--they got to
getting fairly good where I had to devote
a l i ttle bit of time to damping them , and
I f i nally just went to guidance and stayed on
guidance andJust flicked over tc single r i ng
rate command to damp the oscillati ons and
then used the attitude control i n the rate
command to steer the computer steers .

Which

worked out versJ well and there was--there
never was really any oscillating-you never
really--I could go to rate on there and you
could hardly ever see the rate needles

CQNftO Etsi:filA L -..

..

CO t-ct FIDEt'<ITI AL

51

jiggle--single ring was holding i t just as
tight as could be .

.

Retrofire attitude

control - I had already mentioned on theredual ring.

Rate Command, reentry attitude

control-- I had already mentioned how we
shot the reentry.

No primary heater lights .

Heater lights on the RCS - they were on
practically--we had the heater on 99 percent
of the whole flight.

We turned it off, got

heater lights on Ring A first, brought the
RCS heaters on then rechecked-heater light
went off and turned the heater off and about
five or ten minutes later-fifteen minutes
later, the heater light came on and then it
was on Ring Band we turned the heater back
on and this went on five or six times and
finally we just turned the heater on and
left it on the whole flight.

I monitored

the temper~tures f~equently throughout the
whole flight in the RCS Ring A - temperature
ran about 70 degrees or about 65 degrees
and the RCS Ring B temperature ran about
70 to 72 degrees the entire flight .

<::.:.€0►~FIDE~~T I A L

At

52

one time I noted the RCS Ring B was up to
80 degrees.

I watched i t quite closely for

a while and then it never went beyond
that and came on back down to about 70.
And they stayed there essentia.lly the whole
flight .

I think you need thoee heaters

on obviously the whole--all tt.e time--I'd
never have any of them off at all now.
Thruster firing colIDllents .

When the RCS

thrusters fire at night they clank out whatever you are l ooking at in the night side.
The only way you are going to use any night
attitude reference i s to watct. what you are
doing, get l~ned up in a reference and then
f i re a thruster and pl an on ws.iting a few
seconds before you can tel l wt.ere you are
at again .

They really light t ~ the place .

When you are firing them at night .
FCSD rep

How far does the flame stick cut?

Cooper

The plume goes out about-- appear s to go out
about 4 feet and the plume is j ust the width
of the outside diameter of tha.t thruster
as i t comes out --it has a little bit of expansion ratio as it comes out and it goes

-'>►4 FlDEfi~Tfii: l' .;

b4~1DEt◄ TIAw

53

r ight up just about that size--it grows very
slightly but not a heck of a lot and s o it's
just about something i n the order of 4
inches diameter.

Something like that--it

has little expansion ratio--i t expands as
it comes out the nozzle slightly, and the~
it just goes sort of like a column and it
fans out very s lightly but it goes up
something in the order of 4 to 5 feet
distance from the thruster.
FCSD rep

Did you ever get any pictures of that?

Cooper

No, we didn't .

We had all our cameras

stowed at the time we got that cranked up .
We intended to.

Systems Shutdown - It

worked just like advertised and we turned
the prop valves off , very shortly then
it rtms out of f uel and stops firing and
you notice that there is a little burning
around all the nozzles.

There we got a little

residual fuel--not much--just a little bit-it dribbles and fumes after i mpact- -probably
very neglible.

I don;t really think we got

them after impact , I think we got them while
still airborne .

But they were almost

i o+◄ FtOEP◄ IIAl

54

neglible-- you had to really b3 looking for
them to tell they were t here .

There was

just a very s light musty odor in there- - fume.
Not sure-- I'm not sure that p~rt of this
odor isn 't part of t he ablati:1g going on
because fiberglass ablates with pretty
high fume rates.

Some pretty pungent fumes off-

ab}ating fibe:rgJas s ·

8.4 ECS

The mobility of the suit is nJ better or
no worse than any other suit .

It--suit

definitely cuts you down and iecreases
mobility.

In anything you do , i t just

limits you i n what you can do, limits the
movements you can make and I 1 :n talki ng about
unpressurized mobility at thi3 point even .
We didn't do any pressurized ·Nork in the
cockpit but t o unpressurize t ·:1e suit
definitel y cuts you down a gr=at deal in
your mobility and where you cm reach and
takes up a great deal of r oom.

Pressure -

Are they talking about pressu rized suit work
here?
FCSD r ep

Well , since you didn't do any pressurized ,
how about the

€'01QF1

und and--

a@8t◄ ftef~tJtl

Cooper

55

Yeah, when you are sealed up in it it gives
you about a half a psi in pressure in there
which doesn't decrease your mobility a
great deal over what the regular suit does .
Temperature in the suit, I certainly
can't complain there.
eat crow on that .
consistently.

I had to sort of

That suit circuit ran

We had to really shut it

completely down to get above 55 degrees
t emperature on the suit heat exchanger
outlet and generally it ran around 50 degrees
which just froze my rear off and I had my
suit flow . . the general configuration we
had was both of us

f".ad the suit flow

rates quite a bit back .

I had mine clear

back to almost a minimum position and we
had the suit coolant loop shut down to
where it was just about a half to one notch
open from the fully OFF position.

I really

got quite concerned that they were going to
freeze us to death.

In fact one whole night

side I had my suit inlet exhaust hoses off
and laying down alongside the seat because
e ~ as

C

iust too cold in the suit .

►fF 9Et-~,l'AL

Humidiv.

56

The suit seemed to run pretty ,iry .

I wasn ' t

conscious of any great amount of perspiration
in i t at all.

A couple of tim1~s when we

had fairly heavy work loads I 1;as aware of
the feeling of cool air and folt
like it was drying sweat .
or 3 indications of CO

2

CO2 .

We got 2

on the PCO

2

gage .

One thing, whenever a station nends you a
calibrate, well, you get a big jump on that
gage but there were other timeB when we
weren ' t even near a stati on when that
gage came up and began to give an indication
and one time it gave such a poBitive
indication for quite a period of time that
we got a little concerned about i t because
it was right when all this other stuff was
'

going, on day 5 and we I d shut c.own control
systems had failed and we were destined for

3 deys of drifting and the PCOr started up .
~

So we pulled out one of the ta;es , one of
the CO2 tapes that we had onboard . lt showed
it was below 2 nun of mercury, below that anyway.
It was this usually erroneous €:age .

suit comfort is no darn good.

~ mNffl>Et◄ llA ~

The

It is worse than any

57

other suit but there just isn't any way of
having comfort in a pressure suit .
Darn thing gives you pressure points and
bulges and gouges and cuts down, scrapes
you here and there, prevents you from being
able to stretch and scratch and have any
comfort.

There isn't a;ny comfort in a suit .

I don ' t giv e a darn who says so .

There just

isn't a;ny real comfort in a pressure suit .
In the configuration that we flew in from
the time we got 6-4 GO , our helmets and
glove s came off--were stowed in the footwell ,
and they were never put on again until just
before retrofire .

We ran the whole flight

in just the basic _pressure suit torso
with the neck dam on and the wrist dams on
and with the light- weight headset and I guess
the comfort was as good as you could possibly
have , but it still wasn't a;ny good and we
cuffed the pressure suits plenty of times.

58

Cooper

Humidity.

The suit seemed to run :pre·;ty d:ry.

I

wasn't conscious of any great amount of :perspiration
in it a t all.

A couple of times we had fairly

heavy work loads , I was aware of any :.ittle cool a:ir:'
and felt like it was kind of drying sweat .

CO2 .

We got two or three indications of CO? on the PC0 2
gage.

One thing , when ever a station gives you a

I

cali.brate well you get a big jump on t hat gage
.
but there are other times when we weren't even near
a statiun when that gage came up and began to give
an indication and one time it gave such a :positive
indication

for

quite a :period of ttme t hat we got

a little concerned about it because it was right
when all this other stuff was going on , day 5
and we had shut down , control systems had failed
and we were destined for three days of drifting and
the PC0

started up . So, we :pulled out one of the
2
tapes , one of the CO tapes we had on board and gave
2
a check of the suit circuit there and i t showed
that it was below 2 millimeters of a,., two millimeters of mercury was what it was .. . below that
anyway.

We probably assumed it was tr.is usually

6j@t4FIDE
►◄T IA-4 •
,

...,CQt~FH)Et~TIAf •
erroneous gage .

59

The suit comfort is no darn good .

It ' s no worse than any other suit but there just
isn't any way of having comfort in a pressure suit .
The darn thing gives you pressure points and
bulges and gouges and cuff dam scrapes you here and
there and prevents you from being able to stretch
and scratch and have any comfort .

There isn't

any comfort in the suit, I don't give a darn who
says so, there just isn't any real comfort in a
pressure suit .

In the configuration that we flew

in,from time we got our 6-4 Go, our helmets and •• •
gloves came off, were stowed in the foot well and
they were never put on again until just before
retrofire .

We ran the whole flight in just a

basic pressure suit torso with the neck dam on and
with wrists dams on and with a light-weight head
set.

I guess the comfort was as good as you could

possibly haV@, but it still wasn' t any good and we
cussed the pressure suit plenty of times .
controls were good on it .

The

No problem there.

The

o Demand Regulator , as far as we could tell, worked
2
fine.

We had no real occassion to reall y stress

it much or anything.

The suit umbilical was

always in the way.

Both my inlet and my exhaust

~~9i►,•f.A~

60

•
made my whole chest and rib area sor E• f rom the
mainfol d , the end i nside the suit being gouged over ,
being cantilevered over and digging in side ways
on me .

So , it 's a real pressure point.

It was the

worst pressure point I had were from the suit
hoses, and I had
my suit hoses deliberatel y longer
,,
than people said they should be so I ~ould get away
f rom this effect .
prevent

So, I di d have sla~k to

~hem from getting drug over ·but even so

they bothered me.

Finger tip lights ·,1ere good and

I kept one glove out and kep t it over on a piece
velcro o,.l t he side to use in the event we had any
kind of cabin light failures.

When P(~te was asleep

I frequently used my finger tip lightB on that
glove to light up some of the gages to look around
with.

Ca bin pressure sealed off high on our gage .

This i s under s ection 2, Ca bin.

Our CE.bin pressure

a t launch sealed off high a t about 5, 5, which it
always did i n the a t titude chamber in a ll t he runs
we made, in f ac t ,

in just exactly the same way.

Then i t bled down slowly t o about 4 , 9 and never
budged from there the whole flight .
right there .

It stayed

We never saw one flick out of it a t

all.

Cabin temperature ran 70 to 75 degrees and

humidity ran about 62 to 67 per cent the who l e
flight .

We have the figures somewhere here .

We

can get in here and get those ou t , but we have
the figures where we mn daily checkr:i; H.:. 1,~i i ,1 t;
once a day and generally t wo or three times a day ,of
the wet and dry bulb readings .

FCSD Rep

Okay.

We have that back in the original check .

Cooper

Okay.

CO .
2

good.

It was very seldom that you really got any

The cabin, I thought was just really

smell in the cabin a t all .

We thought the cabin would

have a dark green cloud evolve out of it when they
finally opened it, but I think the cabin, to the
time we landed, was still a pretty fresh cabin.
It seemed to scrub the odors, defication odor s
would linger on for two or three or four hours
perhaps , but it even scrubbed those out .

You

CO ; we had no--any
2
Comfort day or night . The cabi n

couldn ' t smell them at all .
kind of co .
2

ran too cold at night , particularly when we· were
drifting and had some fairly high drift rates
the cabin got quite cold and in fact even froze
up the windows.

The cabin fan we never used at

all until we turned it on just before retrofire ;

62

about 45 minutes before retrofire we turned the
cabin fan on and let it run for about 30 minutes
and i t decreased the cabin t emperatu:ce about 20
degrees .

Got it down about 50 degre,:)S and then

turned it off prior to starting retrofire .

Cabin

pressure relief valve; never actuall;r did we . . .
the cabin pressure dual regulator , the release
side of the cabin pressure regulator was the only
one that ever . . . .

We never heard the

cabin relief valve actuate after launch .

During

launch we were going up we heard it moan a couple
of times .

The cabin vent val ve .

Th•? cabin vent

valve, we actuated it on the way down once since
we couldn't maintain positive pressu:~e we actuated
the vent and the snorkel.

Cabin rep:~essurizati on .

We never checked it because we didn ' t need to.
Cabin air inlet valve .

We actually never ran any

check on it .

Cabin air recirc , we had open the

whole time .

Fully open .

Pri mary o2 .

monitoring, system monitoring was ea:3y.

o2 was very good.

System
Primary

The only problem we had with

it, it kept yawing us around when it was venting.
Whenever it would get up to vent pre:3sure and
vent, why, it would give us a bit of a yaw, left

yaw.

Build up to any rate you wanted to .

Over a

period of time , one time we got up to about 12
degrees per second.

You just sit there, and drift

it will build you up more , and more and more .
You can really hear it pop off back there .
can hear i t "shhh".
fiel d of stars go by.

You

You see this tremendous big
If i t ' s in the early or lat e

night you just , the whole sky is just complet ely
covered with this , just millions of stars .. . particles, liquid gases ... I guess .

~uantity measur­

ing system; worked perfectly satisfactory.
rates were good.
fine .

Flow

Pressure was . . . pressure was

It got up ; I don ' t think you ever need to

use, unless you are doing something like EVA ,
I don't think you ever should consider ever
using a heater on that oxygen system because i t
all by itself fairly rapidly gets on up there to
boil off pressures .

Boil off temperatures I

should say.
FCSD Rep

How about BJC.Jp, UTE,

Di d you ever use that?

Cooper

Used O Hi gh Rate when they were purging the cabin.
2

It worked f ine , reset fine.
landing.

We used i t then for

Manual heater we never used.

The controls ;

we did very little as f ar as doing anything wi th

•
the

Secondary O . Mine was ope:1, Pete' s
2
was closed the whole flight . That's the way they
stayed, just like for the check list .

Never saw

one quiver in either one of them the ',1hole mission.
FCSD Rep

Pressure stayed right?

Cooper

Pressure stayed right where it was on launch.
partial pressure .

CO 2

The gauge was some·,1hat erratic

and gave us two or three readings that we had
CO

partial pressure~one of which we finally
2
checked and found we did not have and so then we
disbelieved the gauge . . . :

After that, although it

generally read down at zero .

Coolant :

Coolant

loops worked real fine .

w~ were -running two

coolant loops ON most of the time sin,Je we had fuel
cells running .

For 2 twenty- hour per iods we

had fuel cell, section 2 of the fuel ,)ells shut off ,
and the coolant loops shut off.

In one period of

time we had ci rcuit breaker pulled on coolant
loop

number 1 coolant loop .

Secondary cool­

ant 1 oop , then we were running on pum:? B and with
bYJ>ass ON.

BYJ>ass ing it around so we were heating

before bringing the section

2

back nn the line

after long shut down peri od we bYJ)assed the cool ant
loop , the secondary cool ant loop , in order to warm

-€8-t◄ FID[pqf6tL_ ~

COt~ft0E~~TIA l
up the fuel cell section and then went to normal
configuration right on the line .
ation:

for 45 minutes the

the suit.

Evaporator operOh , t his i s not

45

Yes , this ie the water evaporator .

minutes after launch we got yaw deviati ons from
the

evaporator and after that they stopped.

$ornewhere just slightly beyond 45 minutes they were
gone .

By the time we got around one or bi t anyway,

I didn't notice any at all .

Water management .

Well, we ran the water management in t he normal
mode all the time.

In our configurat i on t he normal

mode is the drink mode .

We r an NORMAL , NORMAL ,

NORMAL and OFF the whole time .

The only t i me we

went to OFF was when we went to over - board and
the FLUSH position on the uri ne heater system and
they all worked fine .

No problem at all, and the

water was excell ent water.

It was ful l of air.

It had a lot of air i n i t , a lot of air bubbles ,
but they didn ' t s eem to effect us adversely.

We

decided to go ahead and just ignore i t and drink
it and i t seemed to work out f i ne .

The wat er was

really nice and cold the whole t ime , so i t t ast ed
good .

No objectionable t a s te to i t at all.

thought the water was excellent .

.GON£Hil Et~TJ.il:s

I

Humidity sensor .

66

Yes, we took it.

It worked fine .

It dries out

very rapidly; you have to refill it with water
frequently, but that is no problem .
gun fills it very readily.
accurate .

The drink

I t seems to be pretty

Stowage , of course , is always a problem

and we obtained readings at least once a day on it .
8,5 Communications
Cooper

Communications .

Interphone :

were excellent.

UHF performance :

operation and quality
cJuntdown

was excellent , orbit was excellent, md recovery
was excellent , except that nobody was receiving
our transmitter in the recovery area.

However, they

were receiving it back here in Houst)n.

Twice

AIR BOSS finally shut up talking long enough, said
"some other station calling : me, say"' , and
then immediately he'd launch off int) another long
spiel and I don ' t know whether he was just drowning
us out or whether they just never got us.

At any

rate , nobody was getting us , except Houston, a
couple of times.

But the UHF perfonnance in gen­

eral throughout the whole flight was excellent .
And even AIR BOSS received when we w,~re on our
way down in the parachute.
us on the way down .

He got two steers to

Voice tape reco::.-der worked

wQOhU,IDEN+t1'<~

fine for two cartidges worth and then quit.
FCSD Rep

Was i t two or four?

Cooper

I don't lmow, it was some l ow number.
four .

Maybe it was

Anyway, it quit fairly early in the flight .

The tape recorder was finished.

DCS .

Ok8iY , until

the last 30 minutes of the flight , the DCS couldn't
have been better.

The updates were good , the

ground coordination was f ine on i t .

The things

they gave us to put in the MDIU were given in a good
manner and were put in.

No problem.

Pete got

them all loaded in fine .

No problem at all

until that last up-date we got from Carnarvon which
they updated us with our compu t er a~d reentry configuration, after we wer e all ready supposed to have
our last update from Houston and without telling
everybody to look on his board and see what mode
our computer was in, he sends this update which is
just about ... blew our cork there .

And which I

think at this point right now, having

experienced

this one occasion of this happening at the worst
possible time it could happen in, my recommendation
right now to flight crews is that they fly the DCS
circuit breaker in the OFF position.
FCSD Rep

I concur.

ee~◄ F tDe~

Al~

68

Cooper

That's a drastic move to make , but just that one
experience was just enough to convince me that if
you can ' t 100 per cent trust everybody and the
system isn ' t going to work, then you just don ' t
dare trust it at all.

I wouldn' t even think of

not flying again wit h that DCS circui t breaker ON .
Conrad

At least for reentry.

Cooper

At lease in crew ... .

Conrad

You couldn't have hurt us any better than by sending
t hat load up .

Cooper

Real- time t ransmitter,delayed-time trmsmitter, fine .
Stand-by t ransmitter ... .

Conrad

We were out of fuel on Ring A. And we had 4.9 and

4. 6 left in Ring B. Which is good.

It says that

Ring A ran out sometime after Ring B ~ame on, which
says we went around the world 1 1/2 ttmes and re- entered on Ring A by itself .

That's :9retty impressive.

33 pounds of fuel

It al so shows you how much

fuel we used in Ring B.

We tested Ring B and

turned it off and didn ' t turn i t on u1til sometime
less than 70,000 f eet and turned it back off again
at 30,000 feet so we used the majorit;r of the fuel
on RATE COMMAN]) in Ring B from 65 to 30 which says
it probably fired continuously all thi? way down ,

08-~~FIDE~~T.I•

69

damping those rates .

But it sure was steady.

We

used almost 80 percent of the , yes , 80 percent of
the fuel in Ring B from 65 to 30 .
Cooper

65 down.

FCSD Rep

On this voice tape recorder.

Didn't you say ·it

broke after you got 4 tapes.
Conr ad

Yes, what happened was that the thing worked j ust
· 1ike advertised.

Two minutes before the tape ran

out you get the little flicker on the tape recorder
l i ght which is now up on the caution and warning
panel, and at the end of the two minutes the TAPE
OUT light comes on steady and that operat es just
as advertised and then one day I put a new tape
in it and Gordo and I held a big debriefing on it ,
About what all our storage was and present
configuration that we were in in the spacecraft ,
and what we thought the six, I mean , 'that the seven
troops would want to know about how we were using
our storage and we thought the best place to do it
was in flight right there while we were using it
and we really put down some good dope and we also
had some thoughts on Apollo on the darn thing and
I figured we talked at least an hour on the thing,
and I couldn't understand why it hadn 't run out and

70

I looked down in there and I marked ·;he t ape , you
know with my pencil , and put it back in the tape
recorder and turned it on and sure enough it
wasn ' t running.
recorder.

The motor burned ou·; in the tape

Now, when I turned the tape recorder

switch ON and OFF I could see a slight rise in
the ammeter but I think what was happening was that
we were getting the amplification part of it , but
that the motor to the tape recorder was not running, tt
wasn't driving the tape .

That seemec. to be the

f ailure .
FCSD Rep

While we're here why don't you flip back a couple
of pages while you were out and see jf there is
anythi ng that you want to add.

Conrad

Okay.

Yes ,. Gordo covered the h~ater operation on

the ECS .

Okay, they came on pretty early in the

flight and we kept checking to see that it was
truly working and it was .

System check covered

the fumes and we got fumes at 27 ,000 and we were
very light because we did have the ... .
Cooper

Under EX:;S I covered how you loved your pressure suit
for mobility and comfort .

Conrad

Yes , okay.

I won ' t say anymore on that .

Conrad

Finger tip lights .

Listen, now there ' s a very in-

.-o►,fJOet>Jflltt

co~~FID EtiTI-A L
teresting thing.

71

The finger tip lights were the

only darn lights we had in the spacecraft that we
could move around, which is ridiculous .

We kept

holding a glove up once in a while looking at lights
all night because we
Cooper

They sure were ... .

Conra d

We had the gloves stowed a.nd I broke my auxiliary
light because it was too ha.rd to hold there.

When

I pulled it out, the very first time I pulled it
out I shattered it a.nd Gordo never used the one on
his side because it's just not handy.

What you

really need in there is, we've got to quality one
of those little pen lights .
Cooper

One of those little pen flash. lights .

Conrad

A g.zy- really needs one of those little pen flash
lights up there a.nd I really wish that we had
ta.ken the ones along but we couldn't get them
qualified.

They had an open switch in them a.nd we

couldn't get them qualified for 100 per cent oxygen.
Cooper

You really need a little light that doesn ' t have
a.n electric cord fastened to it that you ca.n just

s tick in your suit or on a pieoe of velcro where
you can just get to it and use it, you know.

72

I

Conrad

There is plenty of time at night when you are
flying.

Now the worst thing a t all wa s a guy

sleeping.

If you turn on your instrument panel

lights it only lights your instrument and the· thing is
you are interested in most is that ce,n ter panel
with the cabin press and the secondary o and
2
all these things in it.

So , the big thing is

that you need an auxiliary light in t here, like a
pen light.
Cooper

Yes, you did.

Conrad

The umbilicals:

I had about the right fit on the

umbilicals and all that s ort of jazz.

The cabin

press was great. .The thing locked up a little
high on lift off like it was supposed to but then
a 4.9 never moved.

We covered the co

2

bit.

Did

you c·o ver the comfort day night and how the high
rotation rates that effect us?

We m~ver used

the cabin fan except just prior to l:Lft off
where it is cal l ed for in sequence SJ1d when we put
the cabin cooler to the full cold po::11tion and
brought on the cabin f an and fl ew it through

Primary o did vent quite a
2
You covered that.

entry that was it.
bit.
Cooper

' -re­

Yes .

.:i~

fid:DE~~Tl&Li

73
Conrad

I'm sure that's all for now.
us, of ~ odor.

It never bothered

The normal type venting system

worked fine.
Cooper

I covered that on the CO

Conrad

Did you cover the coolant splashing all over the

2

partial press . . . .

nose of the spacecraft just after adapter s ep .
That must have been coolant, it's the only thing
I can think of that wouldn't be frozen up there.
But it was liquid and it actually splashed on
the nose after adapter sep and retrofire.

It

ca.me around behind the spacecraft and I saw it
splash and the marks are still on the nose of
the spacecraft where it hit .

Water management

I thought was great except it had air in it.

It

did have air in it but pressures were good, the
wa ter was cold, it tasted good, but we did have
air in the water and it wasn't the amount that we
had at the factory, but there was air in the water.
You could see it when you filled your darn rehydratable food bags.
Cooper

Yes.

Conrad

But, it was good water.

Cooper

I covered the humidity sensor, we used it ... communications, I don't think you say anything but

74
excellent on that.
Conrad

They were great.

Even the UHF worked wnll.

I

mean HF .
Cooper

Voice tape recorder.
covered tha t .

Conrad

Then we were on.

I just

It didn't work.

Did you cover the . .. the exact detail s on this
DCS? How we didn ' t get the light.

The only time

we didn't get the light.
Cooper

No, I didn't cover the details on that Eixcept just
that we had gotten DCS unforecast over Carnarvon
after when we already had our load in from Houston,
and then it came on unexpectedly, not ev-en checking
to see what mode we were in here,

We we•r e in re­

entry mode and sent us this DCS updatin€' our TR
and updating our load, DCS load there, and just as
he said he was sending, why rapidly then we switched
out of reentry to prelaunch but never got any DCS
l i ght on either the TR or the load.
Conrad

Yes , he s ent two s eparate commands, and theoretical ly
the light should come on each time but I never got
the lights, so I'm highly suspicious of what happened and I've got to have an explana tion why this
load....

Cooper

Which he verified to the cores and they checked out

ak0tr4f.lDEt-4TIAL

75

all right.
Conrad

Yes, it was address 03 and address 10 and they verified okay and that seemed to convince everybody
except me that the load was correct and my mistake,
in retrospect, I should have made them ,transmit the
load and either satisfied myself that the DCS light
had burned out, or that the operation did take place
truly in the ma.mter in which it was supposed to
and it did light the DCS light .

He knew the TR

was right because he had his TR clock synched in
with the spacecraft TR.
Cooper

And he assumed the load was right because he got
maps back on it, but ... .

I'm not too sure I .. . .

Conrad

Yes , that's pretty dangerous. Pretty dangerous .

Cooper

I think this is it as I jus t pointed out to J . B.
and we were discussing in the corridor here, my
feelings on it are right now are real strongly, that
my recommendation would be to piloia during really
critical time periods, "I'd just turn the DCS
circuit breaker off."

I wouldn't even fiddle with

it because that one violation that of everything
we had agreed on has just completely destroyed my
confidence in the whole set up .

That's all it takes

is that one time just to completely foul you up .

0'8HF+9E►.IW.L

~

76

IDEtff

Conrad

Big Brother.

Cooper

Yes. sir.

I do feel that way, I really do .

Okay.

Let' s see, all this real time, delayed time,
s t andby, that all worked fine, I thought.
Cooper

Yes, we had real little trouble .

Conrad

The coordination with the ground really in general
went excellent.

Conrad

Yes, the only guy that had any problem ,.,as Guaymas
doesn't have a command system so , poor old Guaymas
was stuck when he was first to pick us up coming
into the states with having to call us a.nd tell us
t o turn on real -time and ack and then th,~ Rous ton
people would have to remind us t o turn :Lt off again
but the rest of the flight the command 13ystem ran
t hat telemetry and dumped t elemetry and everything
else just fine as f ar as I was concerned.

We

were glad not to be bo thered with it.
Cooper

Communications control and switches .

The vjc .

Man

I tell you, that really worked s lick, e:ccept thos e

darn rubber guards on there.
Conrad

Yes.

The cabin is dry enough.

Those havH got to go.
The onl:r reason

I can see they need them on there is in case you had
a catastrophic water spillage which you do very

easily have. ...

£QMF--1De~JIA~·•

77

Cooper

Yes , I pulled my ear plug and put the ear plug right
in the bottom of my ear where it was barely hanging
there and I could hear anybody calling then .
I put the plug back in.

Then

I thought the quality of

the communication.ewas really, as far as we were
concerned, in the air a:n:yway, was excellent.
Conrad

Our beacons worked satisfactorily both adapter and
reentry, C band beacons most of the time they were
in the command position, the people used them
as they wanted them.

Cooper

Let's see, the s l eep configuration, we covered
that , yes, that worked fine .

Conrad

Antenna selection.

I went to adapter and I really

couldn't tell much different and then we decided
we would go back to the check off list which called
for reentry.

Oh, I know how I got in adapter position.

Cooper

Somebody asked you .. . .

Oh, it was that test.

Conrad

Yes, it was the UHF test that we pulled and we
were switching from reentry to adapter, from
reentry to adapter, and I finally left it at
adapter one time and the thing was working just
great as far as I could tell .

Cooper

Yes , it was there for a day or so.

Cooper

Yes, it was there for a day or so.

I really

78

Cooper

You could dUlllp OUZD or something.

Conrad

Yes, I ... .

Cooper

But the neoprene things are hard to s ee· through ,
you could actually push them up to the control
knob to read what you got on there.

Conrad

Let ' s face it Gordo, once we got those controls
set, we never moved them.

Cooper

Yes, that ' s right,

Once you set t hem you very

seldom ever set them from there on.
really isn ' t too bad.

Sc,, I guess it

It's kind of a :Mickey Mouse

thing..,, -..net iit works-, I guess.
Conrad

Those light weight head sets , Those PlEll'ltronic
head sets that we had, I don't think 8J'tybody can
argue about the voice quality and they are really
comfortable up there.

Cooper

Yes, and they were really good reception , too .

Conrad

Just pull a plug out of my ear and l et it hang
and turn the sleep switch on when I W8J'tted to sleep.
Never took the think off my head in 7 or 8 days I
don ' t believe.

I'd sometimes take it off and hook

it under here for sleeping, but after E1 'While I
just got so used to having it on my head I just
unpull the ear plug and let it hang ancl turn the
sleep switch, and the sleep switch worted grea t ...•

c:.COMElllB!PYM•

79

couldn't see, we didn't have too much problem with

that, but they wanted it back to reentry and I
presumed that they will get the right data out of
that UHF test to know what's wrong with the adapter
antennas , if anything' s wrong with it.

But we

stayed in reentry configuration most of the time.
Conrad

E™ controls?

Cooper

We didn't have a:ny problems with i t .

Conrad

We had no problems there at a ll .

-.;_COMFHDEffFIAA. •

C@ t l ~ l iE t ◄T I A L

80

8. 6 Electrical
Cooper

Elec trical system monitoring.

Conrad

Well , I can't say enough for the fuel c:ells, they
really performed they --

Cooper

They s ure did , boy those little rascal Et really work.

Conrad

The purging, I recommend that we changEi those purge
switches , and I don 't think this is dar.gerous .

I

recommend that we change those purge swi tches to
three position.

Maybe guarded ones.

Yes , maybe

guarded ones.
Cooper

What you might do was put a little thrEie position
guar d there.

Conrad

But that spring loaded business , that Bpring
tension on those , so I tell you my fingers are still
sore from doing that.

I used my toothbrush ... •

t hat's what I used a ll the time to purge them
with.

You had to j a ck them up with your tooth-

brush because we've got them guarded u.nd they are
spring loaded , and you just don ' t think about it
but you just try and hold that spring :'..n that
pos ition for two minutes , it' s like a :rear.
Cooper

Particularly under zero g.
t o push against .

E@t l~IDEWI1h L

You don't have anything

~'it l'FIOEt•l'fl P1 ...
Conrad

81

So I recommend they make the purging switches.
Well, I recommend that they either cane up with a
gimmick that you can insert on the switches when it
is time to purge so that you can flip them on and
time it and then f l ip them off, or ~beyma.ke the
s witches three position.
day flight .

Especially in that 14

You purge every 6 hours you know, and

that's minimum.

If you are running higher loads

you are purging every 4 or every 2.
quite a chore and it's

So, that's

like house keeping.

Those fuel cells have to be purged and 5 minutes
of s witching is what it takes, holding those spring
loaded switches.
Cooper

2, 2 and almost 1,
26 seconds.

Yes, 2, 2 and half a minute .

That's really hard on the fingers ,

hiding behind these guards we have, makes it even
more difficult but the guards should be there.
Let's see , monitoring electrical power remaining.
Conrad

There was no big argument there.

Cooper

No problem there a t a l l, just watching the hydrogen
fa.11.

Conrad

They were either there or they weren't.

Cooper

Ground information required to complete mission.

eOl <U'IDEl ◄ T I At

82

Well , that there again.

Ti-ie cryos were rea lly

the only problem we had with electrical.

The main

bat teries ... the times tha t Pete touched them they
were just exactly like advertised.
Conrad

Yes, they were 22½ volts every time we tested them ,

Cooper

No problem at all.

Squib ba tteries were fine , no

problem.
Conrad

Squib ba tteries came down about, I would say

2½ volts during the whole flight.

We

s t arted out with a common ccmtrol bus t ha t had been
27½ vol t s and a t the end of the flight it was 24 . 7
or s omething like that, 24, 8 or something.
down about 3 volts.

It came

But one thing that nobody ever

tol d me, was man , when you fire thrusters and
things like that you can s ee a l ot of t ransients on
that common control bus.

Tha t thing rea lly gets

to os cil l a ting up and down.

I wasn' t sure s ome­

thing wasn't wrong at the beginning, SlJd I just pass
t hat on as a tip to people who go later .

8, 7 Onboard Computer
Cooper

On.board computer,

Conrad

I can' t say too much for t he computer 6ither.
It worked f ant astically,

=€8t 4Flli'0@1A1-Cooper

83

It couldn't have worked better. It really
did .

Conrad

The IGS Guidance was indicating everything that we
did.

We knew that we were going to loft a little

bit and boy, it showed that we should pitch down
at second stage and RGS did pitch us down, and when
it pitched us down and put us on the IGS was
centered up.

I never saw any big needle deviations.

I didn ' t see this big pitch transient at the end
of the flight.

I think it did wander just a little

bit in pitch but none of this off the scale stuff.
It looked like it was on the money all the wey , am
I felt that if we ever switched we would be right
down the pipe with it.
Cooper

Yes.

I did too.

Real good.

Conrad

In the insertion, boy, that math flow 6 ca.me up
with all the right numbers.
right.

The numbers were just

You didn't read the numbers.

began the numbers were on tbe money.
was 25,808.

Where the ta~e
Address 72

Address 94 R dot was plus 20 feet :pga

97 was plus 2 feet.

52 said we had a perfect

:insertion that we had no apogee adjust .

At perigee

there was 00000 and then calculated , even though

-e8 tsl □P Fls1TIAL

84

we didn't need one, the directions should be applied
at 3,042 seconds and the nominal value io ?, 008
seconds and I just don't think you can ask for
better computations than that.
Cooper

Okay .

I think that everything that we did on it

worked out quite well.
Conrad

Catch- up mode worked well .

The .... tl:.e one

thing it did though, there was one ancmaly that
I saw on there and I almost had a heart attack at
the beginning of the flight.

Remember, we got

into orbit and I don't know whether I did it or
what, but I got in the mo::le where I got the darn
IVI 's running and it wouldn't stop running , and
the worked until I switched into pre- launch nav
again a couple of times and I finally got the IVI 1 s
to quit and then I was very careful about how I
did any switching after that and I don't know what
that was.

I'll have to sit down and talk to the

computer people about that.

It seemed to me that

what I did ....
Cooper

It happened once more.

Conrad

Yes, it happened one other time and we got out of
i t by going to pre-launch and letting it sit for

• @Ot ◄ FID E► ~.tA I

c€~F,6Ef~ f I

85

awhile and it finally ran itself out and stopped.
But it looked l ike the accelerometer bi as took off
or did s omething that just made IVI 's run .

I

don 't rea lly understand what happened but I wanted
to note that an anomaly.

I felt that the thing

was running right and that this might have been a
little glitch so I didn't report it to ground
because, well , later on we didn ' t really have any
need for catch

up or anything like t hat and it

seemed to operat~ okay.
Cooper

Okay , let's see.

Orbit maneuvers.

I don 't think

there was

FCSD REP

How about the powering down and powering up?

Conrad

It shut down and s tarted up d~t as advertised.

ON

with the on s witch and 18 seconds it went through
it's s elf check and the green start comp l i ght ca.me
on green and it did it every time .
Cooper

Okey, Orbit maneuvers we have already covered that.

Conra d

We powered it up for a ll our updates and it accepted
it every time, llO strain·.

Cooper

Retro fire, you got those numbers through ,

We gave

the number to .. . . IVI's after retro fire .

Read

269 aft and 10 left and 181 down.

@@ I 4FIDEr4fliAll

86

Conrad

10 left and 181 dOWl\, 269 010 181 .

Cooper

Yes .

Conrad

And as soon as those retro ' s fired the llght came
on green and it went right into reentry ,5',lidance
. . . reentry guidance

Cooper

Reentry guidance was right on the money when it came
on, it came on exactly on time .

Roll neeclle , roll

bug . . ..
Conrad

Stopped a t 400, 000 feet , right at the tine Hous ton
gave us our c omputed time to 400 K.

Cooper

And the 290 K steering commands came in ~ ust right.
Came in just where they should , the dir ection they
should come in and everything~

Conrad

At about the r ight magnitude • • • •

Cooper

And about the right magnitude.

Then the problems

star t ed.
Conrad

And tbat was the loos e nut on the ground and n ot
in the a ir, f ortunately.

Cooper

MDU , t hat worked fine .

Conrad

That apparently worked fine .

Cooper

Computer modes.

Let' s s ee, pr e l aunch worked good.

Ascent worked beautiful ly, catch up . . . . Ne didn ' t
rea l ly do any ca tch up except the one . .. .

:m O b4F19 itL4il.Air

87

Conrad

Now, there was one thing there, I don't know if it
was the radar or the computer.

But , the first

time we flew over the Cape and locked up on the
back up REP on the ground, it read out the
digital millage to a gnat's eyebrow.

It locked

up at 248,66 miles and I don 't believe it will read
any higher than that supposed to be 250 , but I had
the same number at the other end so I suspect
that that is as high as it will read out.

And it

tracked t hat thing right over the Cape where we got down
to, I think we got down to .... our slant range at
the closest approach was 161 miles or something
like that, and everyti.me I punched it up to the
range went do'Wl'l. and - Cooper

Man that was really beautiful, just beautiful,
The radar itself stayed locked on for .. . . I felt
like you could a lmost point out the tower it was
right on the mila.ge mcxl e.

Conrad

But in the catch up mode it read out to 248 . 66
miles both at the start of lock up and the end of
lock up , and I was really impressed with that.
after that we always locked the Cape .

The r adar

locked on like it should on the REP , but we

Then

a@Q t 4Ft9€NII • b

88

never got it to read through the compute1r now I

Cooper

Yes, but my analog read- outs read.

Conrad

Yes, but wait a minute, your analog readouts only
go to 300,000 feet and that's 50 miles El.l'l.d we were
never within 50 miles of it, so . . ..

Cooper

Yes, but they rea d correctly and I got Hteering,
radar steering.

Conrad

Yes, but the analog couldn't have read correctly.
If it read anything on your scale it wa.E1 wrong
because it should have read only digital . . . .

Cooper

What I saw it was showing that it was getting a
r eading.

Conrad

Oh, yes, well , there was no doubt that ue were
locked up.

Cooper

The R dot was going right on out past there , you
know, and then it came on past .

Conrad

But I don't know whether if the problem in the

89

digital read- out was a computer problem in the
catch- up and rendezvous mode of accepting radar data
or whether it was radar problem, but I ' ll mention
under the computer becaus e I sort of suspect it was
a computer problem.
Cooper

Eut I don't understand why it worked so well the one
time and the other time it didn 't work.

Conrad

Something gave out .
computer.

Either in the radar or in the

Well, then we never did get ·to check'- a.ny­

thing in the rendezvous mode.
Cooper

No , reentry ....

Conrad

We dan 1 t know what the problem was in reentry, but
I think the canputer did a 40 job it did just what
it was suppose to do.

It just had bum dope .

90
8.8 Crew Station
Cooper

Okay, control s and displays, sequence telelights .
The only comment I have on sequence t el elights is
that the comp light on the comput~r is too bright.

Conrad

That 's right.

Cooper

We are going to have to have some way of iimming
that or put some tape over it or something, because

Conrad

That 's a comment for GT-6 especially.

Cooper

Because when you are running it at night with the
computer on for rendezvous, that comp light darn
near blinds you.

Conrad

Yeah, it I s really bright .

That needs a dim f eatur e

on i t.
Cooper

The other sequential telelights that are in there
are all dimable, or turnoffable .

Conrad

Say, there is one thing t hat we didn 't t r y through.
I wonder if that thing is on the bright-d im sequence
We never did put the switch to dim.
thought of it in 8 days eibher.

I never

I'll bet you it's

on t he bright- dim circuit, but we never used that
swit ch.

We ' ve never had occassion to ever use t hat

swit ch.

You lmow we always check sequence l ights

bright .
Cooper

So, that is what that check is f or .

(laughter)

91

Conrad

Learn something new everyday.

Cooper

I didn't think about that.

Conrad

1 1 11 bet baby it is.

Cooper

Well , that ' s something somebody ought to check out .
This is just a comment.

Conrad

But we never did have any reason to dim it in the
simulator.

You never tried to look out the window.

Cooper

You don't have anything to look out the window at.

Conrad

Yeah.

Cooper

Okay, event timer - - We stopped at 48 minutes after
insertinn and never ran it again until we cranked
it up at 27 minutes prior to retrofire.

Conrad

Yeah, that's right.

That was one of those things

they had ~s power down.

We never powered it up in

the flight.
Cooper

Apparently, it is a fairly good power consumer.

Conrad

But it worked all right.

Cooper

The IVI 1 s worked fine, other than the one comment
Pete made while ago that they were continually running there for a while.

The FDI 1 s

excellent.

Range and range rate indicator worked good on the
REP, boy, really, really good .

It worked very good

on the - -

•

..
a ef ◄ FIE)l!I ◄ 'Pl~L

92

Conrad

And the analog range was in close agreeme:'lt with
the digital range when the REP was going away from
us.

Cooper

Yep.

The GLV fuel and oxidizer pressure gauges

worked excellent except for the IPS .

Stage two IPS

fuel gauge failed to the full max deflect:i.on position just shortly before POGO started, ancl stayed
in the OFF position until after staging.

It came

back on and worked for about a minute and then went
back off again.

The altimeter worked just like it

worked in the altitude chamber.

Stopped at 96 800

feet .
Conrad

It was very jerky on the wa:y up .

Cooper

It was erratic going up .

Conrad

And I don ' t guess you ca.n expect a pressm·e altimeter like that to follow as fast as that booster is
moving.

Cooper

I t's r eally winding up.

Conrad

Coming back on reentry, why, we were apparently a
lot slower on the other aide of it, because it
unwound in a.n extremely steady manner and it seemed
to be right with the barostat .

Cooper

It was right on the barostat , actually.

Conrad

And this is really the important thing.

93
Cooper

Rate of descent - - you know, I even forgot to look
at the rate of descent .

Conrad

Well, we didn ' t even worry about it.

When the chute

Cooper

When the main chute opened as good as i t did --

Conrad

-- out there, t hat we both watched the main chut e
and I saw the water coming at the corner of t he
window --

Cooper

I didn't even think t o look at the rat e of descent .
I knew it was good.

Conrad

Yeah, we didn ' t have a:ny reason to look at it.

Cooper

I forgot about t hat .

Conrad

No, we got busy doing a check there, too.

Cooper

Well, we were also having a couple of radio calls
in there and it was int errupting --

Conrad

Yeah, radio calls , and we knew the chute was good,
and there wasn't a:ny reason to look at it .

Cooper

I ' m sure the rate of descent worked all right .

Cooper

Accelerometer

Conrad

We 'll look at it the next time .

Cooper

Yeah, okay.

Cooper

The accelerometer worked fine .

i t seemed t o wcr k, f ine.

1 1 11 make a not e.
The switches and

circuit breaker panel s -Conrad

I t's still extremely easy to knock off a:ny circuit
breakers --

€ 8 t JFIB Et 4Tl"'1L

94

Cooper

Anyt:iJlle you move around in there.

Conrad

You get in the habit of real fast checking that.

Cooper

I would strongly recommend to anybody in any crew
that anytime they do any moving around o::- turning
around

in the cockpit that they run a c:Lrcui t

breaker check.
Conrad

we did.

Cooper

Because, invaribly, we would always find one off.
Everytime we would run a check, somewhere or another
we would find one knocked off.

Conrad

We usally found a reason for it though, t he overhead ones we knocked off with the water gun so we
stopped putting it up there.

And the orni I thought

I knocked off on the right hand side, I came to the
conclusion that was one the o heater blnw out.
2

It

just blew it off .
Cooper

And the mirrors worked excellent.

I must say,

Deke, you do need that in-flight repair occasionally
to tighten those mirror -Conrad

You mean the postlanding kit.

Cooper

Whew! Gracious!

I lost my head.

The pontlanding

kit to tighten up the adjustments on thoeie mirrors
to keep them tight .

Repair reticle, you know ,

things like that.

~J~ilE► ttlAt

95

- COtrt~IQitililil ·\ l
Conrad

Suit s.

Cooper

The first tlling that happened -- Pete's suit had
to be repaired.

Cooper

Swizzle stick -- I used the swizzle stick for qui te
awhile to punch off the DOS light when Pete was
asleep, but, finally, it got to where it was j:ust
easier to reach over there.
arms.

I've got pretty long

I think most people would probably need the

swizzle st ick t o get over there to punch it off.
Conrad

I never had the occasion to use it.

Cooper

That's the only time I used it.

I used it once for

turning on the ACME power over there.
FCSD REP

Before we go a:ny further, while I'm thinking about
it, on the pad out here, you said you could see that
umbilical tower when they started to raise it.

Conrad

No, the erector.

FCSD REP

The erector.

Conrad

You could take t he mirror out of the holder and hold

Yes.

it at the bottom of the window, and you could measure
the distance .

Now I don't know exactly how high we

are above the road, but where the road winds up to
the pad and makes a left turn in and drive straight
into the pad, you could see the intersection of that
road.

So, I S83 that you can see the ground some

tet-tPfOEtfF1'tl

CO~◄ F18 E~ fF h't-l 350 feet away from the booster .

,..
You can see ground

level, and we were going to use that procedure if
we aborted.

We didn't know if we were going to make

a land or a water landing, but we f elt t hat we
could use the mirror to see if we were over water
or over land, at least within 350 feet of the spacecraft in the direction of the windows .

J didn't

use the mirror on the water landing out c~er Bermuda,
because I oould see the water out of the corner of
the window by just putting my head up and peering
at it - - in the two-point attitude.
the water coming.

I could see

I knew we were fairly low .

As

a matter of fact, that altimeter was just about on
the money, wasn 1 t it?
Conrad

We were at just about zero feet when we hit the
water .

We had a good altimeter setting.

Cooper

Almost exactly zero feet.

Conrad

Th.is is what McDivitt said.

Don't go on that 29 . 92 .

They gave us a 30 . 10 altimeter setting, and when it
read zero we were on the water.
Cooper

Yes, that was a real good one.

Conrad

So , I recommend they stick with this -- giving the
altimeter setting in the recovery area be,~ause it
can make the difference of a co~ le of hundred f eet .

'€01'1FtDEl"~TIAt

97
Cooper

Okay-, radar.

Warm up time -- we don't have any

comment on that?
Conrad

No.

That was straightforward.

Cooper

Acquisi tion range --

Conrad

It acquired in excess of 250 miles and read at
250 miles.

Cooper

That's that.

Acquisition attitude -- well, at one

ti.me I thought we were out of attitude, and it still
was reading right on, locked up.
Conrad

Yes.

Cooper

Ease of lock on -- good.

Capability of holding lock

-- it seemed to hold lock very well.

Flight display

Conrad

I t was fine.

All you needed.

Cooper

Radar tests generally -- from our point of view it
went very well.
at all .

We never had any false lock problems

We didn I t really give these a fair shake,

however.
Conrad

Yes.

Cooper

But, from the testing that we did, we encountered
no false locks.

Conrad

We didn't get a false lock when we turned around
and looked at the REP.

Cooper

No, we didn't .

@ 0+4Fl !J! l ◄ if 11'L

98

Conrad

,...

We t urned around and we waited unt i l 1 mjnute was
over , and banged on the radar and it didn ' t take t his
23 seconds or anything.

I t just bammed .

It just

locked up on us right t here.
Cooper

Locked up instantaneously .

Conrad

There it was.

Cooper

Lighting, indicators, and instruments.

Conrad

Okay, there's a def iciency here.

No doubt in your mind.

You need to see

that center instrument panel, and
Cooper

You need some kind of glow.

You need some kind of

a little glow down t hat center instrument panel to
be able to see that t hing.
black .
Conrad

That thing is really

Without bringing that big darn

I really don't underst and why those guys took that
r ed center light out.

Cooper

Whil e we are talking about lights, let's see if we
cover that.

No, we don't.

But there is a real

safety- of-flight item in t hat cockpit

lighting.

That is, if you leave a:ny one of these lig·hts on,
and, in particular, the big bright center light
which is the landing light -- I think it is on
ther e

in the light solenoid area , the reostat,

you build up a heat thing that is actuall;y- to the
point of being explosive.

I t actually gets to

•eet*t8 i ~q;rw.L

99

where it will burn -Conrad

Yes , you could smell paint.

Cooper

It burns the paint in the spacecraft .

Conrad

You can smell paint cooking.

That's the first

thing that we noticed, the first day.

I 'll tell

you what heats up.

Well, the

It 's the reostat .

thunderstorm light th.at Gordo 1 s referring to doesn't
have a reostat.
Cooper

That just flat puts out heat.

It just flat puts out heat.

You can burn your

glove right off your hand on th.at one.
Conrad

Your under-window right and left lights -- if we
ran those at great periods of time with the light
dimmed down , th.at reostat gets so bloody hot th.at
you can smell the paint cooking again.

I felt that

that was a real bad sit uation and we have comments
on th.at -Cooper

So we kept rotating these lights on and off.

Conrad

We never did burn our lights too steadily unless we
absolutely had to .

The other problem there was that

anything that generates th.at much heat is going to
have a tendency to burn out, and I 'll tell you, you
lose one of those cockpit lights, buddy, and you
are screwed.
Cooper

You really are.

,QNFl9Et ◄ TIAL.21a

100

Conrad

I had already busted my au.xiliary light a.nd if I would
have burned out the light on the right i :'.lstrument
panel, we would have had to rtm that center light a
lot, and I don ' t think that center light would have
lasted either.

Cooper

No . I think that whole center console area is a very
weakly lit area.

It could certainly stand a very, very

faint soft light.

When you are rtmning 1mder night

light conditions you'd be able to see thn radio switches and this type of thing.

Let ' s see, indicators and

instruments--well t of course t a pet peeVE! of mine is
that we couldn' t get EL in the 8- balls .

I still think

the 8- balls could certainly be lit a lot better, al though they are satisfactory for what we ' ve got.

I

think the-Conrad

We really didn't use that except during lift- off and
reentry, but it does shine.

Mine shines in your eyes,

doesn ' t it?
Cooper

Yes , there is a real bad f eature in the cockpit in
that a:ny lighting at all, either one of the right or
the left lights- say Pete turns his right light on,
particularly--if I'm trying to look through the reticle,

it just zaps.

It 's gone.

Can't see a thing in

•

101

there with a.ny light on in the cockpit.

In order to

use the reticl e , you have almost got to dim out all
the lights in the cockpit, and this is pretty ha.rd
to do because you need to use some around.
Conrad

And , you know, they bad a light down on the center
pedestal shining aft that was supposed to light up
the water management panel, and everybody took it out.
You have to do most of your work on that water management panel blind.

I mean, you sort of put your hand

in there backwards and everything, and , as long as
everything runs all right , you only need that one
switch to go from off to overboard.

The other two

switches stay in the normal position unless you have
some sort of problem.

But it would be nice to light

up that whole area down there.

There is no way,

without a flashlight or pulling that auxiliary light
way over there , to tell how much water you have in
the water tank.
Cooper

I don't think you can tell with it.

I took that

auxiliary light and got back in there and practically
crawled down in there.

With that darn M- 1 experiment

thing installed on t0p of the tank there , you can't
see the water level bubble anymore.

They i nstalled

-

102

Pete's M- 1 experiment right on top of the water tank
where the water level bubble and the mea3uring gauge
is .
Conrad

It ' s built right on over it, so you can ' t see it .

We used every combination of l ights in t :1ere that you
could think of, depending

on what we we:re doing.

Sometimes we ran with Gordo--if one guy was sleeping,
the other guy would run with his red lights on dim.
And many nights, we ran with no lights at all .

We

had that much confidence in things like 1!abin pressurization and so forth , that we just powered down the
lights and we would go through whole night sides without
ever turning the lights on and never even looking at
the instrument panel when we were in dri::ting f light.
We would both nod or look out the window.,
Cooper

Or sleep.

Conrad

Yes, and one of the reasons we did this Has because
of this heating problem.

I had a decided fear that we

would be in real trouble if we burned ou·; any light .
We had no way of replacing them.

So , an;:r time I

could conserve elec t rical lighting, by saving the
bulb , I would turn the thing off.

I didn ' t want to

build up big hea t loads in them.

We ran red lights ,

we ran white lights, we ran the center lights only,

-e@N Pl8ENTI

103

we ran the left side only, we ran the right side
only; we ran them in a:ny combination you could think
of, just dependent on what you wanted to do with them.
Sometimes you needed lights in the daytime , sometimes
you didn't need lights in the daytime .

It depend s on

what your orientation ~a9

and what you were doing.

That was very interesting.

It's an entirely lighting

situation than in an -ai-rplane .
Cooper

Let ' s see. We checked out the one light that we hadn't
mentioned here.

I think we mentioned all of them ex­

cept the doggone docking light.

We did check it out,

and it really throws out a nice light out there .
didn ' t have anything

We

to try it out on out beyond the

nose, but it sure lights up the nose.

As a matter of

f act, on that onenlght side we kept wondering where in
the heck that light was com.;_ng from.
Conrad

I kept saying, "Hey, the sun is really shining on the
nose for a long time . "

It was the night I blew up the-­

Cooper

We were pointing straight up.

Conrad

Yeah, I 'd blown up the shrimp and gotten it all over
the right console, and when I was cleaning it off, I
had inadvertently turned on the docking light switch.
It took me about 10 minutes looking out there trying

..

-

-€0i'IFID Ef~TIAt

104

to figure out what the heck it was shinj ng out there
on the nos e .

It finally came to me in a. flash that

the docking light was on.

Now that is another thing-­

I don ' t know how they covered that REP with the reflective t ape , but, man, that thing wa s bright!
Cooper

All you could see was the light.

Conrad

No , I mean in the daytime.

Cooper

Oh yes .

Conrad

In the daytime with the sun shining on that thing, it
almost burned a hole in your head.

Boy it was bright!

Cooper

"{es, actually--

Conrad

It looked like a little sun out there.

Cooper

Pete went into it deciding that he was n~ver going to
see it in the daytime , and I think he ha1i a big surpri se.

Conrad

I was determined that we were go:Lng to see it .

.And we did see it in the daytime, several times after
i t had gotten a fair distance away from us, I ' d say
2 or 3 miles away.

Cooper

It was bright.

It was almost brighter on the day­

s i de than it was at night .

In fact, it was so bright

i t would blot out those blinking lights .
Conxad

Yes , that ' s right .

The REP, itself, was bright enough

and reflective enough that it would blot out the

-ee,Nfl!) f!l!fftlrt 2

105

flashing light, but there were times when we saw it
close enough in the dayside that we could see the
flashing light.

it didn ' t get that far away from us,

and thats why I s t ill challenge this 375 miles-Cooper

You aren ' t going to see that dipole as long as we did .
The last time I saw that thing, I was still seeing the
dipole antenna.

Conrad

That ' s right.

Cooper

You aren't going to see that dipole at several hun­

That's the last thing I saw.

dred miles.
Conrad

That ' s right, and we saw it in the daytime.

Cooper

Yes .

Conrad

And it was on the 5th or 6th orbit.

Cooper

Okay , utility light, interior lights , outside lights­

FCSD REP

Talking about outside lighting from external--

Cooper

We didn ' t have any flashlights .

All we had was the

gloves.

FCSD REP

It says glove .

Cooper

Gla.re--well, anytime the sun comes whopping in the

It should be glare.

window there, you are going to really have a gld,re
And anytime you are sitting there watching the earth,
tracking a target down on the earth, and you suddenly
come back into the cockpit, you aren ' t going to see a

zCOt'4f K)itsl11.,tfLP

@9 ► IEll;l Ii~ 111..\L

106

thing.

You are completely blinded because when you

have gotten used to the outside--sunlit earth--and
you come back in ..the cockpit, it takes a few seconds to
adapt to seeing things ins ide.
Cooper

Intensity controls--! think they were f:.ne .

I thought

they worked pretty well, and I must say 1, as Pete
mentioned, I did like thos e red lights very well .
Fingertip lights- they work ed out all r :.ght.

A

flashli ght would have been better, but t he fingertip
lights are f i ne.
Conra d

Onboard data-

Flight plan strip we r eally didn ' t use, We used our
own checkoff list, because all we had on the flight plan
strip was checkoff lists .

You couldn't read it at night ,

and we just put something on there beca1::se it was
going to be in the spacecraft .
FCSD REP

You didn ' t use it?

Conrad

I set it up in the proper places , but ar.ytime I really
used a checkoff list, I used this one right here .

And

I think that one is going to be replaced by a clock.
Cooper

Yes . Checkl ist cards- -

Conrad

I can't s ay too much for them.

Cooper

They are

Conra d

We beat them over the head and we reworked them and

really good.

EO♦~ liiM-iJiO. L

107

reworked them.

I lmow we drove thos e guys nu ts down

there , but I ' ll tell you, there are darn few things I ' d
change on these set of cards right now, after having
flown the flight .

They really helped us.

And the

experiments book helped us and the log book worked
well , and I think we kept things fairly straight .
Cooper

In general , I thi nk the books worked out very, very
wel l .

Conrad

Our big flight plan book worked out well , it didn't
get in the way .

Our reentry book, I t hink, could be

made smaller.

I would recommend next t i me that they

put the schematics together like Neil did in the GOH
Junior , which turned out that he had the schematics
in a b◊Ok that was 10 inches high and 2 1/ 2 inches
wide and about 1/ 2 inch thick.

Just by folding them

a certain way, and this you would put away and never
pull out.

Now, everytime we hauled out that reentry

book to do anythi ng, we had all the schematics and
everything.

We really didn ' t need to haul those

around all the time.
plac e for them.

We could have found a proper

So , I ' m not complaining against the

reentry book and I wouldn ' t take anything out of it.
By golly, we used everything in the books .

€O ► 4ft90tt 1 A1,--

We looked

108

at schematics when we were up there.
didn't with the troubles we had.
in that reentry book .

Don't think we

We used everything

There is only one book that we

didn't take out of its holder and that w~s the REP
and that is because we gave up the REP, or we would
have used that one.

And this big flight plan like this,

I'd recommend that you make it even bigger.
seen how much writing we did in it.

You've

I recomment that

you use the same procedure of keeping a log book and
a flight plan, because two guys are working all the
time.

You put it down in the log book and then you

write it down in the flight plan, and this helps you
organize it .

By writing it down in the flight plan

is when we really recognized just what we had tc unstow
and how we had to put it together to make that series
pass work right.

It took us three days to do that.

We still spent a lot of time thinking about this .
maps--boy, that's another thing.

The

If we didn't have

that map, we wouldn't have known where in the hell we
were.
Cooper

Yes, that orbital map-

Conrad

Those map updates were the greatest !

Cooper

I'll

tell you the map that was the useful one was the

109

D- 6 map that Harry Kozuma had in there.
Conxad

Yes , we used this one, too.

Cooper

Yes , this big map that he had in here.was really a
good one.

-.

Conrad

Yes , that helped you even better find out where you
were.

Cooper

Man that's a good map .

For instance, over here , we

were over here trying to find some details on some
isla.nois .
Conrad

Where was it?

Yes , you could go to this map and get an orbit and come
down to--

Cooper

Oh, islands or something off here.
they?

Let ' s see, where were

Some of these little islands right here , off

India-

Conxad

We could pick up these little tiny chains and these
things .

The Solomons and these little messy things

down in here- boy,. and all this stuff out in here .

Here

is all that junk we kept passing over in thereCooper

Yes ! We were getting the New Hebrides, the Carolines,
and the Marshalls .

We were going over everyone of

those darn islands, just like on our maps, boy.

Just

beautiful .
Conrad

And you could really pinpoint your location.

That

ee1<Wl" Er4TIAL

110

r eally impressed me.
Cooper

Here is where we did all t he photographing.

Conrad

Yes, that' s right .

Here is where we photographed

Australia one day .
(Much Laughter)
Cooper

We were photographing the hell out of Au stralia coming
right down across here.
odd.

Then we thought , well , that ' s

Never had noticed that. Where is that island

off here?

Well , that does look kind of like Sumatra

coming across there .

And there is another big island

and I thought , well , darn, I know there isn't another
big island coming off there, and it was Borneo , and
~ here

comes Austra l ia.

Fortunately , we had the

time on it, so somebody can go back thro·igh and
reconst ruct wher e we really were .
Conrad

I was trying to find where we struck out Australi a and
wrote down Palestine.

Cooper

Pal estine.

Dear me.

We had two cameraB going j ust

as f ast a s they would click.
click click.

You know, elicket y

Nobody had gotten aerial photographs of

Australia before during the daylight .
Conrad

.

Listen, I t a iLked to Paul Backer and he t old me the
16mm film came out great.
pi ctures , too .

,,.COMFfOtf

So, maybe we got t he REP

11 1

Conrad

Okay, maps and overl ays--they were really good.
D-6 books and the data books were good and we used
the star charts--

Cooper

The onl y maps I thought weren't worth a darn were
the Apoll o landmark maps.

Conrad

Yes , well you' ll get to debrief on that through
Apollo in here.

But our straight data books and

everything-Cooper

Yes , they were good .

Conrad

We used .all of them .

Cooper

No comment on them.

Conrad

We took the experiments procedure book and the experiments log book just like this , and whoever had
the watch side put them in the Volkswagen bag.

We ' d

take the reentry book, which we had the PLA updates
in, and the other book, and we woul d just throw the~
down between our legs.

If you wanted to l ook at the

f l ight plan you would just f lick it up , grab it , and
read the thing, and throw it back down there again.
Cooper

There was enough r oom so that Pete kept them on the
side of his left l eg, and I kept them on the sid.e
of my right l eg, and we woul d just pass them back
and forth.

Cooper

Okay, start charts--by gol 1 y , I thought they were

-

112

r eally good, and I think anybody that wants to get
lined up for a night retro, if they do :_t once and
aren't convinced that star charts were pretty useful they're -Conrad

Well, it gave us a great deal of confidence to go
into the star chart the last day and pic:k out the
right yaw stars, and then, as we were aJ.ining the
platform, to see those yaw stars go right through
the middle like they were supposed to.

Cooper

I think the star chart was very usable snd very neat,
much smaller and neater in this fashion than it is
in this great big mechanism thing we hav-e .

I think

they're very usable in that fashion.
Cooper

Stowage.

Hah!

What are we supposed to say about

stowage? Boy, it's probably the most critical thing
in a long flight .
basis .

It has to be kept up on an hourly

Belts and harness-- I thought they were

perfectly satisfactory, except for one set of bel ts
I wanted to get out before the flight and if I were
doing it again, I'd take my own scissors down there
and cut them out.

That is the knee belt which was

put in there for pressurized ejection .

I t is still

in there, and it is in the way, and I hated the darn
thing.

Mine flopped and f l apped around in there .

113

I final ly took them and gouged them down in al ong
side the s eat.

I took my scissors and cr ammed them

down in there , and that is where they stayed the
whol e fl ight .
Conrad

Yes , I ' m not convinced they are necess ary.

Cooper

That knee restraint belt was put in there so that
if you were ejecting at high al titude and you came
out in a pressuri zed condition - -

Conrad

I think the arm restraints ought to be l ooked at the
same way.

Cooper

My arm restraints stayed in the down position , I
l aunched with them down , I r eentered with them down,
and they never came out of the down position.

They

could have s aved a good 2 or 3 pounds of weight on
my sea t by taking my arm restraints out .

I t old

t hem that before and they said , "Well, they woul dn't
ever be abl e to get them of f . " You know the seat
was out s itting over there and I coul d have removed
them my~el f in 5 minutes when we were in Weight and
Bal ance .

They said the paperwork involved in re­

moving them would probab l y take a year.

So,' those

two items I f l ew with I thought were compl etel y
worthl es s .

And the lifevest- - I don ' t know what

you are going to do better .

I really don ' t

114

••

honestly !mow what you are goi ng to do better because
of the ejection situation, but they are in the way.
They are in the way of everything you do, and they are
real little bearcats to get on and off---these little
lifevests.
Conrad

We didn't have a place to stow them.

Cooper

Yes, we left them on the whole darn time just because
we didn I t have anywhere to stow them.
really in the way.

llut they are

They are a real pail'.. in the rear.

Conrad

Yes , it ' s all part of the suit combina tjon.

Cooper

Well, that's right.

Conrad

If you didn ' t have the suit, they wouldn.1 t be so bad.

Cooper

Waste disposal- pack harder.

Conrad

Yes .

Cooper

Pack tighter.

That's a very grave problem, in the

f act that as you start getting defecaticn wastes of this
type you want an area where you are not going to mixing that with other items too much, and you want an
area that you start packing right the first time so
you don ' t have to keep dragging it all out and repacking.
I don't !mow how you are going to do it any differently
than we did~in keeping one area completely open for
it, and just working and using that for your disposal

115

area.

FCSD REP

How about urine?

Cooper

The urine system worked just great .

Conrad

Except for one problem.

It leaked on occasion, and

I really attr ibute that to the fact that this rubber
device gets covered with tars .

I cover ed t his pretty

thoroughly with the doctors .

I recommend that you take

new urine rubber receivers along, one per each day of
the flight .

We had four along and we changed t hem

every two days .

They get gummy and tarry and they

don ' t have their holding power and urine tends to
flow back.

eeft#AD Ei<ITt,o,L

•

-

C:@ l ◄ i IOLN I iAt

11 6

around the side .

That is what i t amounts t o .

Cooper

Yes.

Conrad

We never had any t r ouble with them when w1~ put on a
new one .

The new one would l ast about a day before

i t would start getting gummy .

We t ried everything

to keep them clean.
Cooper

It would get gummy.

Conrad

... wipe on them and we left them unrolled so that
t hey would dry out.

Cooper

The rubber gets so gummy you can put the t wo together
and they j ust stick together.
sticky.

It gets all gummy and

It may be a better material is available .

Conrad

I still think i ts the urine t hat does i t .

Cooper

Tha t ' s what I'm saying.

There may be a better material

available tha t the urine won ' t effect that way .

The

urine is eating into that latex--its late~ rubber ,
I suspect .

Either carry more good ones al ong or

get a better materi al to use .
evaluated by CSD.

That should have been

They should have determined tha t

urine does effect them and makes them go to pieces
in a hurry .
Conrad

Yes , I ' m not sure they don ' t even wash then out
occasionally.

.

117

Cooper

Two other things we have is that you leave preheat
on for 4 minutes prior to flushing.

We got one

t remendous big glob of urine ice that broke off
sometime about the fifth day.
Conrad

Oh, yes .

Cooper

And, man, that indicated that it really bui l t up .
It must have been as big as that box there .

Conrad

It looked like one of those sand castles you build .
It was a conica l buildup of ice .
had flowed out .
up .

The liquid

It kept building up and building

But it was still flowing out through the center

like a volcano.

The darn thing broke off one day

ou t there , and, boy , I tell you that thing was about
this big around and it was about 3 and 1/2 inches
high.

It just went floating right by the spacecraft

and it was pure yellow. Ha , ha!

It was about 3 by

4 by 3 or 3 1/2 or 4 . About 3 inches in diameter
and about 4 inches high .

It was triangular , dribbled

up, rough shaped, but you could see where it was smooth
on the back side where it had actually s tarted to
freeze.

Boy , that scared us .

We didn ' t want the urine

system to freeze up so we went to 4 minutes .

We used

the recommended McDonnell procedures and we revised
those slightly when we found out the tar was beginning

.CO ~4 FIB l!r 4ih',I&

eO ►+Ft0Etrff~

118

to gum up the little valve too .
Cooper

The little relief check valve .

Conrad

We ' d built up a pressure in there when you would
start to UJ1inate in that thing .

We would open it

up and dump for 30 seconds after we went through
regular dump cycle and evacuated the bag.

We

woul d open it up to the cockpit and let it dump
30 seconds which is what MAC recommended .

Then we

woul d sit there and cycle it on and off a 1d have
that vacuum suck around down on that valv,~.
Cooper

Open and close that valve dry .

Conrad

We cycled it three or four times rapidly with the
vacuum opening and closing it and then we shut the
system down .
not.

Cooper

I don ' t know whether that helped or

We had the impression that it did .

It made us feel better about the whole si·;uation.
At least the thing worked the whole time .

8. 9 Biomedical
Cooper

Medical Data Passes--They weren ' t really too big a
problem.

They ' re necessary.

I guess they are as

minimum in interfer ence as you can get thEise medical
data passes .

They weren ' t too bad .

I tal ked to

Chuck Berry this morning about it.

I thir.k that

getting the food down into a better type i:.ystem where

~

10E

L

•

€9~J f lil E► ll bt, L,

119

you give the pilot more option in what he eats
rather than t ry to give him meal A, B, C, D, E, F , G
is goi ng to alleviate their problem as well as the
pilots a great deal .

It ' ll make i t easier and t ake

a lot less t ransmitting.

They were thoroughly

confused by this numbering system.

It made it

more difficult f or them to keep track of what we
wer e eating.
at all .

The excersior worked fine .

No problem

I n f act , I used tha t exercisor a lot of

times other than medical passes .
hurting me .
hurting.

My lcnee s got

About the t hird day they really start ed

So I started using the

r egular and found that it helped .

exer ci sor
Pete did t he same

thing l a ter when his-Conrad

I didn ' t use it as much as Gordo did , but I did
use it for t he same reason .

Both my knees got

sore from being bent all the time .

For some reason,

I don ' t know why, it settles in your knees .

I

just found out that maybe once or twice a day with
that thing in additi on to the medical dat a pass eliminated the whole thing.
Cooper

Yes, it real ly helped .

Food and water evaluation.

We have already evaluated the water .
excell ent .

The water was

Having cold water is really a luxury .

lhtl l

€ O ► 4Fl&li ► 1

•

120

:ti 0t ◄ fl8Et ◄ T1)!(~
It i s sure different than Mercury.

The food just

boil s down to the fact that we quit eating the
bite size food entirely.

We had absolute ly no desire

for it after the third day .

I doubt whet·:1.er

we

touched a drop of that bite size food affor t he
third day .
If I

We ate s t rictly the rehydrated food.

were sitting down r i ght now to redo this

flight, I would make up a recommendation ::or the
food .

I would have a number of bags made up just

the size of these rehydratab l e bags .

Bagi; that

don't have to be folded, crushed , rolled, or steam
rollers driven over them .

I ' d make up these packets

of eight , ten , or f i f teen or whatever the neatest
package with a zipper or a velcro on it if:.

I 'd

put those in there and let the pilot pick out what
he wanted for a meal.

He could pick out one or two

or three or wha tever he fe lt like he wanted for a
meal.

He could do the same with the juices.

have other bags in with just juices .

I'd

We ' d have a

grea t many juices all stacked i n there , and they
don ' t have to be all folded and crumpled up .

I

thi nk they will probably package a lot neater this
way .

You just have two types of bags .

You 'd have

iO ► IE1Qfti&i
food bags and juice bags .

12 1

And then I'd have another

bag just full of these wet wipes .

I f somebody

wanted a wet wipe they could go in and get a wet wipe .
They wouldn ' t have to be handed back and forth ,
back and forth .
the cockpit.
set up .

They wouldn ' t be hanging all over

And that way you ' d have a very neat

You wouldn ' t have a lot of food that is

difficult to stow.

The big difficulty in s t owing

this food is the paper .

This makes the bulk.

All this tinfoil and other · things wrapped in
individual plastic and then more foil and a great
big package holding the whole thing .

And When you

get all this paper gathered up the best you can
possibly packet you have at least equal volume to what
you had initially with the food .

I think that you

can cut down a great deal by clever packaging and allow
the pilot to choose his foods per meal .
be happier .

I think he'll

I think the packaging of it will be

neater and easier .

I think you will get a lot more

effective use of space .

I think the biggest

problem for GT-7 will be that they are going to
have a 2- 1 factor .

Everytime they pul l out a package

of food, by the time they get that food plus the waste
products back in and stowed it ' s going to be exactly

@ot ◄ FtMl5 ◄ 11xr

EO ► ~FH!Jl!m l

122

twice the size it was when it came out.

I don ' t

believe there is anyway t o get around it the way
the food is packaged .
Conrad

What are you going to do?
in the spacecraft.

Jim a.nd .l!:d at11 everything

You and I hardly ate anything.

If we had known that we were going to eat what we ate ,
we could have had twice the room in the Bpacecraf t .
Cooper

Yes.

Conrad

We lef t 10 packages of food there .
ever touched it .

We m•ver

Plus we filled up the Jocker

with another third of the food we didn't eat from
the packages that we opened .

Toast, apri cot cubes ,

brownie squares, fruit cakes , a.nd I don ' t know
what all were stuffed all over that spacecraft .
We didn 't eat any of that .
I had wanted to.

I couldn' t eat it if

I just didn ' t have a:ny desire

for that stuff at all .
Cooper

I don ' t know what it was about, but it jus t seemed
to be so dry, and chew and concentrated .

Conrad

The doctors figured we were running on ab)ut
1800 calories a day , and I don ' t feel that we were

cheating ourselves .

There is a big diffe::-ence between

our flight and Jim and Ed ' s .

They went a::ter this

big extravehicular t hing, and I think tha·; it probably--

(@t 4F18{MiWIL

•

123

Cooper

Well, I ' ll tell you , a couple of days we ate a
lot more .

That third day we had a real full day .

We were really busy.

Man , we really had the appetite .

We really gobbled down the food and we ate good .
Those days we were just drifting were-Conrad

That makes sense to me because if I ' m wor king I eat
a lot and if I ' m not working I don ' t eat much.

Cooper

Maybe our morale was low all over .
consume much food .

We didn' t

I got hungry and Pete did , too .

I could tell when I was hungry , and we'd say okay
let ' s break out the food and eat .

We really boiled

down to just about 2 meals a day when we powered
down and 3 meals a day when we were working hard .
It was only about 2 meals a day powered down that
we even wanted .

The bite s i ze food tastes awful

good when you just sit around and snack on bite
size food .
there .

I t just didn ' t taste wor t h anything up

I may have finished off maybe one or possibly

two packages of it up t here just by having it
sitting around i n •that little nook or cranny .
Maybe once a day , I'd have one of t hem.

Jus t an

i n-between meal snack but other t han that i t was
really a waste having t hem along.

I think that if

we had all bite size food we would have quit eating

-eof'~kJelSt rrm

124

entirely.

I imagine that would be an ea3y way to

package the food.
really good.

But the rehydratabl e ,)nes were

There is just no getting acound it.

They are good food.

The are nourishing and ...

Conrad

Boy, I don't know what to say about the :3leep periods.

Cooper

The juices were good.

They were really Hxcellent.

We had some leaks .

We had four bag failures on

those plastic bags .

I think it was the /unction of

crumpling this bag all up again and having t o wad
i t around to fit it -tightly into a diffe:'.'ent
shape from the fold that it was in.

I think tha.t

those four bag failures could have been r eal serious.
Pete had one that was worse probably-Conrad

I was eating merrily on the eighth day, r:hrimp creole,
and it blew out the side , and it blew this itty bitty
dehydrated , rehydrated shrimp all over the circuit
breaker panel.

It was red and i t looked like somebody

had flashed their hash all over--Ha,ha!
clean it up in zero g.

You can ' t

Everytime you wipe a shrimp

off one place it would float over somewhEre else.
I was snatching shrirap out of the a i r a l l over
everywhere.

I was bloody mad at the bag.

abou t to have a fit .

..ONPl9@11ff.,_L

•

I was

~ eMUAL
FCSD Rep

125

Why don ' t we finish this sleep period?

And we wil l

be through with systems and pick up those questions .
Conrad

Start the experiments.

Cooper

Okay , sleep period .

Okay .

I think the schedule needs to

be set somewhere around the normal s l eep cycle that
a person has a l ready, in other words , I don ' t think
that the s l eep ought to be set for mid- morning or
mid- afternoon .

And I personally think that the

cockpit is small enough that you ' re al mos t going
to have to s l eep both guys at the same time .
Conrad

I concur .

I don ' t think you can be doing the ex­

? eriments with one of them-Cooper

And have the other one as leep .

Conrad

Yeah.

Cooper

Pete and I both found that the times when we really
slept the bes t and most comfortable and real ly got
some good sound s leep was when we powered that thing
completely down and turned all the l ights out and
were down around the backs ide area of South America
and there wasn ' t anybody to cut in and be flashing
in to tell us all kind of things and they woul d
leave us a l one and we just both power down and go
to sleep and get a good s l eep .

And that is the only

way you are going to do it , becaus e if one guy is

•

126

doing experiments or working, or if one in the
spacecraft, or doing all this other stuff, the other
one is just not going to sleep.

This i~: pure and

simple as that.
FCSD Rep

How about mentioning about how quiet it is .

Cooper

The inside of the spacecraft is just as quiet as
the inside of a very quiet office room .

Conrad

Yeah.

Well now , the big thing here is ihat we had

taken our helmets off and put these neck dams on
so we had no, none of this suit air flow over the
mikes.

And when you get in that configuration so

you are not picking up any noises, as a matter of
fact , we had our intercom volumes turned down .

Most

of our talking we were doing was to one another.
Cooper

We were just talking in our normal tone of voice.

Conrad

And our radio volume levels were extremely low .
were carrying about 4 on our radio volumes .
that was more than adequate volume.

And

I mean that

guy came in loud and clear in the headset.

You

could hear a pin drop in that spacecraft .

The only

sound that you were aware of was a very gentle
swishing sound of air which was flow due to the
recirc being open .
Cooper

We

Right .

•

127

Cooper

And it was so quiet that you could hear a guy when
he picked the book up and started turning the page .

Conrad

Yeah , I could hear in back in the adapter section
after real ly getting adapted to this thing , we
could hear the hydrogen vent , we could hear the
fuel cell hydrogen purge .
purge .

We couldn ' t hear oxygen

We could hear all thr uster firing of the

attitude thruster s .

When we did our burns, we

didn ' t even have our helmets on .

Did we? We had

our helmets off when we did the maneuver burns ,
when we did those perigee--and we could hear all
thrusters firing .

Aft firing thrus ters .

We

bl i pped the forward fir ing thrus ter s and we fired
the up-down and left and right thrusters and we
heard them al l fire -- all the maneuver thrusters
and all the attitude thrusters .

And I could hear

many other noises working back in the--There was a
pump package or something squeaking back there that
squeaked for all through the test period and I was
curious to see if I was going to hear it in flight
and sure enough , it was loud and clear .

It was

back there behind my head in the adapter section.
And you could hear jus t anything that was out of
the ordinary noise .

And that was what the pr oblem

ee-NFlt:JfflTF-;1¥1_

@@:t 4FID it tTls-tt~

128

..

was , it was so blas ted quiet in there that when
something did click or snap or that was not cyclic
in nature that you got used to it woke you up just
like that .

And as Gordo says , turning the pages

i n a book , or he ' d reach over and pull something
off the Velcro , jus t a little food package and just
that little zip of the Velcro sounded like it was
magnified in ther e cause it was so blasted quiet
in the spacecraft .

He couldn ' t talk in the micro­

phone without me hearing it .
Cooper

I tri ed actually cupping my hands and talking into
my mike here so I could make as little n)ise as
poss ible .

Conrad

And I tried it too .

We would wake each )ther up .

So our recommendation - I ' m sure the spa~ecraft is
safe.

You may want to look at something - I really

don ' t think you need this, but I think it should be
looked at f r om an engineering point of view - what
would - what are the catastrophic things that could
bother you i f you were both asleep that ·,,rould need
somewhat of a warning to wake you up and I real l y
don ' t think you need any myself .
Cooper

I don ' t either .

Conrad

But I think that the spacecr aft - and we felt that

129

way in flight , and we did ; we both went to s leep
at the same time .

And I ' m sure if we would start

losing pressurization our ears would have told us
that we were as sensitive to that as we were to
noise .
Cooper

Thi s schedule we have covered that , I think it
should be in .

Because invariably, we could get busy

doing other things and have many interfer ences and
it would wind up that we would both wind up sleeping
during the normal Eas t Coast nighttime cycle .

In­

variably, we just weren ' t sleepy at other times .
Conrad

Yeah , I think the other thing is that now in the
schedule my naptime al ways took place when we were
cleaning the spacecraft .
the stateside passes .

This was too short after

That compressed the whole

rest of the sleeping cycle .
stick to it .

Although we tried to

Gordo woul d go to s leep for his long

period which was usually 5 hours instead of 6 because we ' d slid into that time .

We always ate our

meals together and we were scheduled not to .
always took the vision test together .
this way we compr essed things down .

We

We weren ' t ,
And uh , then

I usually wound up having about 5 hours off , but
I never s lept the full 5 hours .

There was just one

..

•

130

night that I did .

There was one night that Gor do

slept maybe 6 or 7 hours and I let him Eleep that
whole time because we were just exhausted.

And

that was the same reciprocal thing -- he let me
sleep for 6 or 7 hours .

That was the on ly time in

the f l ight that we both real ly s l ept any long period
of time .

The rest of the time I don't t hink we ever

slept longer than 2 hour s at the most -- And most
of the time it was 50 minutes between s t ations.
Cooper

Well, that ' s the whole thing , that the -- on this
schedule thing there are many , many, many interfer ences to sleeping and these stations just calling
in letting you know that they have TM sclid and are
standing by, interfere with you-- they wake you up.

Conrad

They shouldn ' t even do that--on backside passes unless they got something to give you , they shouldn ' t
even call you .

Cooper

And then too , when they start handing ycu a bunch
of flight plan updates and they want yoi:.. to do this
and that and one man is trying to be-- ttey ar e trying to keep one man real busy whil e the other sleeps ,
just doesn't work out.
close your eyes .

Configuration , i,,ell , just

The best configuration t o s l eep

is to turn all lights off and s l eep .

I will say one

131

thing right now that we haven ' t mentioned befor e ,
I believe the Polaroid window f i l t ers we
took were the greatest things we had along.
Conrad

Es pecially when we got on that drift in fl i ght .

Cooper

I ' d real l y r ecommend thos e very strongly,

We put

both of those up dim then down to where they completely block things out, turn the lights out , go
to s leep and rea lly have at it .
Conrad

One guy could open his up and real ly s ee the gr~'.ll1d
well with them in the open conditi on , but i t was a
circular hole that was small and with the filter on
the other window it kept t he spacecraft r el ativel y
dar k i f the other guy was t rying to sleep .

Cooper

Ri ght .

Conrad

I think that was supposed to be the t hing that we

What ' s this miss ion br iefing?

changed courses in midstream and we di d; we briefed
each ot her and br ought one another up on what was
going on and what we had written down .

CO~Ffl!J !PffM

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9,0
9,1

OPERATIONAL CHECKS

Apollo Landmark Identification
FCSD Rep

On these - let ' s try to get everything in that log
on these --it ' s going to take a little more time?
I think - -

Conr ad

FCSD Rep

Well , you want to take each Apollo landmark separately?

Is that what you want to do?

Yes .

As your list - - go down and call out the ones

you did and whatever you have on your log there and
we' 11 put this in one neat l i ttle packag(?.
Conrad

Well, the first one they gave us--you want to do
this exactly fully like - time , rev?

FCSD Rep

I ' d like to , yes , because we ' ve had an awful l ot of
trouble .

Conrad

Okay, the first Apo l lo l andmark was 208 and it was
on day one at 09 : 27 and it was covered b;r cl ouds .
And it was Cape Rhir and we didn ' t get 1. .,c .

Cooper

In fact , the clouds were right over the (?dge and
we didn ' t see anything until just about off the
land.

Conrad

And the next one was - -

Gordo , why don ' -~ you talk

about -- You took all these except--you -~ook them
al l , as a matter of fact, so why don't you give
them the business on that, I didn ' t even look at

60t H@
l8 Et tlh\L
half of them .

133

Most of them occurred during my sleep

time .
Cooper

Okay, the next one was Sequence 212 .

And that is

on Lake Winemarka and it was a point out in the
l akes in Brazi l --down in the Br azilian area, and
it ' s a l arge l ake .
immediate area .

There are no other l akes in the

The l ake was very , very distinctive .

You could see it from some 6 or 700 miles away very
clearly--big, heavy jungle all around the lake and
the point that they selected was the finger of a
little peninsula out in the lake in a particular
point right on the peninsula .

I thought the lake

was easy to find , the peninsula was relati vely easy
to find from quite a distance out .
problem getting on it .
landmark .

There was no

It was a fairly disti nctive

The light was fairly low - it was late­

in- the- day type pass, and the light was fairly low
over in the West , but no particular problem getting
on it , holding on t he target , and ident i f yi ng it .
Apollo l andmark--l et ' s see , I took 1 , 2 , 3, sequences
of pi ctures over that .

And Apollo landmark 213 was

the next one , and I wonder if they want the magazi ne
and sequence number s .

Okay , on 212 it was magazine 1

and exposure 62 , 63 , and 64 .

On Apollo landmark 213

•

134

it was magazine 4, exposure 10, expo:rnre 11 .

213

was Lake DePoopo in South America and here again
the l ake was fairl y distinctive although this was
a shallow water lake - the other lake was i n the
mountains in a fairl y deep water - crater-type lake,
whereas this Lake DePoopo was a flat land lake fai r ly
shallow , the lake was not the same shape as on the
map that we had of it .

In fact, the map we have is

quite a poor map and the isl and that the point i s on ,
Is l a de Panza , is not the same shape as the is land
that is shown .

It is the onl y i slanc it can be,

i t is not exactly, quite different in reality than
it is here on the thing .

The island is changed in

shape, but being a shallow water l ake you can see
that the lake could very r eadily change with the
water level - - change shape with the water level ;
and these islands could very readily be modified
fairly readily just by dredging or hacking away at
them .

It was obviously the only lake in tha t im­

mediate area that i t could be and it had the same
general shape as this lake .
leading in.

And it had the river

The lake was f airly distinctive, and

fairly easy to find, the point was easy enough to
get onto , and I got these two pictures of it .

•

Light

.. _

135
conditions were again fairly late-in- the-afternoon
type light conditions, but they were good enough .
I don't think this lake was nearly as distinctive
however, as the Lago de Winemarga .

I don't think

you can trust these shallow water lakes as being
that definitive in that they may change a little on
you and won ' t show up as good , particularly f r om
higher altitudes I don't believe, as the deeper
water lake perhaps .

And the next one , let ' s see,

as to time--days and times-- first of all , I was
skipping that, day 2, 21 hours 45 minutes 39 seconds was Sequence 212 which I covered, Sequence 213
which we just covered was day 3 , 21 hours 38 minutes
and 2 seconds; these were all made at -- 212 was
made at 1/250 at f/8 because of the quite low light
value, and Sequence 213 was made at 1/250 at 9.5 and
then one at f /8 , because here again, it was a fairly
low l ight level.

They were all made at fairly near

90° pitch down.

Sequence 207 was made by day 5 ,

7 hours 14 minutes 27 seconds.
there.

I made two pictures

57 and 58 are magazine 4, 1/250 at 9 . 5 and

approximately 70° pitch down and 30 to 50° yaw .
These were yawed off at some slight angle .

And

207 was Canary Islands and it was the southern point

•

«€~

E;f P9 1Tl,•,L

on the La Palma Island , and very distinctive ; however, one can get confused if there LS any l ittle
bit of cloud cover at the isl ands yo·1 1 r e l ooking
at .

There are approximately five or six islands

out in this group and with some of t :1e scattered
cloud conditions, vou can get on the wrong island
there fairly readi l y, particularly i .: part of one
island , where partial l y covered by cl ouds , maybe
just a point--you can very readily g1~t the wrong
po.int .

However, I think we got the :~ight point

all right without any problem .

And :: think the

lighting condi tions were very excel l nnt , really ,
except for the scattered c louds on the water down
there; the lighting conditions themsdves were good
for these pictures .

And on day 5 , 10 hours 25 min­

utes and 2 seconds , we got Sequence :)08 which was
the one we had tried the first day and had had
cloud cover .

That was magazine 4 , e>:posure no . 62

taken at 1/250 at f/9 . 5 90° with about a 20° yaw
right, and there again that was the 1,oint near
Cape Rhir near Agadir and the commenis that I had
to make on this one are that there are three points
going down this same general land mass that are
neither one a great deal more distinctive than the

•

..

< Qt; f IDflsl1\AJ;
other .

137

In fact, the one that is the most distinctive

from quite a distance out is Cape Sim near Osaweira.
It is a lot brighter, lighter colored sand and is
more distinctive than Cape Rhir .

However, once you

learn the place , Cape Rhir becomes a little more
distinctive when you learn what to look for , because
Cape Rhir is at the edge of the mountains and just
to the southeast of Cape Rhir , there is a river and
a valley--a big, wide, green valley which travels
up to the east along the edge of the mountains .
When you once learn to look for it , this river and
valley are quite a give- away , because look just to
the left of it and that's Cape Rhir .

I think , prob­

ably it is the most distinctive of these three.

The

three points that show up immediately from perhaps
800- -1000 miles out are Cape Hodad and Cape Sim and.
Cape Rhir .

You can see all three little points

sticking out there .

Neither one of which are

particularly more distinct except this Cape Sim has

..

brighter colored sand and begins to show up a little
more distinctive, but once you learn where the landmarks are , these mountains and valleys near Agadir
give away Cape Rhir .

I believe it is the best

landmark-- in that immediate area.

I ' m not sure that

138
I agree , incidentally on all the Apollo landmarks
landmarks we ' ve got here .

I ' m not sure I agree , in

general, with any of the Apollo landmarks that they
havp .

I think there are lots more distinctive l and­

mark features around the country.

I think that

their idea of selecting a point of land down in the
water is good, but I think that there are numerous
places around the world where , say a large river
comes out and intersects with the ocean naybe at a
point , at a point in a river and things ,f this
type , would be even more distinctive or an inters ection of a river and the ocean , or an intersection
of something in the type of causeways i n Miami or
the causeways here at the Cape where the;r cross the
water with a very prominent water landma:~k .

They ' ll

give you a very accurate telescopic poin-; to sight.
on , whereas the particular points of lancl that they
have selected are not really accurate type sighting
points for real accuracy , I don ' t feel .

They're

r easonably distinctive, but I don ' t thin}: any--nearl y
a s distinctive as a lot of other areas around the
country that could be selected.
FCSD Rep

Okay, why don ' t you look through these things her e
and see if there is anything there that you haven ' t
covered.

€ewfl~if>. f"pl,Ofl

139
Cooper

Okay, let 's see, going down on the 9 , 0 Operational
Checks - Acquisition . .

FCSD Rep

That's Apollo Landmarks.

Cooper

All right, the--I think to find these landmarks,
things of this type , one thing that I feel pretty
strongly that you really need is a platform.
need a platform to operate from.

You

You need pointing,

something to give you pointing information .

Now,

you can find it approximat ely with the plat form off, and by knowing about what BEF or SEF are ,
and by yawing approximately so many degrees , knowing
what time to look for it, approximately what degrees
to pitch down .

Chances are, if it is fairly dis­

tinctive you are going to find it.

But for certainly

very accurate acquisition , you certainly need a
platform up and some accurate pointing information, then you real ly got it pinned.
Cooper

We tried it both ways and there is no comparison.
If you really want to make sure you get on a target,

"

if you ' ve got a time and a t the time you are at
this time, then the pitch angle and the yaw angle
to be at, boy, you just can ' t miss it .

If you go

to those angles just a few seconds ahead of time
and set right there and as you come up on the time ,

•

140

there t he point is, right there .
miss it.

You just don't

Updating, of course , you 've got to keep

these times updated as you--depending on your
ephemeris, and how you are sliding around on your
original time.

Ours, fortunately , was just right

on the money practically the whol e mission , fairly
late in the program we began to decay enough that
we were changing times fairly significantly, but
the weather is the biggest factor of all .

Of course,

if t he weather is bad in the area, you do:1 1 t get it .
You just don ' t get the t arget .

I f it exists , humidity

l ike you find along the West Coast of t he United
States

then you aren ' t going to get it

although

some places out there like the point by Santa Barbara
and Point Arguella and some of those poin·~s, even in
spite of fog and haze , almost i nvariably Bhow up .
These are the kind of things that should be taken
into consideration .

The weather is pr obably t he

biggest factor on whether you are going to get a
point or not .

Sun angle is not so importcnt as

weather, although it definitely is a factc,r in that
very early or very late the sun angles ree.lly tend
to cut down the visibility, particularly if you have
the addition of humidity in the air .

"COMFf D ~

•

If you have

•
the addition of humidity in the air.

141
If you have

high humidity and then low sun angles, you are out
of luck .

If it is a very dry humidity, the low sun

angles don ' t hurt you nearly so much .

The sightings

--there again the ease of which you are going to get
your sightings done, get on to them and get them
spotted and so on , i s going to be dependent on the
landmark itself .

Those of them that we got, I think,

are certainly reasonably landmarks , although some
of the confusion things can be- Conrad

I just found out why the whip antenna didn't go up .
It was my fault .

Cooper

Why is that?

Conrad

Because I powered down the common control bus.
Remember, I turned off all squib batteries to save
batteries later.

Cooper

You didn ' t turn those off till later.

Conrad

Well, I know I didn ' t, but I pr obably turned them
off before we ran the antenna up though , or tried
to.

I ' m not really sure.

Cooper

I don ' t think so .

Conrad

Well, don't mind that.

If it comes out , well , that

was the reason.
Cooper

I remember when you powered those down.
t

We had

142
already gone through all the sequences ~1d everything
by then.
Cooper

Okay, let's see.

Designated targets--

FCSD Rep

I think you have covered that pretty much.

Cooper

Yes , a ll the targets .

FCSD Rep

The targets that they have designated versus what ••

Cooper

Yes .

Okay, well the designated targets- -- There are

some al ternate targets right in the are1:.s here that
I ' ve already mentioned.

I mentioned a c:ouple of

cases there that could possibly be bettnr targets
than the ones that they selected, although there
is nothing wrong, particularly, with thr, ones that
they selected .

I personally liked a little bit

better than on target 212 , or Sequence 212 , this
point of land .

I thought a little more distinctive

was the point of land that came out of a l ittl e
town called San Pedro, just north of there on the
same lake .

That 's spmething to consider .

It 's a

point of land that is quite distinct because it is
fairly heavy.

A big mountain sort of c:ame right

down into the lake and dropped off into it , and it ·
was quite a prominent point of land .

::t is very

shear and precise, whereas, it is a l i ·;tle bigger
point.

Although, from a great distanc,~ farther out,

••

the point they had might have proved to be better.
Maps--Boy, we ran the gamut on them, but in general,
the Apollo maps we got were just stinking.

They

were lousy and they didn ' t give you any lead-ins to
where you were trying to find these things, and if
it hadn ' t been for Harry KazU1DA. ' s map over there
and our regular orbital map , we never would have begun to have found these places .

We couldn't have

possibly told where they were .

And the Apollo maps

that they have on here, these colored lithograph types
gizmoes things, are just worthless .

They are not

worth the powder to blow them up with .

There are

several real typical examples of why these maps are
so bad .

For instance , right here, just on the better

map of the group , they have the Canary Islands, but
they don't even have all of the islands in the group.
The island that you pick is sitting way up here at
the corner of the map and you don ' t know what's
leading you into there, or whether there ' s maybe
another island just right by that one .
bigger scale map like this one .

You need a

That was a little

too big a scale perhaps , really, but that ' s the
kind of map you need to really point out what you
need coming into it, and s omewhat of a more reasonable

144

•
picture .

I think the prime example we had of any

difficulty in map locat ion was not on the Apo llo
maps themselves , but i t is exactl y the srune kind of
thing.

What was that one that had the lit tle i s land?

Conrad

Lake Depoopo .

Cooper

No, no .

It had one tiny l i ttle i sland right off

t he coast and it wasn't on the Apollo mapB .

It was

the-Conrad

It was a D- 6 .
a ll it was .

That was that thing off BrE,zil.

That's

It was a chart of water with an i sland

in the middle of it .

It turned out that right at

the edge of the chart was another island .

We took

the wrong island first because , heck, it looked l ike
there wasn ' t another island-Conrad

I'm just making this comment because it will apply
to the Apollo map making, as well, and this was an
ideal example of how t o really screw somebody up .

Cooper

We a l so got another isl and right up there .

We got

it and we were sail ing along thinking that was a
good shot we made of that island, and we fooked
down and I said, "Hey, look down there.
that.

That ' s another one."

What ' s

I swung over on it ,

and he said , "Let's get it , too ."

So , we discovered

E~PID[NflAL
that it was the one.

145

It was just by accident that

we got the right one.
FCSD Rep

Cooper

Okay.

Detail--which of these do you think would be

best?

I think you covered some of this.

Well, I think that coastline is the best, distinctive
features on a coastline .
mountains .

Next best are rivers and

Probably, if you can have combinations

of the rivers, mountains, and coastlines, these are
quite good.

A river running into a coastline and

into the sea, I think, is a real excellent one.
Very good.

And roads- -boy, there is just no getting

around it that roads make an excellent landmark area.
They really show up.

And a road in the right area

where it is contrasty will really show up for a long,
long way away , like a white concrete road and darker
background, a dark green background, really shows . .
And then, I guess cities show up probably the least
of anything.

They tend to have enough vegetation

and foliage and everything and they kind of blend
in.

They don't reall y show.

landmarks.

Lakes are excellent

Airports are not as good as lakes and

things of this type.
little bit.
covered that .

Airports tend to blend in a

L~t•s see, color contrast--I've already
Readability - -

FCSD Rep

Anything at night?

Cooper

Coastline .

On a clear ni ght, boy, the best thing

that will show up is coastline .

The grnatest light

contrast is between your water and l and ..
FCSD Rep
9,2

Okay, I think that ' s enough on that .

Cabin Lighting Survey
Cooper

I ' ll let Pete comment on that one .

Conrad

Well , it was very straightforward, and we didn't
get very many of them, mainly because WE! wound up
in drifting flight .

We took the measurements as

advertised , except there is one little ~:litch in the
thing .

They wanted you to take a light measurement

out , the , window, and they wanted you to c.o it in
either the heads- up, or heads- down.

In doi ng thi s ,

that said the horizon was in front of ycu.

Now the

light meter reading looking at the black sky just
above the horizon in the daytime , which was the
total sky, was usually a number around 11 . 5 .

But

looking at the earth, or just below the horizon, the
meter reading was about 15 . 6.

So, I al ways recorded

two readings , the reading for the horizon and the
black sky, because I didn't really know which one
you wanted .
out that way .

With the spot meter the thing just turned
Okay, we made one at 01+23+10.

Gordo

-GQMEilQEt{l:1 AI D
made one at 05+04+30+00.

,.

147

I made another one at

03+01+45+00 , and we had another one at 04+22+40+00.

Out of those, two of them were in drifting flight,
and the other two were heads-up .

And I had this

recording that 11 . 6 was equal to black sky and 16.8
was normally representative of earth background.
That was it.

It was straightforward.

9 , 3 SPADATS Tracking Check
Conrad

We did it.

We did it by turning our beacon on so

they could just track us, but we , of course, didn't
get into it with the REP thing.

The SPADATS thing,

actually, was supposed to take place during the REP
operation, and it didn ' t.

But we did turn on our

beacon so SPADATS could track us one time over this
Willia.mtown site, or wherever it was.

That's all

there was to it, so there was nothing to-- 9 , 4 UHF Antenna Pattern Test

Conrad

Now, these UHF antenna pattern tests were done just
as written in the book and the data is recorded .
Do you want it?

FCSD Rep

Why don ' t you read it out?

Conrad

Okay.

We did a UHF sequence 03 at 01+10+44+25,

and the angles were 0°, 0° , 0° .

We did a sequence

01 at 02+13+47+05, and the angles were 90°, 0°, and

•

..

eOt ◄ Fll'f fqTIJ(t

148

14° left .

We did an 02+15+21+19 , sequence 02 , and

the angles were 0°, roll left 132° , 0°, and they were
done as advertized .
FCSD Rep

How about any updating on that?

Conrad

No , they just sent i t up and said to do it , and these
were the angles they wanted .

They set this up for

us to do.
9,5

Thruster Illuminati on Checks
Conrad

Never did it .

We were supposed to do it the beginn­

ing of the first night or something like that , and
it was in a sleep period time and we were tired and
we didn ' t do it .

After that, we got into either a

power down or drifting situation where we were unable to do it, so it was never done during the flight .

9.6 Dual Command Transmi tter Test
Conrad

That was never done.

That had to do with the REP

too, if I remember right.
r esets .

I think it was DCS light

I think what they were trying to do was to

f i nd out if our radar was on.

They sent DCS commartds

and we were transmitting or something--what could
happen--We never got into that test .

9,7 Radar Tests
Conrad

Okay, Test 2, short range, boresight spacecraft on
REP, no problem.

We never got time to get into the

00►4 FtDffi~TlA!

•

~cONEIDftsl!IAL
rest of it .

149

We never got more than a mile from him,

so we got that 3000 foot transient but we never got
the 30,000,
like?

What was the transient at 3000 feet

Do you remember, Gordo? On radar when the

REP went farther than 3000 feet , I don't think there
was any transient to speak of.
Cooper

I didn't notice any particular transient, or any
noticeable one at all.

I was looking for it.

Conrad

Yeah.

We did the--

Cooper

I had it damped pretty well .

Conrad

We never did get the radar to run for 3 hours, so
we didn ' t get test 5, test 4, no correlation between
range and range rate display and visual observations
at short range, they all worked very well.

Test 6,

we observed the normal transients that you'd expect,
just as advertised on here, and I also noticed that·
the lock- on light cycled on and off, on and off,
when I was in a standby mode after warmup.

Radar

test 7, stand by to ON, you have to get Gordo on
that .
Conrad

Test 8 .

We dashed over there the first time and as

soon as we were within about 260 to 270 miles, the
radar locked up on 248,66 miles .

I got the first

digital readout on address 69 and it read down to

150
some 160 miles .
air.

I read the numbers out over the

I ' m not sure that they aren't on t ape , too .

The tape hadn't run out then .

Then we tracked back

out again and it pointed right to t his f-''.ILA area
here at the Cape when we had the needles centered .
Gordo was tracking on the needles, and it seemed to
work real well.

We are really impressed with it.

As you know, we got it to lock on the REP everytime
after that over the Cape , but we never g~t the range
to read right .

I don't know whether that was a

radar prob lem or a computer problem .
Conrad

At that time , the voice recorder was working on the
first test, and I thi nk there is some in::ormation
on the tape .

9 . 8 HF Evaluati on
Conrad

HF evaluation test number 1 .
the way around the worl d.

We transmi t ted all

Then we gave i.:.p number 2,

because it was keeping the other :Astronaut awake .
Then we did the other HF transmission test which
was l is ten .

We did hear Hawaii for awhile going

away from them and coming back in Cooper

That was a ridiculous test anyway.

151

Cooper

.. . .HF when they were playing music.

It dropped

out when we heard it, and we'd transmit once in a
while to them and they heard us.
well.

£0Mftf>EMflAL

It worked real

152

10 .0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS
10.1 Powered Flight
Conrad

Wel l, everything wa.s straightforward up ·.mtil
Fairing Jet.

We told you about the problems we had

at Fairing Jet .

We want to take a look 1:1.t that .

Cooper

I didn ' t see anything--

Conrad

I did see the horizon come into view at 1:1.bout 60° .

Cooper

Yes, I saw it just as we began to stage '.>ver .
1

I

l ooked out over your window.
Conrad

That 's right.

Right after staging in guidance ini­

tiate it ca.me down to about 80° on t he horizon and
man , it looked great out there .
Cooper

And the only thing that I noticed at SEGO was a lot
·o f debris.

Conrad

Oh, yes, it was stuff all over everywhere.

About

the funniest thing of all was
Cooper

Snow all over the whole area..

Conrad

Yes, and just all sorts of glittering pieces of
thi s , that and the other thing.

Cooper

Pieces and bits.

Conrad

Then a.11 these washers and goodies started floating
a.round in the spacecraft, but the .. .. . 'llas the
washer floating along --

Cooper

That wa s three or four orbits later.

....

He:t:'e we are

~Qt~OOit IIIAI? =

153

whipping a long at 17 , 000 miles an hour or so and I
looked out and here's that washer floating right in
front of my window.
around a while.

It sat out there and floated

I pointed it out to Pete and he

got over and looked at it and it floated on around
and finally it ·just was drifting on off.
it disappeared.

Finally

And about an hour l ater a bolt

came off.
10 2 Orbital Flight
Conrad

We didn't see our own booster.

We were too busy.

We started the flight plan right away and we never
turned around to look at it.
Cooper

We never turned around to look at it.

Conrad

We sure as heck saw the REP.

Cooper

We saw the REP and saw the REP and saw the REP.

Conrad

We saw the REP bl anket too.

Cooper

The REP blanket, I think we mentioned before, but
the REP bl anket someway or other got between us and
the REP.

This means that the REP either went through

it or tumbled over it, because the blanket was between us and the REP.

Man-made objects in orbit.

Let's see booster, REP--

Conrad

Okay, now that satellite--

Cooper

Satellites. We never saw any of the scheduled ones.

154
Conrad

We never saw any of the scheduled ones but you ' ve
got to have the platform to see them.
angles like pitch 82° and yaw 45.
at the black sky.
you're looking.

They gave us

You're looking

You haven't any idea of where
You have to have the platform.

One thing that we did find, if their platform pointing at satellites was actuall y the pointing information they gave us for the ground objects, why we
woul dn ' t have had any trouble finding them.
Cooper

The pointing information that we got from the ground
was excellent.

Conrad

We hacked that time on the second and we were
really pointed with the platform up and we were
looking right down the pipe at whatever it was that
they were wanting us to look at .

The only reason

we didn't see it is we couldn't make it out.

But

we were l ooking at it.
Cooper

Satellites--There was only one time when Pete and
I thought we saw something and we didn't have time
to identify it .

We were in drifting flight and we

never could identify it.
was a satellite.

I don ' t even know if it

So many things are going by when

you're drifting that it's difficult to say.

Geo­

graphical--We saw millions of geographical details:

ESt◄fJtlDEt◄ TIA f

155

rivers, lakes, oceans-Conrad

I think all of that will come out in the experiments
too .

Cooper

We saw all kinds -

Towns, airports, railroads, roads, and all that
stuff .

Conrad

.Airplanes.

Cooper

Airp-lanes .

Conrad

.Anything you say, we saw at least one each.

Cooper

I finally saw one and I nearly busted my rear end
doing it.

Conrad

I saw the carrier.
trails.

I saw an airliner.

I saw con­

I saw individual houses up in Tibet.

One

thing I didn't see for Gordo was a car.
Cooper

I couldn't find him a car.
asleep.

He was sitting over there

I turned on the whole control system and

turned around to show him one.

This was the only

one I could find during the whole stinking l ousy
trip .
Conrad

We saw just about anything you would expect us to
see.

Cooper

But there again I think you've got to have the control system to point where you have your windows
right to make sightings .

You just can't catch them

in drifting flight .

ee~~flOEt'ITIAL

156
Conrad

One day we went past El Paso and the ligh ting conditions were just right.

You really coul d s ee the

individual s treets in El Paso .

You could distinguish

the streets but this wasn 't always true.
ing conditions had to be right.

The l ight­

One day we made a

pass over the United States and I could 3ee the
str eets, the airports, the lakes and eve:ry principle town across the United States all on one orbit .
We started at Los Angel es, went to Phoenix to Tucson,
Abilene , White Sands , El Paso-Cooper

You coul d see the details down there in Jlear Lake Taylor Lake area--like you were flying over coming
in to land.

Conrad

Dallas, Nashville , Memphis-­

Cooper

It was clear as a bell ,

Conrad

And when we went right out at Savannah and we were ·
looking right down the pipe at Jacksonville , Florida.
You coul d see the bridges and the St . Johns R~ver
and everything.

Cooper

When we came o~er. t~e Ca~e here you could see every
one of the launch pads .

Conrad

I should have two 70-mm photographs.

I guarantee

you that I got a 70-mm photograph of the Cape one
day l ike nobody ever took before.

eet>tfl0 ENTIM

•

If i t came out ,

157
it was the clearest picture of the Cape.
Cooper

Boy, that was beautiful.
tail.

You coul d see every de­

You could see every causeway and every street,

everything that rode around the Cape, and buildings
all over the Cape.
Conrad

All that was on the same day but it was another
orbit .

Cooper

Celestial --

Conrad

Gosh, we coul d see seventh magnitude stars--

Cooper

Mercury never had a window.

Our windows were filthy .

When we l ifted off it just absolutel y unforgiveable
how dirty they were.

Yet there were many times the

magnitude of visibil ity the Mercury windows were .
We could see easil y seventh magnitude stars.

Well,

in Orion we coul d see all seven stars in the belt
and we could see cl usters down the side of the leg ..
I've never seen those clusters before .

I have seen

big bl owups of them, but you could definitely see
two good size cl usters.

Celestial - -We saw a lot of

planets and we saw the moon under all kinds of conditions.

We saw the sun.

We took Polaroid testings

on the sun. We ran the Polaroid fil ters at different angles.

It looks to me like the sun has circul ar

•

158
polarization.
tion of it.

I just can' t find any linear definiWhen the sun is setting you can get

s ome linear polarity in a vertical plane , but otherwise I just can't see anything different one way
than the other.

I took the filter out and rotated

it a number of times.

I took the whole filt er out.

We saw a Zodiacal light .
Conrad

We saw--

Yes, we really did a couple of times--just could
s ee it where night vision was right .

We had t he

lights out in cockpit and everything.

Boy, you

coul d really-,:Cooper

Pete spotted an interesting phenomenon that he pointed
out one night that I had never seen before.
looked like an Aurora.

It

It was an Aurora type l ight

and it was a very bright green .
and was in the airglow layer.

It changed in color
It actuall y changed

the height of the airglow below .

It brightened it

above where it -- but below it, it seemed t o cut it
down and make it more definitive.

Where it wasn't

it was kind of fuzzy along there and then where t his
glow was the airglow kind of jumped up and was sort
of chopped off very sharply.

This was very bright .

I don 't know what it was .

It was apparently some

kind of a Aurora effect.

We saw a lot of meteorites

in Australia was a good example .

Two different

days it was completely clobbered in where you
couldn't see anything on the ground in that immediate area.
one day.

This point Rhir was clobbered in

We were going to get an Apollo landmark

on it and it was just back in under the clouds in
fact.

And Kano we were going to get a shot of

the Kano air field, wasn ' t it?
Conrad

Yes, that was clobbered .

Cooper

Yes, it was clobbered,

We got right up close to

i t and there were these low clouds hanging in
there just scattered to broken clouds and we
couldn't see .
Conrad

Actually on the D-6 stuff most of the time the
experimenters were up on what was clobbered and
they didn't even bother to give it to us , or if
they gave it to us it became clobbered before we
got there.

They usually were able to tell us that

it was going to be clobbered and then many times
they gave us that the weather was pretty good,
but there's three tenths cloud coverage so you
may or may not,

It didn't bother us too much

around the coastal regions.

,

:,

.. .

159 A

Cooper

Cloud Coverage .

We had varied cloud coverage

t hroughout the flight .
Conrad

Boy, I think we saw every phenomenon you could
think of with t he clouds.

Cooper

Just about everyt hing you could t hink of.

We saw

typhoons , and hurricanes , and-Conrad

We saw well defined eyes in thes e tropical storms
and others without- -with such ci rrus cover t hat you
couldn' t define an eye.

We saw some of the most

fant asti c thunder s t orms we have ever seen.
Cooper

We saw hundreds and hundr eds and hundreds of miles
of t r ememdous big thunder storm lines with squall
lines going across it .

Conrad

Near Sout h America.

Cooper

Had at times as many as 15 to 20 thunderstorms
that were lighting up all at the same time .

Conrad

I think I have some good 16 mm camera coverage of
t he thunderstorm lightning at night .

Cooper

And these are--then we saw--then we had

great

expanses over the same areas of excel lent weather,
clear weather.

We saw a lot of dust storms

< 0~4'1Dcl~TIM •

159 B

in Arabia and Africa.
Conrad

Yes .

You could see those desert storms real clear-

ly.
Cooper

The wind picking up and moving the sand al ong.
Other days we saw the same areas just as clear with
no wind .

Conrad

Beaut iful weather.

It was interesting in those deserts to notice that
you could really pick up the prevailing wind t rails.

Cooper

Yes.

Conrad

You know from the sand flow.

Cooper

The way the sand dunes were--

Conrad

And which as I sort of remember back e1omewhere
there was a lot of explanation about how the
whole desert moves , you know, and you could r eally
see these great --! mean for a hundred miles-hundreds of miles you could pick out t hese great
obvi ous prevailing wind tracks in t he sand that
just stretched for hundreds of miles .

Cooper

Yes .

Conrad

And again t his was in Egypt and south of Egypt -down in t hat area .

Cooper

Well, you could actually s ee by the c 1oud
format ion--was odd, too .

The t hing I noticed was,

159 C

you really could see the lower altitude prevailing
winds in the cirrus clouds or the lower altitude
stratus type cloud you all around and you really
could see the wind pattern and one thing that
r eall y impressed me , was the- - on cloud formations
low altitude cloud formations--up in the Himalayan
areas ,how t hat stratus- type cloud would hang-would just completely define the land shape .

You ' d

see it hang in the valleys and swirl right down
in the valleys and you'd see where the peaks
were , i t would puff and was quite definitive of
the land mass.

And then coming in off the--

you could see the prevailing wind direction in
the l ower altitude clouds .

You could see the way

the wind would come in and you'd get the wind
shear where it would hit the mountain peaks
coming in off the desert areas there and it would
kick it up over the peak areas .
Cooper

Okay.

FCSD Rep

Let me ask one question.

Cooper

Okay.

FCSD Rep

Was ther e--as far as good pictures are concerned- how many pictures did cloud coverage prevent you

co•lE.-laEhtllAL ~

159 D

from getting?
Cooper

Oh, well, a great many.

Some areas--well , just in

general let's just say that some areaB of the
country would be completely clobbered in and we'd be
traveling over an undercast for great long expanses
of hundreds and hundreds of miles , and anything ·,
that was in there would be-- anything t o do with
any areas we desired to photograph in there whether
they were specified immediate areas 01· whether
they were just general pupose or S-5 , S-6 , were
not available for photography, and yet the next
day it might be wide open.

The Himals.yas was

an ideal example of that too.

For twc, different

days we traveled over that , you couldr..' t see
any of the craters or any of the ice flows or
anything due to the clouds .

You could. see just

occasional areas and some of the lakee would be
open, so it was just heavy cloud cover- through
there for about a 2 day period and then it just
broke up wide open one day.

Eut there were a great

many areas that there were cloud covered to the
point that you could not f i nd it.

For instance,

the Carnarvon or I should say the woodly side

®@r ◄ r1~Tr~t

159 E

•

in Australia was a good example.

Two different

days it was completely clobbered in where you
couldn't see anything on the ground in that immediate area.
one day.

This point Rhir was clobbered in

We were going to get an Apollo landmark

on it and it was just back in under the clouds in
fact.

And Kano we were going to get a shot of

the Kano air field , wasn't it?
Conrad

Yes , that was clobbered .

Cooper

Yes, it was clobbered.

We got right up close to

it and there were these low cl ouds hanging in
there just scattered to broken clouds and we
couldn't see.
Conrad

Actually on the D-6 stuff most of the time the
experimenters were up on what was clobbered and
they didn ' t even bother to give it to us , or if
they gave it t o us it became clobbered before we
got there .

They usually were able to tell us that

it was going t o be clobbered and then many times
they gave us that the weat her was pretty good ,
but there 's three tenths cloud coverage so you
may or may not.

It didn't bother us too much

around the coastal regions .

160

Cooper

The carrier was the one thing that it really
bothered us on .

Two different days on the carrier

shots doggone it you could see one day-- for instance we saw the carrier wake and-Conrad

But the sunlighting was such-­

Cooper

The sunlighting and the--

Conrad

You lose the wake and everything--

Cooper

And then the scattered clouds, too were such that
you were kind of hunting for him in and around the
scattered clouds and sunlight angle was low on it
and we lost him.

Conrad

The day we got him there were clouds b~ck there
but gee we could see him for 500 miles out and we
never lost t hem.

Cooper

Just the lighting conditions were ideal t hat day
and he was also out in kind of an open area in
t he clouds .
Okay , horizons.

The hori zons were of ~curse , a s

usual , I t hink day and night were fairl;r well defined
except as you come into the- -as you go in out and
out of the terminator .

Just at that p,~riod of time

where you ' r e going into t he l i ght or out of t he
light through the terminator it ' s a ve:-:y f uzzy

"

161

ill- defined, odd area-Conrad

Yeah, looking down the sun.

Cooper

Where you have no defined horizon at all.
very--a real messy situation.

It's

The only thing I

noted different about the horizons this time was
at one morning, at one sunrise, when we saw
those tremendous thunder heads out clear on the
horizon--you remember that?
Conrad

Yes.

Cooper

Where we saw the horizon well-defined and these
great big thunder heads with the handles on them
sitting up above the horizon.
big thunder storms.

They were those

I would guess that those

things must have gone well in excess of 50,000 feet
probably to be that well defined--clear out on
the horizon some 12 to 15 hundred miles away you
could see that profile of them.

Do you have any­

thing more on horizons?
Conrad

No .

FCSD Rep

One thing we might mention here while we're
talking aoout these thunderstorms, you mentioned
before the l ighting in the spacecraft from this
lightning.

162

Conrad

Yes, the lightning was bright enough io light the
shingles on the spacecraft.

Cooper

You--the whole spacecraft could be li';.

You would,

even through the polaroid windows- -with the polaroid
windows down full dark,some of these cig thunderstorms were lighting the whole thing.
Conrad

Well , I tell you we saw some lightning· like I
just never dreamed existed.

I mean the lightning

bolts must have covered a hundred miles.
Cooper

In general in this lightning--

Conrad

Cloud to cloud

Cooper

In the clouds , in this lightning, in general,these
clouds light up like they were a big puff of
cotton with a light bulb inside, and the
whole thing just lights up .

But Pete md I both

saw several cases where we would see a thunderst0rm
a l ittle ways out in the distance , and I actually
saw air to ground lightning bolts come right out
of the clouds and right down just 11 cho,:,m".
Conrad

There was one storm we looked at for t :1em in the
daytime where we saw air to ground lig,1tning in
the daytime--

Cooper

We saw lightning go all the way from t he edge of

e!Ol'I f 10E~ITIAL~

EiOt◄ Ftl?>et◄ TIAt

163

'

this big black cloud right down to the ground.
Very clear.
Another thing that was different that I noted
that was a little different than the usual type
of the whole big mass of clouds lighting up-one long series of thunderstorms, I noticed where
there was horizontal kind of a chain--horizontal
lightning going over and you'd see it sort of
travel along horizontally through the clouds like
it was moving from cloud to cloud rather than from
cloud to ground .
Okay, thruster firing.

You could see every thruster

on the spacecraft fire in the middle of t he night- you could see the glow from it .
FCSD Rep

These aft firing thrusters too?

Conrad

I don't know.

I was just trying to think about

the aft firing ones and we were so busy everytime
we fired them that I wasn't aware of them.
Cooper

I don't know .

We had the lights up in the cockpit

when we were firing the aft -firing because we were
busy-Conrad

It ' s unfair to say without pulling the test, you
see, because when we were firing the aft firing

164

thrusters, we were also firing attitude thrusters
and the attitude thrusters you could see all of
them.
Cooper

I don't know whether you s ee the glo..;- off the af t
firing thruster or not .

Cooper

You certainly can feel t hem firing.

You can hear

them fire .
Conr ad

It's not annoying or anything.

FCSD Rep

Somewhere we ought to say here--you said you could
hear all the thrusters firing.

Cooper

Every one of them.

FCSD Rep

Now, this is with the helmet on or off?

Conrad

Off .

Cooper

Off .

FCSD Rep

How about with it on at separation?

Conrad

I bad the impression tbat at separati)n tbat I
could hear them firing .

The aft thrunters with

the helmet on and tbat is- Cooper

Yes , I did , too .

Conrad

Simply because everybody said they couldn ' t hear
them.

Cooper

I thought I could hear the- -

165

"

Conrad

There's no doubt in your mind that they are firing.

Cooper

Yes . I think it 's almost more a matter of--

FCSD Rep

Did you fire t hem before you separated?

Cooper

We fired them just as we separated.

We hit SEP-­

the spacecraft just as we-Conrad

Gordo counted them down 1, 2 SEP and I hit the
SEP button and I don't know when he started firing.

Cooper

I fired just as you hit SEP.

Conr ad

Yes.

We came out clean as a whistle , I'll tell

you that boy.
Cooper

We fired at the same second that we hit SEP.

Conrad

There wasn't any pitch or yaw of anything- -we
just separated as smooth as a bell.

Cooper

And what I did , I--we held that on in there
in direct and then switched over to rate command
then a couple to 3 seconds later .

FCSD Rep

Okay, how about the--why don't you describe the
plumes a little bit here on the different thrusters
and what you saw.

Cooper

Okay.

Conrad

You don ' t see any plumes .

Cooper

You don't see any plumes off the OAMS and all you

Well, the only really-­

do is get the glow from them back there--you see

CO ►~EIDE►4TIAL

166

the glow as they fire .
Conrad

And it is pure white .

Cooper

And- -

Conrad

My recollection of i t --like white li€·ht glowing.

Cooper

Of the RCS Plumes?

Conrad

No , of t he OAMS .

Cooper

Oh yes.

The OAMS .

The RCS had a little bit of a

golden color to them.
Conrad

Yes .

Cooper

And--

Conrad

Plus you see on t he RCS t hrusters you see little
bits of pieces of ablative material c)ming out
like carbon.

Cooper

Yes.

Right.

The RCS plumes tend to come out of th,3 nozzle
with a little bit of an expansion rat:lo and then
just to come out in almost a column that doesn't
change much.
Conrad

Yes .

It just increases in si,;e.

I was surprised t hat it didn't expand out

this way.
Cooper

Yes, I thought it would expand out .

Conrad

But it just went straight up.

Cooper

I very much thought it would fan completely out .

~O►◄ t:IDfMflAL

167

Conrad

Like a nice candle flame.

Cooper

It just goes up in just a contained column almost -in fact the column appeared t o me to be no bigger
around t han t hat saucer .

Conrad

That 's right, if it was that round .

Cooper

Some 4 to 5 inches maybe, in diameter at the most
and just went right s t raight up for a period,
distance of about 4 to 5 feet I guess where it
faded, something like t hat .

Conrad

Oh, I didn't really think it went that high.

I

really didn't think the thing stuck up more t han
about a foot .

That i t was visible light that would

bother you.
Cooper

Well , it would bother you, but I could actually
detect when they would fire, I could actually see
from the pitch down--I could see t hat going almost
to the t op of the window on something on the order
of about a 4 foot dent where you could see any
line a t all.

I'm tal king about where it fades

you lmow completely.

And it's act ually only a

couple of feet out from where the light is r eally
bright.
Conrad

The t hing that I thought of when first I ever

co~~FIDEt~TJM:

C QfqflDEt~TIAL"

168

saw one fire was one of these 4th of ~-uly firecracker stand-up type bombs that you light the fuse,
you know, and the thing sort of like ·;he Roman
candle--it sort of spits out flame and a few
sparks you know and then-Cooper

Yes, that's right .

Conrad

That really did it .

And the other thing is that

everybody's been talking about how bright they
were at night and maybe again I was geared to
see in the really, really brilliant light --I
didn ' t really think t hey were that bright--now
t hey do disrupt night vision and they did disrupt
t he horizon, but they.'re not that brignt .
Cooper

Well , of course you 1 ve got to recogniz,~, too , that
we saw them under different conditions and the fact
t hat we were expecting t hem to be very bright and
we bad cabin light ing up full bright.

Conrad

Yes .

Cooper

And they were by comparison with the full bright
cabin lighting--they were not as bright as we
expected.

Conrad

We also went around though with the lie;hts on red
there when we were alone and you were firing only

CO~'4FIDEt~

I

,,,.

in PULSE .
Cooper

That's right.

We actually only bad it in PULSE.

Conrad

And really what it is--as a matter of fact , firing
in PULSE and everything--you could always keep
the ~9rizon in sight.

Cooper

You could keep the horizon in sight and we had the
red lights on, and only we didn't have them down
dim and firing just in pulse you could hold the
attitude visually very well, but when you go into
any amount of RCS thruster firing you 've lost the
horizon.

Conrad

Yes.

Cooper

Okay.

One thing we have here on thruster firing

both attitude and translation.
attitude pretty well.

I think we covered

I think our OAMS was a

very good attitude system to begin with.

I

think it was gradually degrading as the flight
went on.

Getting worse and worse and worse and

mushier and sloppier so it was not fair to evaluate
it later on in the flight because it was pretty
miserable.

But the RCS attitude was beautiful .

It was really good.

It was crisp and real precise

and just a real pleasure to fly.

Translation, we

COt~fHIDEt~TIAb

170

used all the translation thrusters on:.y one little
splurt of it on the forward, i n other words
the forward firing thruster- the smal l forward
firing thruster , but they were all very,· very
positive and you got very defi nite die1t i nct
action out of them.

And you really gc,t a feeling

of real accel eration out of those aft f i r i ng
ones, I thought.

I felt l i ke you really were­

really had a big afterburner lit off when you
lit those things.
Conrad

Yeah, man, I would have liked to have some more
kinds to mess around-like turn off thruster 10
or something like that, and burn a couple of
feet on one thruster because i n the s i mulator
you can't hold it in Rate Command.

Cooper

I think you probably can in the actual spacecraft.

Conrad

Well, I don ' t know whether you can or ~an ' t but I
t hink that the difference between 2 thruster
operation and 1 thruster operation is going to be
apparent to you just like that and the3e guys
i n F0D are making this big deal about :1aving to
burn after separation from the booster and maybe
only have one thruster or anything and I think
anybody who has flown that thing once :Ls going

171

to have a good feel for whether he has two aft
f i re thrusters or one because boy, with those
aft f i r i ng thruster are firing you're just like
you 're flying an airplane and you put the throttle
to it.
Cooper

You really feel i t.

You really feel it .

Yes , it's really got

acceleration .
Conrad

And you can hear i t --it was that high speed water
jet type sound , it wasn ' t an explosive sound or
a r oar or anything like that .

I t was more of a

:i swishing sound.
Cooper

More like a big hose.

Conrad

Like a couple of big hoses firing back there .

FCSD REP

Okay , you say you did fire the forward firing-you checked out the forward firing?

Conrad

Just a bleep .

Cooper

Right .

FCSD REP

What did you see here?

Cooper

Oh, man.

Conrad

. Yes , well, you don ' t , I don't really think you really

You really see t he flames off that .

see the flames , but it throws a grea t deal more light .
Cooper

It's a l i ght rather than flames--alight more than
flames .

FCSD REP

Could you see a distinct plume?

COl-4FIDE~~TIAL

172

Conrad

No .

Cooper

No , not a plume as such, but just it reially lit up .
You got a lot of lighting from it .

Much more so than

you did the-- It was distinct ive enough that it really
made an impression on us .
Cooper

Let ' s see, the side f iring was really-- the thing that ' s
surpri s i ng about the side firing wa s j ust as I-- you
might anticipate, if you really stop ar.d thought about it
but you don ' t get this in the trainer or anyt hing
when you fire a side thrust--

Conrad

A side thrust-- Yes , that was really weird.

Cooper

You really could feel that .

Conrad

It fired down , then up , then left and right then you
raise up in the seat or you slide down in the seat
or you go left in the cockpit or right in .t he cockpit .
You know that you real l y going to do this and you-­

Cooper

And you can see all the debris and evecything coming
t hrough- - swish!

Conrad

Yes , everything starts going sideways .

And it ' s

pretty funny .
Cooper

Okay , we ' re at paragTaph 10 . 3 reentry .
adapter separation.

Number 1

No doubt .

10 . 3 Reentry
Conrad

Yes , there was no doubt but t here agai11 one of those

~t◄ FIDEblTIAL

173

things where both Gus and John and Jim and Ed said ,
"Man, that thing really went out there with this
horrendous bang," and I was really spring loaded .

I

was waiting for a 16 inch gun to go off in my ear,
and, therefore, there was no doubt that it fired ,
and there was no doubt that it left, but I didn ' t
think it was that loud-- but then again, I think,
it's what you're anticipating, and they had both
said that they got quite a -Cooper

I think there again , you and I were keyed up to i t
being a tremendous explosion--when it went off--

Conrad

But there ' s no doubt about it that it is loud - ­

Cooper

There is no doubt about it--it's loud and it really
gives you an acceleration--a delta accelera tion .

Conrad

I actually heard SEP ELEC and SEP OAMS lines squibs
and I don ' t know whether you want to say whether we felt
them or heard them fire, but we could hear a definite
"kerplunk, kerplunk" back there when you push both
of them--not loud--

Cooper

Just like the trainer.

I think the trainer is very

realistic of those sounds .
Conrad

Yes, the trainer is very realistic.

Cooper

And the trainer sound is really pretty realistic

r EO~~FIOEt.'4Ii.L

e@NnDEf~TIAL

174

of the adapter sep now .

I think they're all three

fairly realistic of the t rainer.
Conrad

And now in adapter sep you get a little acceler ation
force wi th it , and you feel that .

You really feel

that-Cooper

Well , it shudders the whole thing as you come off-as you separate .

And re t r ofire to me w~s a big

surprise .
Conrad

I t was a bi g surprise to me , too .

Cooper

I remember in Mercury tha.t everybody had different
feelings on what retrofire felt like , a ~d I didn't
f eel that they were that distincti ve or th~t great
a t all in my previous flight, but in this one I
felt like we were on the front of Stapp ' s rocket
sledo

Conrad

Yes .

Cooper

Everyone that fire.

Conrad

We were pretty G sensative by this point , 8 days of
weightlessness.

Cooper

I t fel t to me like we were just hanging on the--

Conrad

Yes .

Gordo said he thought we wound up going in the

other direction and I had the decided foeling that
we pitched up and did a loop everytime one of them

•

175

fired, I had the feeling that we pitched up another
30 degrees and went streaming up that way you

know, and then another one would f ire , and I really
thought we were going around a big circle .

That

was my physical sensations although the gages said
we were right on the money .

But, all through

retrofire those darn re tros did not overlap .
Cooper

That 's right .

Conrad

Especially 3 and 4.

They didn ' t .

Number 1 .

As a ma tter a fact, there was

enough of a de lay--

"

176

Cooper

Let 's go through these now.
on time.

Number 1 fired exactly

Boy, right on the money with 'I'R .

were right on the money.

We

Every clock we: had in

the spacecraft was just reading right O when
it fired.

No delay or anything anywhere.

Just

beautiful.

Number 1 was still firing when number

2 started to fire.
Conrad

That 's correct.

Cooper

And there was no off-set whatsoever from. number
1 and number 2 .

Conrad

That's right.

Cooper

Then number 2 had finished firing for a definite
delta time period before number 3 fired.

Conrad

That 's right.

Cooper

Then number 3 fired and had an offset to the
left--to the left--ye s to our left which was not
bad and I think they had r times that am::runt of
off- set it had and still hold it with th~ RCS ,
no with the rate command.
doubt in your mind.
powering.

No problem at all.

No

You were way more t han over­

You must keep it glued right t here.

But then number 3 finished firing and then there
was an even greater delta time- -

177

Conrad

That was a period of time that I -­

Cooper

Before number 4--

Conrad

I thought we weren't going to get number 4.

FCSD Rep

What would you estimate the time?

Conrad

Well, I'd say it would have been a full second .

Cooper

Boy, I think it was at least a full second.

Conrad

Time up there is going to seem like--

Cooper

Time--yes .

Conrad

I t may have been shorter than that--but there
was a definite delay.

Cooper

I 1 m sure that our time sensing mechanism was overly
tweaked at that period of time and we probably were
overly sensitive to it, but there was no doubt
I don't believe there was any doubt , and we both
arrived at this conclusion independently too-that number 2 came in at the right sequence on
number 1 and then there was a short delta time and
then number 3 fired and then a longer delta time
and number 4 fired.

FCSD Rep

Okay, how about the visual sightings duri ng thi s.

Cooper

Ma.n- -

Conrad

We were I FR completely the cockpit lights up full
white, pitch black and--

178

Cooper

And the whole window area was completel;r obliterated by flames.

When the retros go off you're

just in a big barrel of flames--because the whol e
thing is just covered by flames.
Conrad

I wasn't even aware of that.

I didn't (~Ven--

I 'd have said that we didn 't see any flume at all.
Cooper

Well , we had everything at full bright-••

Conrad

I guess I had my eyes locked on the instruments-­

Cooper

Well , I did , too , but I also was going to look and
see what it looked like out the window there and
I noted that everytime one of them went off you
got tremendous flame coverage which surprised me
because I didn I t think you would .

I thc,ught

maybe you'd see the glow from it but I lad a
distinct feeling that the whole-- that tl:.e whole
flame expanded to the point where you felt like
it--maybe you just felt like it was so bright
it just lit up the outside that much, but I had
a distinct feeling that you really had flames all
over when they went off.
Conrad

Really that 's the high light of the flight in my
mind is going down through that-- watching that
TR clock count down and going through TR - 1

minute to TR+45 seconds throught retro- jet .

You

seeing that sequential system go amd

know

everything work-

just like it was supposed to,

and the checkoff list go

and everything: B())y,

we were really spring l oaded on that.
Cooper

I know Pete had made some comment , "Well , things
have continued to fail and I just hope that is one
that doesn ' t . "

Conrad

I had lost faith in sequential systems s omewhere along the
way.

We had all the emergency systems out though,

and we were ready to fire it any way we had to .
Cooper

Yes , we had gone through our little emergency
retrofire and our emergency SEP ADAPT and all this.
We were all set to go on those , and I think we'd
have been in rea l good shape even if they hadn' t
occured .

Retro- pack jettison --

Conrad

Straightforward.

Cooper

We held retro- attitude , waited on the light , armed
thereto- jet and when the light came on Pete toggled
them and off they went 11KapJunk 11 •

They sounded just

like in the simulator .
Conrad

Again we didn't see anything.

It was pitch black. Had

cockpit lights up full white .
FCSD REP

Now, you turned around, and you saw it burning up.

~ CiQ~4fiOD~TlAi

180

Cooper

No .

Conrad

No .

Cooper

After we started reenter ing we--

Conrad

During

the

reentr y and it was way , way behind

us , but I did see it--now , I say the retro pack-it could have been the adap t er burning up .

I

don ' t know which one it was , because it was so
far behind .
Cooper

There was some object way behind .

Conrad

It was some object , a large object , ree:~tering
behind
say?

but it must have beer--what would you

5 , 6 , or 10 miles maybe?

Cooper

Oh , yes!

Conrad

I t was way up the path .

Cooper

I'd guess a good 5 or 10 miles .

Conrad

And it was up in the--let 1 s see, I was upside down ,
and it would have been--coming heads up--it
would have been in the upper left- hand :lide .

In

other words , it was reentering to our south and
above us .

It was entering on the south side of the

orbit , and it was sli ghtly above our en•;ry and you
could see our trail clear back to it .

You could

see our plasma jet went way , way back there .

I

EOMFtDEl-~Tt~l
don't know what it wasp'whether it wa s smoke or what
it wasn't fla.rne--you could definitely see it
trailing right along side our trail just like we
were leaving a con .
Cooper

Yes , you could see our con--it was kind of a light
color .

I wouldn't say it was a flame color--it

was kind of a light color. compared to everything else.
Conrad

We were looking at this in relation to what nobody
else hadseen it to .

We were still looking at this

down sun relatively nebulous horizon that you have.
We were looking at it ourselves , a trail back
there in the terminator.
Cooper

Into the dark .

Conrad

Yes .

And that ' s another thing.

A very important

point here-- no kidding, saying this spacecraft's i n s unl i ght
doesn't

• mean anything?

That ' s ani ght retrofire.

And we didn't have a definable horizon to fly on
until we crossed the Mississippi River• .

That ' s

way in the heck down the pipe on retrofire, because
that terminator is nothing.
Cooper

One thing I ' d like to add here- -I really

think a l l

.of us always sweat~d night ret rofire and it wa s a pi ece
of cake.

182

Conrad

It really was .

Cooper

However , if you don ' t have full instrunHmt panel,
I ' d recommend you forget it .
have an 8 ball and

Because i:~ you don ' t

rate gyros and a clarn

good rate da.mping--well, that ' s not true.if you've
got an 8- ball and r _a te gyros , then you could fire
them just as well in .Jirect system as well as Rate
Command; although ,

think , you could hcndle them

in direct with no problem.
FCSD REP

Do you think you nee~ both the rate gyrcs and the
platform?

Cooper

I do .

Yes .

I would strongly recommend that for a

night retro you not try them on purely rate gyros
because you just--even the little-Conrad

And the reason--

Cooper

The RCS a ttitude system disrupts your night vision
so much out there that getting all squar =d away for
i t-- j ust about the t i me you I re getting right in
to retro attitude there if you have to f:ire a
thruster or two you ' d completely lose you attitude-­

Conrad

I think the other big thing is tha t that is
absolutely the world ' s biggest "vertigo gi.ver" ,
because you are really g sensitive and when those
retros go off if you don ' t hav11 the whole smear of

00MFIOE~~TIAl'

183

instruments- -like I said I was watching the
i nstruments and they were sitting right dead
center.

]ordo had that t hing pitched down

30 degrees and we didn ' t hardly over 2 degrees off

that darn retro attitude.,and I wa s convinced we
were doing a loop-- even watching the gages .

That

is the worst set of vertigo that I ever had in my
life .
Cooper

And I had the dist inct feeling that I had just lit
off the biggest after-burner I ' d ever haa a h0~d
of and was going back straight west juat as hard
as I could hold on .

Conrad

That's exactly the feeling.

Cooper

And everyone of them had fired .

Conrad

Yes , -.

Cooper

Yes .

Conrad

All over again and I really- - if you were doing it
on just rate needles--well , doing it on rate needles
wouldn't be as bad as doing it just on the ball
without rate needles .

Listen , boy

.-....

doing

it

just on the ball- -that ' s just bad news .

Conrad

I always felt

even

bad news .

°€:ON filDE►4T IAL

in the trainer t hat

184

Cooper

Wel l, I don't know .

You could do it on the ball .

I t hink if I had my choice between ball and rate
needles I ' d rather have the ball .
Conrad

Would you really?

I'd rather have the rat e needles,

I think, because I could understand them even with this
crazy sensation ; where I might try to int erpret the
But , you see,
Cooper

But , you see , our rat e needles never ven-;ured off
the middle .

Conrad

We never go t a rate on the :rate needles .

Yes , well that ' s fine.

Then you know yo·11 re staying

right where you want to be.
Cooper

And the ball--to me the ball i s the real good
i ndicator.

If you keep your rates down ·;o zero you

still coul d actually get off slightly in attitude
and still have almost, you know , essentially
negligible rat es .
Conrad

I t hink the point is it, it ' s pretty comforting to have
a whole bag of instruments .

Cooper

Ye s , i t sure is .

Conrad

I ' m not saying i t can' t be done, but rea lly there was
no sweat on night ret rofire.
that.

Gordo ' s ri15ht about

I mean, we went through that, turned the lights

up bright-- matter of fact, it's just likn you're
back in t he si mulator.

~lrl9i

•

185

Cooper

Like doing it in the s imulator.

Conrad

Until re t ros fired .

Cooper

When they fire , it's quite a sensation .

Conrad

But , we went cl ear to 400K--we went almos t t he 14
minutes before we had a horizon .

We had the

ground in sight pr evious to this
Cooper

Well , not much previous to this .

Conrad

But we were looking at that scr ewy gray- Well , I 1 11 tell you , we fired them at Hawaii , and White
Sands was the first thing I s aw coming out of the terminator and that 's looking straight down .

It was s till black

r ight behind Whi t e Sands and no horizon looki ng at the
nose .

But looking straight down , White Sands was the first

thing I saw .

We still had a rather nebulous

horizon about 45 degrees out the window when we
crossed the Mississippi River , I had the
decided feeling that we were right on t he east
coast , but by this time the plasma was so bad tha t
I couldn ' t really tell .

I had the decided feel ing

that we were crossing into the Atlantic Ocean by the
time that we had a full horizon out there .
Cooper

Well , now I think our windows on this flight --! was

really pleased.

I think our windows w~re real l y

stayed rel ativel y cl ean .

We built up a slight

coating on them, or something.
Conrad

I think everything we built up on them was on there
at the beginning,

Cooper

But most of it was there to begin with.

Our

windows were s o much better than Mercu::-y.
wasn't even any comparison .

There

The thingn you coul d

see out of them were just fantastic.

\/e 1 re going

t o have to crank up the pl anetarium stars much
higher, in fact , because we saw so man~, more stars
t han we saw at the decreased Mercury values in the
planetarium,

It was very confusing, which was

very pleasing.

I think it's really groat .

But ,

even with thi s better window definition , when you
crossed the terminator from day to dark or dark to
day there's a very decided confusing area in there
where you have absolutel y no attitude reference at
all out the window.

In fact, I tri ed E, couple of

times when we were going through the teirminator , to
be compl etel y blackened down, to have r..o lights on
in the cockpit, and nothing to refl ect outside;
yet when you crossed the terminator

CQ~,FID~f}.~TIAL

•

187

you can see both stars passing under you and the
earth passing under you.

I can't figure how you

get all these odd refl ections in there.

There's

a period of time when everything just gets completel y
jumbled and it's a real dim gray area there you ' re
going through just for a few seconds where you have
absol utely no visual reference at all .

You ' re

doing beautifully on a night horizon on the airglow
and al l of a sudden "zunk" you're into this cottony
i ll-defined mess, and you ' re getting all kinds of
odd refl ections and all kinds of odd l ight patterns,
and then "zoom" here you suddenl y have day reference
on the ground .

That period of time is a very poor

time to have to do any kind of out-the- window attitude control .

And it obviously is a very confusing

l ight period because this is what confuses the horizon scanners, t oo.

The times when you do get the- ­

when we had that one horizon scanner that was really
screwing up .

It was overl y sensitive , of course,

and it woul d just drop out .

Every terminator we

went through it would drop off the line.

And even

our no. 2 dropped off, initial ly there, a few times
going through the terminator.

You get a few ignores

188

going through the terminator .
jettison , we covered .

Okay, r~tro-pack

Reentry--our re~ntry was

exactly like we had planned it.
ring pul se down to 400K.
Conrad

We f l :w single­

At 400K--

400K came on the time that Houston gav: us, the
computer 400K guidance came in wit hin a second or
two--

Cooper

The roll bug came in right on the second.

Conrad

Right on the money.

Cooper

At 400K, then , I switched the attitude contro l
sel ector to Rate Command .

The RCS Ring B came

already off and Ring A I took to Direct- -so it
gave me singl e- ring Direct .

I flew single- ring

Direct then on down through the-Conrad

I think we covered the horizon adequatdy.

Cooper

Let's see--

Conrad

Spacecraft was- -boy, I never even saw-•­

FCSD Rep

What do you recall on visual sight rings?

co~~FlllEt~IIM:

189

Conrad

the updated blackout at 16 + 14 and end of blackout
at 21 +20 .

He updated reverse bank as 19 + 25

for a bank lef t 54 , a bank r ight 68 , which was a
change of 1 degree from 53 and 67 .

He gave us

drogue at 22 + 05 and main at 23 +48,

That was

the l at est updated quantity after retrofire .
Cooper

Okay, spacecraft oscill ations--

FCSD Rep

Could you tell anything visually?

Conrad

Man, that thing was like a rock coming in!

I 'd

been hearing about 40 degree yaw oscillations
and the drogue and everything else.

I f we had

anything over 5 degrees- -maybe it is jus t me ,
but I don't think we had anything over 5 degrees.
Cooper

Let's start farther up in the reentry.

After

we got to 280 K, I was switching back and forth
at this point from r ate to attitude.

I would

switch back to rate, and when I ' d see we had a
little rate build up , I ' d tweak it , and then
back to attitude and hold my attitude on the
attitude needles.

Then I 'd wait just a few

seconds and switch back to r ate and t weak out
the little rates set in, and go back to attitude-back and forth in this f a shion.

On single-ring

direct, I had more control authority, initially,

190

than I needed.

I had to be very careful to just

put a little teensy tweak in to damp the rates.
Later on, as we got on down, maybe half way
through the g pulse area, the rates began to increase in amplitude and in frequency .

J still

was able to handle them very adequately.

No

problem at all on tweaking the rates out on
pitch and yaw.

However, at about this I1eriod

of time, it began to take so much time t o switch
back and forth from rate to attitude and get the
rates damp that I was getting concerned about the
math flow guidance in here and making sure I
stayed on it.

At this point then, probably half

way through or somewhere on down through the
l atter part of the reentry, I just switched over
to the ACME position and allowed the RCS rate
command t o damp the rates .

Then, I wouli reach

over and check the rat es once in a while to see
how it was damping.

But, then, I could concentrate

on purely attitude .and just fly this same singlering attitude control.
attitude control .

It left me plent,v of

Never once when I cheJked the

rates were the rate needles ever off zer).

It

was just keeping it damped to zero.

We -weren 't

firing thrusters too overly often.

You could see

them fire now and then , but it wasn't a great
task for them to fire at all .

I really thought

the whole reentry was quite stable and at no time
did we have a;ny real oscillations .
Conrad

Somewhere in there Ring A ran out of fuel .

But

I am almost convinced that-Cooper

Well , let me say r ight here now
way flying the thing .

fuel as long as I was flying.

Pde .

I

Ring A didn't run out of

We s till had control .

Now

you are talking about down after drogue deploy.
I ' m talking about during reentry.

Until the time

that we went to dual- ring RCS , we still had fuel
left in Ring A.
Conrad

Yes, I know we did .

Cooper

Okey, I just wanted to make that clear on the
record .

Conrad

It ran out somewhere below 65 ,000 f eet .

Cooper

Yes , by those f igures you got yesterday , it looked
like we still had fuel in Ring A sometime af t er
we br ought Ring Bon, which was at 60 , 000 .
Right?

4

C:et<tfilf)Et◄l l.._

192

Conrad

That's right .

You get an idea of how much fuel you

use because Ring B was tested but never used
until below 65 ,000 feet; we shot 80 percent of the
f uel out of it on the drogue.

So , it iB no

surprise to me that Ring A ran out of fuel .
There is no doubt about it that Ring A ua.s still
running, unless somebody shows me otherwise on a
traces , at least past drogue deploy.

It was run­

ning until at l east we got Ring B running .
Cooper

I really firmly believe, based on what we tried
on here and my feeling on the thing, you could shoot
two or three orbits of attitude control and alignment and the whole smear of r e ~rofire ar.d the
whole reentry and everything on one rin€' with no
problem at all .

Conrad

Now , let's look at another thing .

When you are

at drogue deploy , we were on rate command and there
was a high frequency, low amplitude oscillation,
but it was well outside the r ate band.

So , those

thrusters went to steady- state firing .
Cooper

Yes, they did .

Conrad

They were firing full blower all the way, trying
to damp .

And they did.

They did an excellent

.193

job of keeping it damped .

We were steady as rock

coming in there .
Cooper

Of course, this is the way to do it.

Conrad

They were firing all the way, and it doesn't
surprise me at all that we used all that fuel out
of Ring B.

But Ring B, I know , wasn't put on

until the drogue was out.

And I know t hat Ring B

had no fuel taken out of it except to test it
two orbits back.

There are some 33 pounds in

Ring B, and there was 4.9 oxidizer and 4.6 fuel
left in Ring B.

So, we shot almost 25 pounds of

fuel on the drogue.
Cooper

Conrad

Which is fine .

You might as well use the fuel up

at that point .

There's no sense in saving it.

Again, this tells me that up to drogue deployment
you might as well take that reentry rate command
and throw it away because the pilot i sn't going to
accept four degrees per second anyhow.
going to d.Q.mp before that.

He is

So , you might as

well use the wire for something else .

Use rate

command, and if you fly the reentries just like
that , you've got more than adequate fuel in Ring
B to poop it away on the drogue and insure

194

yourself a nice steady ride.

We never :Jaw a:ny­

thing that approached over 5 degrees oscillation.
Cooper

The nice thing about the control system is that
i t is a simple matter to switch back and forth
between direct and rate command in the uystem
that we had set up .

If you are damping and the

damping gets to be t oo much of a t ask, or it
gets more than you can damp, all you do is switch
over to the ACME position on this one switch and
i t will damp in the rate command .

In that rate

command, you have really good damping.

You might

as well have a system that will damp it right
down to a gnat ' s eyebrow, and then you can switch
back into direct , concentrate to what you are
doing , and switch back and forth if you want to .
Let's see , drogue-FCSD Rep

Di d you get enough of an oscillation dw·ing
reentry?

If you looked out the window . _•as there

enough trailing you that you could pr obc,b ly damp
by looking at this?

Was there any possjbility to

do this?
Conrad

I don ' t think the spacecraft is that un~table .

Cooper

We didn ' t have that much oscillation .

195

•
Conrad

I don't think you have to worry about Lt , to tell
you the truth.

I really wasn't aware of any

oscillations at all.

Gordo says he was damping.

For all I know we rode in there free.
Cooper

He speaks highly of my damping.

Conrad

The first time I really noticed anything was
when we got on the drogue , and I didn't have a whole
lot to do. but to look out t he window.

Cooper

There would have been some oscillation, but it
would be kind of interesting to ride one down
and not damp it, to see how it would do.

I

really doubt if you'd get very large amplitudes
or very much-Conrad

Not until you get down there below a 100 ,000.

Cooper

I don't think this is true of a rolling reentry.
That's why we never were in favor of a rolling
reentry.

On the simulator the thing goes wild

on a rolling reentry.

But , I think, a s long as

you hold a steady bank angle , whether i~ is full
left or 90 or whatever you hold, I think the
thing is really stable.
to me.

It sure felt that way

It felt to me that it is a good stable

vehicle. · Now at drogue deploy-- I very deliberately deployed the drogue at 70 ,000 feet.

60►-•Ft&tt<!T~AL

196

Conrad

You might put down that I was reading t:1e checklist off, and I called stRndby for 70,000, which
is our point to put the second ring on HCS rate
command, and we were going to put Ring Bon .

I

s aid stand by for 70,000, and away went the drogue.
Cooper

I reached down, uncovered the cover on :.t, and
punched it out right at 70 K.

I might Hay here

that the drogue went out beautifully, it squidded
a couple of times--a typical supersonic drogue
f ashion.

No hard squidding.

Conr ad

I ' m not sure that it stayed reefed.

Cooper

Yes, it did .

Conrad

It did a couple of gyrations up there .
really sure what it was.

Did. it?

I wasn't

I don ' t think it stayed

reefed for 16 seconds.
Cooper

Yes, it did.

Conrad

It looked to me like it flew out and opened.

Cooper

It came out and opened in the reef condition.

It stayed reefed for 16 seconds.

That was that squidding you saw .

I t opened in

the reef condition and then it squidded 3bout three
times in the reef condition and then dereefed
fully opened .

It was as stable as a roc:ce.

I fully anticipated some of the lines we:c-e

.,§Q±!f lDEt◄ TtAL •

And

197

probably booken, and I began to look at them.
They looked good.

I decided, well, it wasn't really

any problem, even if I had broken the lines.

All

I had to do was reach up and deploy the emergency
main deploy if it departed, and we were still in
good shape, so--no problem on it.

As a matter

of fact, the combination of when the drogue went
out and the RCS left us as stable as a rock .
We just came right straight down t he glide slope
and I don't think we had any oscillations of any
kind all the way down, other than these very very
minor little higher frequency ones t hat felt like
vibrations off the drogue lines.
Conrad

There seemed to be more interaction between the
spacecraft and the drogue lines than anything
else.

Cooper

Right.

At the time that we came to the main

chute, when I pickled off the main chute, it
came out completely straight; we didn't oscillate
or swing on it at all.
Conrad

Let 's backup one second .

The best calculations

of m:ic.e and men were completely wrong though .
At 50 K we went on with full repress and o high
2

198

rate .

And past 27,000 feet that cabin :lndicator

hit zero fas~er than you could say Jack Robinson .
That thing came off the peg and I had to go back
to the old procedure of-Cooper

Snorkel open up .

Conrad

Snorkel vent open , and recirc at 45 deg.eees.
We didn ' t seal it up again until 2,000 , so that
didn't work.

Cooper

Then, at 10 . 6 the altimeter and the barostat
light were exactly right together.

I punched the

main and it came out reefed.

It held rnefed

for approximately 12 seconds .

We were nxactly

straight, no oscillations or swings or gyrations
on the chute at all.

I n fact, we were flO stable

on the chute that in the reefed condition the
skirt was exactly symmetrical arou."1.d thn bottom.
There was no breathing to one side or anything.
Conrad

I think that is another thing that speaks highly
of this rate command business, even through
we shut it off at 30,000 feet.

By that time, we

were well slowed down, and there was no big oscillation, left on the drogue .

So the 1•est of

the ride with no system was free .

Now, when that

.,

199

chute deployed we weren' t even swinging or anything.
Like Gordo said, boy, when tha t thing came out of
the reefed condition, it was perfectly circular
around the bottom.

We looked at movies of these

things and we've seen them collapsed on one side,
billow out, and collapse, and everything.
didn't do that .

It

That chute came out, stayed

perfectly circular.

Whenever the number of seconds

went by, and the thing dereefed, it dereefed perfectly circular.

It never breathed, never

oscillated , never swung or anything.
Cooper

And we never turned on it either.

Conrad

We never turned or anything.

The only oscilla­

tion we got the whole time was when we went to
two-point.
was it.

We got the see-wawing action.

That

We went straight into the water.

The

chute almost landed on top of us.
Cooper

Okay, on Rand R separation--we might cover that
after drogue deploy-- it is just exactly like it
looks in the sequences .

You see all the whole

smear trunneling out there, the great long Rand
R section going out, and all the lines feeding
out , and then the main opens, and the Rand R

COMFIDEfa~TIAL

•

200

can goes on off.

It looks just like it does in

those sequential drawings .
we ' ve already covered.

Main chute deploy-­

We anticipated the landing

attitude as being kind of a jar.

It is kind of a

whip action there, more than anything.

As long

as you are braced for it, it is no problem.

And

then on landing-- to me that was a su.l'.'prise, because
on landing I could hardly believe we had hit .
It was so easy.

We didn't go under water, didn't

splash water, or anything.
clear when we hit .
hit .

The windows were

I could see the water as we

I could see the chute.

When I pur..ched the

chute jettison , the chute just floated c-u t in
front of us and slightly off to one side•.

The

windows were clear .

They had some conde•n sation

on them but not bad.

We could see out of them

very clearly.

We condensed them over a little

more just breathing on the inside, I gue,ss.
But when the frogmen got there the windows were
still clear enough that they came up anc. got up
close to the window and we gave them the, thumbs
up .

They visually got our thumbs up signal with

no problem.

The only abnormality was that after

we got on the water AIR BOSS apparently was not
1

'"CO~◄ FIDE~4Tt"L

201

receiving us.

We were transmitting coming down on

the chute, on the main chute.

We made two steerage

transmissions and counts, and AIR BOSS received
these and acknowledged them and got the clears
on them.

After we were on the water, he apparently

was not receiving us.
Conrad

Okay, now, I found a mistake, and that is my fault
on the HF antenna.

I went down through the check­

list but I read this one item wrong.
three squib batteries off.
No . 3 squib battery on.

I had all

I should have left the

The antenna goes up on

the common control bus, so that is my fault that
the antenna didn't go· up.
Cooper

But, I thought I remembered when you put those off
was after we had already gone through all this.

Conrad

Well, I'm not sure that you are not right there,
but I still made the mistake of turning all three
squib batteries off.

I'm sure that if it doesn't

go up with the squib batteries on, then there is
something wrong with the antenna, but if it goes
with the squib battery on, why it was my fault .
Cooper

But , in defense of Pete on this, I 'm almost sure
that we had already gone through all the sequence

•

202

and said, okay, let I s go through and re1:,lly see
what we can power down here now.

We had. gone

through to really see wha.t we could powE•r down here
now.

We had gone through a sort of s econd power­

down checklist when he turned the squib batteries
off -Conrad

Yes, you are right .

Cooper

.And we had tried several transmissions prior to
this and had gone through and rechecked t his antenna switch location.

So, I'm kind 0f inclined

to think that was not the fault of the Bquib battery being off.
Conrad

I really don ' t know .

Then, we powered t he whole

spacecraft down when we left it, so the1~e was no
telling what was going on.

I can•t speuk too

highly of this checkoff list.

As many t imes as

we went over things in the simulator, boy, if
you don't check these items off item by item, in the
height of the excitement and the way it goes you
are going to miss something.

That is the way we

went through these checkoff lists.
them off by the numbers .

We Ghecked

.Anytime back here where

I didn't do an item--where I left it op1m for some

CO~~FIDE~fR'AL

•

203

reason like right here, suit fans 1 and 2--I
made a mark out to the side, "faceplate closed",
so we would go back and pick them up later.
You've got to do it that way.
is to it.
Cooper

That's all there

It sure did make it easy.

Very briefly we would like to cover post-landing.
First of all, we had ideal conditions.

It was

early morning, the air was cool out on the water.
The wave condition was, at the worst, 2 to 3
feet easy swells.

Almost calm conditions, low

wind.
Conrad

Let me add one thing on that.

We sat there for

4 or 5 minutes in these 2 or 3 foot waves, and
every once in a while a wave would wash over the
top of the spacecraft.

I think you want to be

real careful, and I still say-Cooper

Not over the top, but they could wash into your
window.

Conrad

Right over the window.

Cooper

Your window was the down window.

Conrad

But it looked like it would roll up on your
window.

Cooper

That's right.

That is a good point.

C9:HFIDE~~t1Ab

204

Conrad

Even on as calm a day as that, boy, don't ever
open those hatches unless it is a dire emergency
until they've got that collar on there.

Cooper

I agree.

Conrad

I could see that thing going right straight to the
bottom.

Cooper

I agree.

Pete and I both were in complete agreement

on this.
Conrad

It was as calm as you could get out there.

Cooper

It was a beautiful, calm day.
point is exactly valid.

And even so, his

I think that if you open

up even the left hatch, which is the higher hatch,
there would be an occasional wave which would
throw water into it.

I think opening those hatches

out there, even with the splash curtain, is a
real bad situation, unless you Just absolutely
have to.

You are risking really filling it.

Of course, I think you can get them closed and
shut down if you start taking water on board,
but there is no sense in getting the whole inside
all smeared with salt water.

However, we were

perfectly cool inside with both suit fans operating when we got the repress off, the o2 high

•

205

rate off, and both suit fans back on the line.
We sat there and we were perspiring vecy lightly,
but the spacecraft was cool; we had cooled it down
prior to reentry as cold as it can go.

It was

50 degrees cabin prior to retrofire and 50 degrees
suit loop-Conrad

We had thought when we hit the water if we were
going to have any wait --and it was apparent when
we got down there we were going to have a wait-the smartest thing to do is to get out of the
suit.

It became real apparent that the smartest

thing to do was to stay in the suit and get the
snorkel open, get the both fans running, and the
cabin fan running.
Cooper

And this was the answer, because we were really
cool in there.

There was no problem.

We got our

helmets off, our glo-ves off, and our neck dams
on so we could recirc through the suits good.
was nice and cool in there.

No problem at all.

We could have sat there for hours on end if we
really had to .

No problem.

Of course, there

again, we want to emphasize t hat we were there
under ideal sea conditions, and I am sure that

It

@OMFIDEl>~TI-Al

206

that little spacecraft could get mighty nauseous
if you really had rough seas.
Conrad

We did have just a t winge of RCS fumes in there .
We had sealed it off at 2, 000 feet and it had only
bui]

up to a pound by the time we got en the

water, so that secondary o flow rate ar..d o2
2
high rate is just not putting out a hecli: of a lot
of flow.
Cooper

But it helps.

I think you really had t o really

sniff to--you had to be hunting for it to smell
the fumes.
Conrad

Once we got the snorkel open again on the wat er
and had the cabin fan and the two suit :~ans running,
the smell disappeared shortly thereafte::.- .

Cooper

Yes , it was nice and fresh.

Conrad

I t got to be nice and fresh in there.

As Gordo

says , we wer e perspiring lightly but ou~ best
bet there was we were getting good flow in the
suits from the t wo fans with the snorkel open.
Cooper

I might recommend at this point for later crews
that this~ a good point to take that doggone bl ood
pressure bulb and pump up the water system and
drink all the water you can drink right there .

.,

207

Because once you hit the carrier, the medics
aren •t going to let you drink for about a 3- hour
period while they run all their little diddies on
you.

They don't care how thirsty you are or how

bad a situation it is .

So, I would recommend that

you just fill up with water right there.
Conrad

The most uncomfortable and the hottest we got was
in the nelicopter ride back, which was 35 minutes.
It was hotter than blazes in that helicopter.
We still had the suits on.

We could have gotten

out 0£ them, but we had gotten out fairly dry to
begin with, and we just decided to-Cooper

We decided, as a matter of principle, we were
going to arrive on the carrier with our suits on.

Conrad

We arrived in uniform on the carrier rather than
in a bathrobe.

Cooper

Besides that, we didn't have patches on our bathrobe.

Conrad

Right.

Cooper

Okey, thatls all I think of.

One thing, after we

got out--just to cover briefly- -when the swimmers
got the flotation around the spacecraft we decided
we would open my hatch.

We opened the hatch and

208

I climbed on out over onto the nose sec·;ion.
felt no ill effects at all.

I

I was kind of watch­

ing for it, being careful about it so I didn't
f all in the water right off.
our suits dry.

We wanted to keep

I climbed out on the no.3e section;

and they wheeled one of the bigger raft·:i over
around the flotation collar and I stepp~d on off
over into the raft.

Pete stepped on out.

The only

dampness we got on us was when the chop·per ca.me
down pretty low.

He was sitting there "blowing

spray all over us .

He had a heck of a time getting

the horsecollar over to us for some reason or other.
He finally got over.

Pete took it and went up

in it and dropped it back to me.
went up in it .

I took it and

We had no ill effects in the

horsecollar and no ill effects from there on .
FCSC Rep

Did you crawl out of the left hatch too, Pete?

Conrad

Yes, Gordo got out and I powered the siacecraft
down and turned off all the batteries end the rest
of the switches and got out on the left side, and
then with the flotation collar on, I climbed
back over the right hatch and stood on the right
side because it was plenty stable over there

t'f?~~FtDEMTIAL' "'

209

once they got the collar on.
I closed tlm.e left hatch.

A frogman and

I hooked up the little

gizzy on the wa:y out so that we could close the
hatch and get it started--~ne lock release.
Cooper

Incidentally, was that hard to close? The little
lock release?

Conrad

No, once the hatch was open and started open,
then it was free.

Cooper

For some reason or another--that is the first
time I've seen it like that when you couldn't
get it open.

Conrad

I checked mine and it worked okay.

Cooper

But mine was hung up for some reason where it
wouldn I t open.
But mine was hung

Conrad

Once we opened the hatch it went free.

Cooper

Okiey-, so much for that.

C

I

210

11 .0

EXPERIMENTS

11 . 1 Visual definition of celestial objects (D-1) , nearby object
photography (D- 2) , and terrestrial features(D-§l
Conrad

Okay.

D-1, mode 01.

straightforward.

These are going ti) be real

D-1 mode 01 was done :ln con­

junction with D- 4 and it was done photogTaphing
the moon.

It was done as advertised at 01 days

16 hours 30 minutes , and we took the mo()n with
magazine 11.
ond.

We took 4 pictures at 1/30 of a sec­

We took the moon on magazine 9 at 1/60 of

a second, 4 pictures.

We took 4 picturHs of the

moon on magazine 10 at 1/125 of a seconci, and all
at that time period or shortly thereaft«?r 16: 30.
I n the meantime, we were making the recording
IR measurements of the moon , so we have 12 pictures
of the moon on the three camera backs , :> 400
film , 3401 film, and 8443 film.

That WHS

sequence 3 with the Questar lens , visual acquisition mode.
scope.

Now, we did not track with t he peri­

We found that the boresight was good

enough, and we didn ' t want to screw anything up.
So Gordo did all the tracking with the r eticle .
Cooper

I think we have mentioned it bef'ore, but we might

e6t~[JDEb4Tl.iJL ,

211

mention right here again that when the reticle
was exactly boreaighted on some object, like the
moon or a star , so was the Questar lens.
right on the moon.

It was

212

Cooper

Reentry--Number 1- - Adapter Separation .

No doubt .

We set the Magazine at l/60th of a seccnd- - 4 pictures
We took 4 pi ctures of the moon on Magazine 10 at
l/120th.
Conrad

At that time period shortly, thereafter 16 : 30 .

In

the meantime we wer e making and r ecording IR
measurements of the moon so we have 12 pictures of
the moon on the three camera backs using 3400 film ,
3401 f ilm , and 8443 film .

And that was sequence 3

with the Questar lens, visual acquisition mode .
Now; we did not track with the per iscope .

We found

that the boresight was good enough and we didn ' t
want to mess anything up so Gordo did all the
tracking with the r eticle .
Cooper

We mentioned before, but we might menti,m again that
when the reticle wa s exactly bor esighted on some
object like the moon or a star so was the Questar
lens.

It was right on the money.

Conrad

Yes , r eally good boresight .

Cooper

And t he radar was also right on .

Conrad

D-4/D- 7 , 422 was done at the sa1J?~ t.i ;ae .

Do you want

·to cover that now seeing they wer e done together, or
do you want to wait until we get over into D- 4?

213

FCSD REP

Why don ' t we wait?

Conrad

We did that portion of D- 1 that was .. . . Then the
next D- 1 we did was Mode 2.

This was done on Venus

at 02 days 13 hours 00 minutes .

We took 4 pictures

of Venus at l / 30th of a second on magazine 11 which
was the 8443 IR Film.

It was taken through the

Questar lens visually with reticle tracking.
me check the book to see if that is all .

Let

D- 1 ,

Mode 2 we did at 02 days 13 hours 20 minutes, on
Alpha Centauri using magazine 9 which wa s 3401 Film.
We used the Questar lens , took 4 pictures and that
completed the D-1 Experiments.

Let ' s run through

the updating techniques and communications procedures
that ar e used with the other experiments and I ' ll
only cover them once and that ' s this time .

We send

up the title of the experiment , the GMT of the
experiment , the sequence number if required , a
Mode number if required and then any other requirements went in the remarks section.

Things such

as pitch , yaw , up , down , filmspeeds , and delta
times or anything else went in remarks .

I think

that this procedure worked extremely well .

Ther e

was never any confusion on our part as to what

Gelat,JOENltAt

214

•
experinent or how it was to be done .
Cooper

The only caution that we might throw in is right
here--

Conrad

Stick to sequential times.

Cooper

Ri ght, stick to sequential time exactly so that you
have running sequential time.

You can :{eep track

of all the great number of things that they are
sending up .

They might also consider wi1at--equipment

set up and stowage problems you have wh,m they ' re
sending these things up.

We had a great deal of

equipment shuffling to do there.
worked out fairly well.

In general , it

All the equipm,mt worked

extremely well except 35mm camera which jammed several
times on . . . .
Conrad

Okay, now the reason it jammed was that photo event
indicator,,which st.raps on the film tran:,port adapter
cable,,was too long when t he trigger was squeezed .
That had a tendency to jam the camera mnchanism ,
and I had to back it off out of the thrnad zone so
that it wasn ' t tightly in there.
continue to back itself out.

In zeJ~o g it would

I woul d gtit a couple

of pictures and then it wouldn ' t take a picture and
I woul d have to reach down and screw it in.

I

cCQMAO£MIA L

215

would screw it in too tight so I would get one more
picture off and then it would jam, and I would back
it out a little bit.

We finally got to where it

worked pretty good .
Cooper

But this still is an equipment discrepancy that
should be--

Conrad

Yes , and equipment discrepancy and it a lmost cost
us a couple of good pictures .

Especially, when

we hadn't found the ship about four times and all
of a sudden the camera was jammed. . . . wall light
fit in there .

I might say here that this is D- 1,

D- 2 , and D- 6.

D-1 we got, D-6 we got quite a

bit of , and D- 2 we did nothing.

What we are t alking

about is the camera equipment associated with D-1
and D- 6 .
Cooper

Acquisition Techniques-- They varied.

Acquisition

techniques varied depending on whether it was a
celestial or ground target .

Again we can' t

emphasize ~nough to do experiments where you have to
point to certain places to find things the only way
to do it in a professional manner is to have a plat form up and use the pointing angles.

It makes the

task a thousand times easier and it eliminat es all

21 6

this sloppiness .

If these experiments are worth

taking platform time and power to do .
Conrad

We've got to say here that there was so much difficulty in finding these things and getting organized
that we made onboard decisions to drop this tracking technique and we used only one method .

We both

looked for the target and when we found it, if we
found it, I got Gordo pointed in the right direction
and he put the reticle on it.

From then on , he did

the tracking and I took the pictures .

I 'd coach

him if he was off at all by looking in the lens .
We never t ried the technique of me flyi::ig and taking
the pictures at the same time .

We didn't because

the majority of pictures that they asked for in D- 6
were Questar pictures.

I would never have been

able to find it if we were off the leas·~ little bit
because the pictures that they wanted f :l.lled the
whole Questar l ens .

We found that the lioresi ght

was perfect so rather than mess things up and we
- - Things were getting worst .

To make 11ure that we

got the pictures , we dropped thes e different tracking modes and we used the same t echniquEi everytime .

Gordo tracked it in the r eticle and I coached him
if he wasn't right on fo~ he picture.

c_Qb4f10Et'4TI L

I told him

217

where to go and I took the pictures; and we used
that consistently .

Now that's a switch from what

they wanted but I think it bought them some.
still proves that you can do the job.
has too small a field of view .

It

The telescope

I recommend if you

want the man in the right seat to track and fly
them he should have a reticle on his side .

Then he

can track with the reticle and not the telescope.
He tracks with the reticle and he looks in his viewfinder just to make sure that he's got the picture
where he wants it in the view-finder .
Cooper

Comparison of operational modes .

Conrad

We covered that.

Cooper

Voice recorder usage.

Cooper

We used it while we had it.

F<;SD REP

What about your D- 6 logs?

Conrad

This D-6 log is pretty long.

Do you want it all?

I can give you the time -t'CSD REP

Why don't you

just go through it?

Cooper

I think it might be better to reproduce.

Conrad

It 's not that long.

Conrad

At 01 days, 15 hours, 33 minutes, we had a Sequence

It 's S-5 and S-6 .

053 which we didn't get .

Target obscured by clouds.

02 days, 13 hours, 41 minutes , we had 012 which was

CQMfi,OENl~Af

218

Monterrey, Mexico.

It was covered by elouds , so

we took Tampico instead.

We took two pictures.

02 days, 15 hours, 16 minutes, 59 seconds, they
asked for 020 which was James Connally AFB at Waco,
Texas . It was obscured by clouds so I t hink we got
the Dallas Air Naval Station and it wan sort of
hurried but I think we got five picturHs.

The next

thing they asked for was on 03 days, 11; hours,

37 minutes , 28 seconds , we got our fir11t missile.
I got five pictures.

I won't guaranteo whether the

missile was in it or not.

Shortly aftHr that time ,

we got seven of Holloman .

I was so tickeled to see

the sled down there that I shot 6 pictures instead
of four.

At 03 days, 16 hours, 44 minutes , we took

five pictures of Bergstrom.

On that same pass, we

t ook four pictures of the Cape and tha·; 1 s when we
were tracking with radar .
Cooper

Yes .

Conrad

Then they gave us a target on 04 days , 12 hours,
08 minutes, 13 seconds of Los Palmos and we got
four pictures in the mode that they wanted.

On

04 days, 12 hours, 24 minutes , 02 seconds, we got
Mozambique .

I 1 m not sure how well we got it, but I

took six pictures down here so I guess we got it

219

pretty ~ell.

At 04 days, 13 hours, 29 minutes I

got Savannah. Municipal even though they were asking
for something else and that was covered and then I
t r ied to get them a picture of this Blantyre Airdrome
at 04

days , 13 hours, 58 minutes, 50 seconds and

all I got was the terrain around it, because i t
was covered by clouds .

I t ook a couple of pictures

down there anyhow, because this was IR film , and I
thought they might want to look at Africa.

At

04 days, 15 hours, 56 minutes , 53 seconds we got
W!iite Sands again on a 424a.

I got 5 pictures .

Then we got the best one of all 04 days, 15 hours,
04 minutes, 40 seconds .

We got 6 pictures of the

USS Lake Champlain.
Cooper

Let me interrupt one thing here .

I think you said

15 hours on White Sands .
Conrad

Did I? White Sands was 14 hours , 56 minutes , 53
seconds .

Then we picked up the California missile

on. the .next one.
of that.

I don't think I got any pictures

We saw the missile real clearly but Gordo

didn ' t get on track so I don ' t think we got the
missile in the picture- - Every one of these pictures
that I mentioned are Questar except the Savannah
Municipal which was on a 200 mm.

ee►◄ rlDE~~TIAL

Then we came up

220

with object 65 which was this small island off
Brazil and that was 04 days , 16 hours, 51 minutes,
25 seconds and we have four lovely pictures of the
first island which is 120 miles above the corr ect
island .

We have four more pictures of the correct

island .

We finally found it .

Cooper

Here is the map problem that we remarked about earlier .

Conrad

Here then i s the only one that I really messed up.
05 days, 11 hours , 43 minutes , 41 seconds was the
Cape radar test, and I had the darn lens on l/250th
and I should have had on l/30th.
4 pictures will come out.

I don ' t think those

And that ' s it for D- 6.

FCSD REP

You mi ght mention here the tracking of these missi l es?

Conrad

No strain.

You ' ve got to get on them right away.

When Gordo finally saw it the second time it wa s
just to far away to get him in PULSE,

When they

come r ight of f the pad you can see them all right .
It gets harder the higher they get.
the second stage.

Especi ally

I got the first missile al l the

way to first stage burnout.

Then I was behind hi m.

I kept seeing a piece of the contrail here and ther e
but I really didn ' t catch up with him until he
passed our altitude .

Just about that time he

burned out again and then he was gone .

We could

have t r acked him through second stage.

If you

are going to get hi m on IR you better get him
coming off the pad because after that you can ' t
follow them very well with the naked eye.

We had

two entirely different lighting conditions .
The first day we had them against the clouds and the
second day we had them against the land and water.
Cooper

We had him against that one string of clouds.
We lost him going against those clouds .

If you

had a solid land water background I think you could
fo l low him the whole way without any problem .
Conrad

The f irst day he didn ' t come up out of the clouds
but he did to us.

You know it was clear at Vandenburg

but the clouds were close enough to cut off our
angular view.
Cooper

First , we saw him when he--

But we had good lighting conditions in spite
his being above the clouds.

of

The lighting wa s such

that we could foll ow him real easy.
Conrad

But the second day I was looking right at the pad ,
and I saw the engine light .

There ' s no two ways

about it, I saw the engine light or whatever the
fire was coming out of the hole .

I don ' t know how

they fired them , but f r om the time that flame was

~ l'~E IQ6~,TIA1s

222

above ground or wherever it was , I saw them come
off the grormd just as plain as day.
could see them.

You really

He really stood out tt.e second time

against the sand background.
Cooper

You extended your eyes on that.

You didn't save

them for the visibility targets .
Conrad

We ' ll t alk about those visibility t argets .

I

told you, before I went, I didn't think t hat was the
way to measure eyesight up there.
Cooper

I don't ei ther.

I think, that the problem--

11 . 2 Celestial , Space , and terrestrial Radiometry (D-4/7)
Conrad

Celestial space and terrestrial radiometry , D- 4/ D-7 .
I think , what I'd better do is just go right through
t he log.

C.Q;t-4f IDEMTIM.

223
Conrad

All right we started out on D- 4 on 01 day , 11 hours,
40 minutes, 15 seconds wi th Mode 410.
read them and look them up for you.
star measurement .

Let me just
410 was a

No camera was required.

I have down here 410 and i t was done so i t must
have been Deneb.

Anyhow it's annotated on the

voice tape and it was a 410.
70 degrees.

Pitch angle was

The yaw was O degrees and t he location

was Carnarvon , Austral ia.

We put 4 mi nutes of

D- 4/D- 7 data on the onboard tape .

Okay at 01 deys ,

11 hours, 48 minutes , 00 seconds we did 411 whi ch
was a night. land measurement , 90 degree pitch
down.

The experiment was made whi le over an

experiment station.

No camera was required.

And it was done pas t . Sydney·.

3 minutes .

It was done for

Okey, at 01 deys, 14 hours , 14 minutes ,

00 seconds we did measurement No . 420 .

We started

to do measurement No . 420 whi ch was an I R cloud
blanket swee~ and the place they gave us had no
cl ouds.

We di dn't do i t .

So at 01 deys , 14 hours,

42 minutes , 00 seconds we did 410A.

That was

Vega and I have it marked as Vega.

We got some

recorder time on i t .

It should be correlated.

I know what i t was .

It wasn't 410 .

This was

224

done in conjunction with D- 1.

The firsi: measure­

ment on there was a REP, don't forget that.
first twenty minutes of tape is the REP..

The

Now

at 01 days, 14 hours, 53 minutes, 10 seeonds we
did a 405 and I have the notation "boreBight okay."
And that was where we calibrated our RAD gages.
They were all right. -At 16 hours, 03 m:.nutes, we
di d 422 which was the moon measurements .. We
got 2 minutes and tape recorder on that ..
we go to the next day.

Then

On the second day ,

14 hours, 06 minutes, 00 seconds 420 wh:.ch was
a horizon to nadir measurement and back again,
and I believe IR cloud findings sweep.

You'll

have to correlate what pa.rt of the worlcl that was
in.

I'm not sure that it wasn't over Ancension.

03 days, 12 hours, 50 minutes , 00 seconds we
did a 408 which was a black sky measurement and
v oid black space.
station .

It was done over an Hxper iments

It was done over Carnarvon.

~:hen on

03 days, 16 hours, 02 minutes, 00 seconcls we
did a 409 for 4 minutes over Carna.rvon.
was Zodiacal light measurement.

This

At 03 clays,

16 hours, 07 minutes, 50 seconds we did a
41013' which was Alpha Signus or Deneb.

\le got

two minutes of record time .

On 03 days, 16 hours,

37 minutes, 28 seconds we got our first missile ,
423 Alpha.

We have about a minute and 30 seconds

of record time on that.

03 days, 22 hours , 48

minutes , 17 seconds we did 425A which was a
Hawaii volcano measurement.

I did Monique.

It

is the only one I could find sticking up out of
the cloud.

That's not active , but it 's a volcano .

On the rourth

Maybe they will find something.

day, 14 hours, 57 minutes, 33 seconds we did a
424A which was a White Sands engine measurement.
I got one minute of record time.
been a good run.

It should have

04 days, 16 hours , 28 minutes,

.07 seconds we got the second missile, 423E.
don't think it 's on the .track.
Gordo was looking at it.

I

I don't think

We may have been pointed

at it right at the beginning, but I doubt it.

On the fifth day , at 10 hours, 27 minutes, 00
seconds we did a 414 in East Africa, correlated
with some 16mm magazine film.
land.
Desert.

414 was a desert

It was done in the area of the Sahara

On the sixth day, 08 hours, 43 minutes,

00 seconds I did a 417 in the East African/
Mediterranean.

417 was a water land measurement.

f€0t'4 f:lf> Et\lTIAb

226
It's on the recorder,

At 06 days, 08 ·tours,

44 minutes , 40 seconds I did a 418 whic.h was
mountains .
Africa.

Those were desert mountaine in East

Again I got some record time.

On the

seventh dey, 09 hundred hours, 00 minutes ,
00 seconds 419 I got the Ascension cali bration
except it was done in drifting flight over
Carnarvon if I'm not mistaken,
the end of D- 4/ D- 7.

And that is

Updating techniques and

communications procedures were exactly the same
as covered.

Equipment set up and usage was very

straightforward.

The checkoff list was good.

The cooled spectrometer checks worked out fine
over Carnarvon.

We had a go the first time.

We never did make the alinements.

The only thing

we looked at with the cooled spectrometer was
the REP .

The REP measurements were mad3 1 hour

and 50 minutes after liftoff.
Carnarvon.

We had a go at

I went to PROP GAGE-EXPIDRIMENTS,

RAD- 1, Cold I R- ON, IR- ON, power-ON, transmitte::c...oN,
·recorder-OFF.

Shortly thereafter we had trouole

wi th the scanner.

At 2:05 we were still having

trouble with the scanner.

We were having trouble

wi th the platform aline.

We were in th,~ process
I

227

of turning and I missed Agena BUS ARM EXPERIMENTS
and I missed jettisoning the door on the cold IR.
That's my fault and I jettisoned the door on the
cold IR at 02 hours , 16 minutes, 15 seconds after
liftoff.

I started taking the first REP measure­

ments and unfortunately it was at 2500 feet.

I

felt that it was still readable so that is where
the data starts.

We got some black sky along side

the REP with the cold IR.

The radiometric and

IR spectrometer alinements were r ight on the
button .

So was the cold IR.

We had no trouble

with the power down procedures.
straightf orward.

It was very

We never did get to do the

cryogenic gas lifetime updates .

We never got

the Milky Wey with that cooled sensor.

We did

get the void black space with the cooled sensor.
We got the Zodiacal light .
star .measurements .

We got most of the

We got the moon.

We got the

night land measurements.

No, well,· we got the

numbers that I mentioned.

I just don ' t remember

a ll of them.

I did not get a:n:y cloud illumination

with lightning.

I did get dey land measurements .

I got the Ascension calibration.

I got an IR cloud

blanket sweep , but I did not get the cumulus clouds .

C~►4EIDEt◄TIAL

~0t◄ FIDEf~TIAL '

228

I did get the moon measurements.
mi ssile measurement.
measurement.

I did get one

I did get one volcano

I did not get the sun measurements .

We were in drifting flight then and we never
drifted into the sun.

The equipment tape recorder

shoul d have had by my calculations, which were
generous and I think there was probably more left
on it than I had calculated, 12 minutes and

40 seconds worth of record time left on it .
This says we recorded some 41 minutes worth of
data.

The voice recorder was used until it

broke down.

The flight control proced~res were

straightforward and we did most of our tracking
with the reticle.

11 .3

I ran the equipment.

FCSD REP

Did missile coordination turn out okay:

Conrad

It couldn't have been better.

Synoptic Terrain

and Weather Photography
Conrad

I could sum up this synoptic terrain photography.
We have over three hundred photographs.

I'm just

saying that I think we got some tremendous
geological shots.
weather shots.

I think we got some great

I can't say anything al>out it

until I see the pictures.

We've got them all

229
logged.
them.

We should be able to dig our way through
Some of them were done on 35 mm film

which was not requested by the man.

It was done

on the extra 35mm film that we carried with the
200mm lens so we may have some great shots.
relay of data was good.
used until it br oke .

The voice recorder was

All the equipment operated.

The Hasselblad camera operated fine.
jammed.

The

It never

It took every picture and I think they

were all good pictures.

The tape recorder quit

somewhere in the third day.

I've got a log over

her e that says voice recorder tapes.

We had a

tape that ran from launch to 01 days, 09 hours ,
25 minutes , 00 seconds and we picked up the next
tape at that time .

It ran till 02 day , 13 hours,

10 minutes and we had another tape that we picked
up at that time.

It ran till the third day,

13 hours, 47 minutes.

Tape 29 ran until the

third day 17 hours , 15 minutes .

There was another

tape in there and that was the one that quit.
We don't know how much we got on that one.
was the fifth tape.
on the fifth one.

That

We ran 4 tapes and it quit
That fourth tape takes us

through third day , 17 hours , 15 minutes .

We took

pictures of Betsy and Ibre.e n and we got a couple
of typhoons, also.

We gvt them all marked down.

231
Conr ad

Let me just maybe gi ve you a synopsis here of some
idea of what we probably have down here on the log,
and , just looking at the pages here -- started out
pretty generally, lot of Ba.ha California, few in
Mexico , Island chains, sunrise , couple of shots down
of Saigon, Tibet , Tibet , China, Japan , Arabian desert ,
Tibet , Tibet, China, Arabia, Hanoy, Phillipine
Islands , desert dunes , Oasis , African continent ,
hurricane , coast line , Cairo , Gibraltar, Tripoli,
Apollo landmark, Mexico , U. S.

California coast, Cape ,

large storm on an S- 6 at 01 day 17 hours 12 minutes ,
Florida, large thunder storms over Antigua, Ba.ha,
California, Islands and coast, large circular swirls
and clouds , river mouth in Shanghai , Japan, typhoon
by Japan , Tibet , Tibet , Formosa, Cairo , an

S- 6 mode

07 , Florida, Cuba (if I can mention the word),
Guaymas clouds , Houston coastal weather, tropical
storm - Central America, Lake Titticaca, Arabia,
China, earache , North Australian Islands, Africa,
Cairo, Tibet, Pete (laughter) , Apollo landmarks ,
Cyclonic clouds , Hawaiian Islands , Hawaiian Islands ,
Iran, Turkey, Tibet, Glazier, Tibet , Hong Kong, Nile ,
I

Florida, Cuba, West Coast, South America -- gee , hes
got a lot of pictures of me in here -- Pete -- tropical

232
storm Doreen, West Coast , South Americ a , Andes ,
Formosa, big Islands of Japan , Tibet mountains and
clouds , Tibeten geology , Tibet village , China coast ,
North Coast of Australia, Australia, China, New
Guinea , North Coast of ·Australia, Cairo , (got a lot
of Cairo - - we really liked Cairo), Central Australia,
clouds at Cape Rhir ( oh, I got a reall~r spectacular
cloud shot at Cape Rhir of a cyclonic cloud f ormat ion -- a minature one) , East Africa , Canari es , Dallas ,
Fort Worth , Jacksonvill e , Houston, U. S. , Carribean,
Getmo , Baha, California, Mexico , storm Doreen, uxine i ce,
Amazon , Hawaii storm, coral r eefs , Midpac , tropical
storm, coral reef , urine dump , Tibet, Ji'ormosa, Africa,
Arabia, weather , Crete'., a string acros:3 the Meds ,
l arge something, Ind_ia, Isl and s , Arabia, Palestine ,
Rev 87 - Australia, East African geol0;5J' , African
l akes south of Nirobi , east African coa,st north of
Tananarive , Madagascar , clouds in the [nter- Tropical
'
Convergence Zone , Jacksonville
, Florid.3., aircr aft

carrier West Coast by Windowhec , Afric3., night photos ,
clouds , Baha, California, South Mexico , South America,
Zodiacal light, moon , cloud formations in the Pacific ,
cloud formation Hawaii, Sout h American geol ogy,
West- South American weather phenomena Jf sunrise in

233
Japan , Japan weather, night pies , stars, Milky Way ,
thunderstorm and lightning, something village , China,
something Shanghai , Marshall Islands , tropical storms ,
oil well fires in Africa, geol ogy in India, Tibet,
Solomon Islands , sequences across Arabia, New Guinea,
China coast, Islands due west of someplace
•

can ' t

I

read it -- West Coast Africa, I cant read any of
Gordo's wr~ting, some other islands , 102 Rev
Austral ia, Canaries , S- 5 no . 48 -- wonder what that
was -- East Africa, very hazy , African geology, Cape
Kennedy , ice particles , and that's it .
varied (laughter) .

Pretty

That ' s a lot of film there , I ' ll

tell you.
FCSD Rep

Greed on Tibet?

Cpnrad

No , that was Gordo -- he real ly goes for that Ti beten
country up ··there -- that I s where he sees all his
goodies .

It's pretty clear and pretty· up there .

11.4 Visual Acuity and As tronaut Visibility (S- 8/D-13) and Vision Test (M-9)
Cooper

Okay .

FCSD Rep

Why don ' t we go --

Conr ad

Okay -- updating techni ques and communications procedures.

Again remain the same as before .

Equipment

set up -- the thing we had there , of course, was a

CE1NFPDE ►◄lt>6.i:

234
vision tester and photometer and the f :Lrst thing there
on the photometer -- I got t he firs t day measurement
with the photometer which required a 30 degree sun
angle and this was really -- had been given a location to put the sun on ,the -- Gordo 1 s nide of the
instrument panel to assure that we had the right sun
angle - - okay, we made that measurement.

We had the

photometer in the window whenever we went by the
S- 8/D- 13 target -- we got t hose measur Eiments , but we
1

didn. t get the last day photometer mea~iurement because we were in drifting flight and di dn't have the
fue l to set it up.

But I don 1 t think the wi ndow

changed.
Cooper

I don ' t either .

Conrad

Yeah, okay.

Cooper

Let ' s see , ·the vision te ster , I thought worked very •
well.

No problem on it - - everything "·orked just as

advertised and we did run it just as we had agreed to
run it and was scheduled to run it .

I n fact, in­

creased our numbers of runs on it later on.
thing went fine on it.

Every­

I sure noticed a variance

from day to day in our perf ormance

back and f orth,

back and forth -- it would seem to me like we -- and
I think thi s is probably a function of how much we

•

~Ot~FIDE~◄ llAL

235

have been looking out the window -Conrad

Yeah, I think you hit the nail right on the head with
that one --

Cooper

Because once you have been looking out the window for
a while , if you come back in and do anything for a
while until your eyes kind of got set tled down was
very difficult .

The M- 9 -- it ' s not the M- 9 vision

test -- it was the M- 9 vestibular functions tests of
we ran that just as we had said we
would run it

we held our heads alined with the

headrest , as straight as possible, and turned the
thing on - - I took mine in my right eye, Pete took
his in his left eye , so t hat I could read along the
side of his and he could read along the side of mine .
I alined with the top of my instrument panel which
is offse.t by some 30 degrees, or so , and I assume
that Pete alined with the top of his also.

And we

would spin the dial and then while looking in there ,
aline with what we thought was the parallel alinement
with the top of the panel and then say read, and the
other man would read their reading or would record
the reading down then, and we di d this five times to
get the readings -- enough said for that .

I just

will say that I -- my personal opinion on this thing

ct>J\,FK) E►~T I,._.

~t◄ FIDE►4TI~

236

is that it was put in here politicall y , that it was
ill planned, ill defined , and is a worthless experiment .

I hope someday somebody will have the courtesy

t o check some of these things out more thoroughly .
Ground observati ons - - we can't even say about the
Austr alian site - - the Woodleigh sit e because the
weather was such that we never got a look at it - t wo times we could have gott en a look at it, t he
weather was very bad over the area and one - Conrad

We saw the smoke so clearly though ,~ and the weather
was so clear that I could sort of put that in a
category with Yuma, you know, I just wished we had
seen i t

Cooper

Yeah, I do too .

Conrad

That darned Laredo site -- even when we saw the
smoke - - the contrast ratio was down so much on the·
target outlines

Cooper

Yeah

Conrad

That we had a great deal of difficulty finding the
target .

Now Gordo found them a couple of times when

I didn ' t even f ind them even looking right at the right
spot and I -- when I 'd find them , why I 'd be too
late -- I mean we'd be already at the Nadir and
going away from i t and by that time , we 'd usually be

co~~FIDE~~TIAL

237

in rolling flight because of the tracking involved
and the couple of times we saw the marks , you ' d be
messed up trying to decide whether it was the 1 , 2 ,

3, or 4, just from orientation.
Cooper

Well, here again, we were trying to salvage a little
bit out of drifting flight and I realize why we continued that experiment where we could and doing what
we could, but it ' s almost worthless to try and do
anything of this type if you don ' t have attitude
control systems --

Conrad

And a platform

Cooper

And a platform

because you have got t o be able

to get powered up , you have got to be able to have
pointing information, be able to get on the thing
at an early enough date to get your angles right
and to get all set up and to be able to control the·
spacecraft so that you can take the right look angle .
When you are trying to climb all over one side of the
spacecraft, peer out the back corner of the other
window and one in one another ' s lap, one peering out
of one window and one out the other and there ' s just
a mess and it doesn't do the experiment justice and
it doesn't do us justice .

If the experiments going

to be done at all, it ought to be done right and

@0 ►4FIDE~~TIAL

238

here again , I say I realize why we wer,= trying to
sal vage what we could out of a bad sit 11ation but
it didn 1 t really do justice to the expt=riment .

We

never r eally once really gave the expe:C'iment as far
as the ground observation, a really fa:Lr chance. And
the one time when we really did give it the most
fair chance, when we did have attitude control , was
extremely bad weather -- the haze was ·)ad -- it was
j ust about like

the

day when we went over it in

the airplane trying to do those observations , it was
a low sun angle and

haze and the vis:Lbility in the

area was not real overly good .

Pete ' s already

covered the window measurements checkli st .

I think

that t his whole _experiment was very well laid down
and very well prepared for and that the people concerned with this experiment did a real fine job of •
it -Conrad

I have to make one comment though , I think that the
target size was small enough such that the target
itself , although it had the high contrast ratio with
the surrounding background , that they were looking
for , you know so it would stand out, was lost in the
acquiring -- in other words , th3.t thing was designed
for our close overhead work to see it , and therefore,

EO~◄ FIDE~◄ TrAt

239

besides the smoke there was nothing else to -- in
a contrast nature -- to attract us to the target area
Cooper

That ' s right.

Conrad

And that -- the problem was acquiring it -- we were
always in the process of acquiring but by the time we
acquired it, we were already overhead where we should
have been making readings .

Cooper

Yeah, I think that they might do ~ell to put some
big colored panels out or some type of something
that would be more distinctive

Conrad

Let ' s (Say this -- the times that we saw the ships,
the time we found the carrier, we had the carrier
wake in sight for 500 miles even though we didn ' t
have the ship in sight and we were bor esighted ,
tracking, ,spacecraft pitching down keeping track of
that thing when we got close enough

to actually

see the aarrier with our naked eyes, why it's because
we had been tracking and looking and focusing right
in the right spot all this time .

You can ' t do that

with that type target , and this was the thing that
I was afraid that was going -- they've tried to
control everything in this S~S/D- 13 experiment
measure the atmosphere , they have measured our eyes,
they have made the targets the right size , but they

240
left out the one thing that reall y made -- just like
being in the desert -- you are flying along out there
over the desert and a very , very small ·;hink road
s t ands out and the reason it does , is because it ' s
got the r i ght contr ast ratio .

You can put a 6 foot

road in brown in a brown field and you ' r e not going to
see it from 100 feet in the air.
whole trouble.

And t his was . the

The targets were to small that their

contrast ratio didn ' t help us acquire.
experiment was really a good one .

I feel the

I re~lly feel

badly about not getting the data , but ~1 opinion
hasn ' t changed from before flight -- I ·,ras worried
before flight that the contrast was gob.g to be
such that we would never locate it and that was
exactly what our problem was .

Now the Woodleigh

s i te , I feel might have been a little bit different:
We had such a good sighting cue in that Sharksmouth
Bay, and there was no doubt in our mind where the
target was the one time we saw it with t he smoke and
in relation to Sharksmouth Bay, and eve:cything that
if we had had some fuel up there, we ve:cy well may
have seen those targets far enough out t o acquir e the
s i te and start t r acking and then we might have gotten
them some useful dat a .

No doubt in our mind that we'd

lu€0MFIDE~fFJAL

~F.IDENT!ts#-

241

have had a heck of a lot easier problem if the visual
acuity targets had been located up in Yuma and not
Laredo .

Everytime we came over the West Coast , if

I didn ' t see Yuma, why I was surprised because I
think!I acquired Yuma every time - - it ' s real easy
to pick it out of the desert and there was many clues
to lead you right where those vis targets might have
situated if they had been in the Yu.ma areas, and I felt
that you would probably see them.

And I still think

this is a real worthwhile experiment .

I think it ' s

good for 7, but it ' s got to be revised considerably .
They have got to move that Laredo l ocation ,
Cooper

Okay.

FCSD Rep

Have you got anything in the book ther e that you
want to put in?

Conrad

Wel l, yeah.

Let ' s just run by it real quick.

happened on each one of the

What ·

I have several passes

l isted and I have on the first day 00 hours 00 minutes
that we took a vision test , well, those are all in the
flight plan and they are all marked on the cards so
that ' s not necessary to record .

It was on the f i r st

day, 18 hours 26 minutes , when I did the window scan.
The Laredo siting we did at 1 day , 18 hours, 34 minutes , 38 seconds and we didn ' t even see it.

Then

t:€ 0bt~IDEt◄ TIAL' •

242

at 18:25 : 05 on the second day, Gordo s~w the targets

On the third day, 13:32:40 we saw the

and I didn't .
smoke -- no

targets

bad sun angle -- then the

third day, 18 hours, 16 minutes, 14 sei::onds, we
saw a 1 in the first row , and a 4 in t :'le second
1 in on the second row -- then on the 3eventh day,
16 hours , 40 seconds, we saw the smoke , saw the
targets on Gordo 1 s side and he scored

:1.

4 and a 1

in the first two boxes and the window measurement
was made at that time also.

We had to, you know,

had the photometer and that's the only S- 8/D- 13 data
I have down.
11. 5 Electrostatic Charge

fuse :.1l..

Cooper

We did
that just according to the flight plan,

Conrad

I
I
Yeah , well, lets
see -- Ive
got - - I I 11 give the ·

readings here , if I can find them.

MSC- 1 -- We had

....
an MSC- 1 at 01+21+52+00 which ended at 01+22+44+00

and another one at 03+07+40+00 that encied at
03+08+40+00 .

And another one at 04+05--50+00 that

ended at 04+07+00+00 and another one a·; 06+05+24+00
that ended at 06+06+24+00 .

Another orni at 07+05+24+00

t hat ended at 07+06+25+00 and another one at
07+20+50+00 and that got cut short by a thruster

f

243

check and I didn't record the time that it was
turned off , but I turned on again -- but I ' m sure it ' s
on the tape somewhere.- So much for the MSC- 1.
11.6

Zodia,5e.l Light Photc--gra.:phy (s 1)
Conrad

Why don't you give them the word on that.

Cooper

Equipment set up and usage - - we didn ' t have any
problems in sett ing up the camera - - all set to go
by the procedure that we developed for using the
Southern Cross and pointing up towards Alpha and
Beta Centaurus with the top part of the reticle
worked out all right .

We don ' t know yet what kind

of data we got , but we followed the pre-agreed
method for where we put the reticle and for turning
the camera on and how long it was held on there and
then proceeded on around to Gruis , pointing up
towards Fomalhaut and held on there and we didn't
thrust any during the film .

I think there was one

film sequence we had to - - we still were doing a
little thrusting to get into attitude on one of the
longer observations and we recorded this on the
recorder and should be on there as to the times and
everything.
11 . 7

Inflight Exerciser (M-3} '
We used it extensively for both medical passes and

244

for regular exercise through the day--both of us used
it.

There was no noticeable changes in physiological

condition.

I think if anything, it i~ easier to use

inflight than it is on the ground, und.er lg I mean.
One thing I might recommend is that ii have some little
better method of rolling up in maybe some kind of
velcro strap fastened onto it to be able to roll the
thing up into a stowage type configuration.

This is

one thing when you start to stow it anywhere , it tends
to keep unrolling and getting all over the place.

But

i t worked very well--no problem.
11 . 8

Inflight Phonocardiogram (M-4)
Cooper

As far as I know, it functioned all right.

It was

just like any other sensor, it itched and was troublesome as far as another sensor~

It was not comfort­

able, but i t was not overly painful, but it certainly
was very noticeable just like other sensors.
11 . 9 Cardiovascular Ref lex Conditioning (M-1)
Cooper

This worked for some 4 days on Pete.
one that had this on.

:3:e was the

There were no procedures

or operational problems--it was turned on and left
on for all this period of time in whic:1. time it
ran out of air and quit and the cuffs ·~ere itching
him very much under his suit, and we p:,:-oceeded to get
his suit
•

tEEot.◄ EI DEf',Tl;iill

245
off -- enough off that we could cut the cuffs off
and throw them back in the trash box.

The cardio-

vascular conditioning bottle valve was very objectionable .

It was extremely noisy.

It YOke both of us

up everytime it actuated -- with a loud thud and
hisses of air-- and I don ' t care what anybody says
in a very quite room, it was very defi nitely
objectionabl e and I won't change my opinion of it
one bit !

It was too loud and my recommendation

woul d be if they can ' t decrease the noise of this
valve, that it be eliminated from any flights .
Your M- 1.
Conrad

My M- 1, huh?

Yeah , that was a crazy one.

FCSD Rep

Let me ask one question on this.

You didn't say here .

Did you feel anything?
Conrad

Yeah , let's go into that .

I very definitely felt

that after we finally spent many hours down her e
with Gene Tuggs and rebuilt the cuffs -- yeah , they
were doing the job that they were designed to do.
They were cutting off the venous flow and I could
feel that in flight.

Very easily in my f eet .

thi nk it was working correctly.
ran out of poop -- gas , air .
Cooper
Conrad

I'm glad it did!

YesCOJ)iU•IDEf>fJJicL

So I

It was a shame it

11.10

Cloud Top Spectrometer (S-7)

Cooper

Here again , there weren't a:ny problems
in the hard~1are in the flight that
we didn ' t know about before flight.

There were two

occasions where the spectrograph I s shu·;ter was released inadvertently e i ther in stowage or unstowing
and the main shutter had not been -- just as we knew-this is a very weak point of the mechru1ism because all
you have to do is bump it against some·;hing and the
spectrographic shutter was released -- which ruined
the whole -- that particular exposure •·- you had to
recock the whole thing.

As far as the procedur es

of using it, it was easy enough to use , it was a
ld.ttle bit cumbersome in shape but we used it holding
i t -- the lenses upright up high so tha·; they got out
t he window.

I think we got them some good data if .

Pete will get the log out here he can r ead over that .
We recorded on the voice recorder as long as we had
any tape .

We recorded comments on t he clouds, their

appearance , and all that while making ·;he photographs .
Conrad

Now, all the photographs taken were specific photographs requested at a specific time .

'.:here were

some that were requested at a specific t ime that we
didn ' t get.

I think the experiments pHople have those

G©t'<IFIBE►~TIAL

247

down or they can correlate it real easy if I give
you the ones that we got .

So we had a -- and we

alwrors took two sets , one at an eighth and one a t

.

quaYter , so we had a set at 1 day 20 hours 2 minutes
and 30 seconds, and we actually would up with four
pictures .

Apparently they requested four.

Then

/

we had another one and that was cumulus clouds
wherelver the location was -- Gordo took the pictures
I

and another one on the second day 21 hours 33 minutes
and 02 seconds , four pictures of a tropical storm.

On the third day, 6 hours 32 minutes and 46 seconds
we had four pictures taken over the Philippines of
clouds in the Philippines .

Then the next frame ,

number 13, was exposed accidentally.

And then on

the third day at 21 hours 20 minutes and 8 seconds ,
it doesn ' t say what the picture was made of -- but~
set were made -- of an 03 , mode 03 -- that was , let
me look and see here .
Cooper

Right , I think that was

Conrad

S- 7, 03 Eastern Pacific and then we had on the fourth
day at 3 hours 20 minutes and 25 seconds , we had a
Philippines/Guam area set again, then on the third
day, 20 minutes 35 seconds, you had one taken there
t
Gordo, whats
that white something -- oh , that white

EO~~FIDE~TIAL

248

calibration card--that was frame number 18,
Conrad

Then on the fourth day 16 hours 37 minutes 00 seconds,
you had thunderstorms over someplace---is that right-thunderstonns?

Cooper

Yes , the tip of_ Florida, up right off-•-

Conrad

Yes, thunderstorms off the tip of Florida--that's
right, they ask for that.

And then on the fourth

day, 19 hours 44 minutes 02 seconds, we had another
Eastern Pacific for_two pictures.

Then on the fourth

day, 21 hours 09 minutes 25 seconds, t ropical storm
'Doreen--two pictures.

Twenty-seven wHs tripped in

the spectrometer again--the twenty-seventh-Cooper

That's right.

Conrad

Then on the seventh we had seventh day, 4 hours, 18
minutes 21 seconds, we had another Philippine/Guam
area.

Cooper

Right

Conrad

Two pictures.

Cooper

Yes, and that was it for the cloud to1> spectrometer.

11,11 Miscellaneous

Cooper

Celestial and External Observations.
Zodiacal light .

Conrad

Quite clearly--twice.

We saw the

249
Cooper

Clearly.

We saw the air glow as usual, always

around everywhere - - around the night .
Conrad

We did see streaks in the air glow that they talked
to us about -- the dark streaks in it which ' Jim and
Ed mentioned.

Cooper

They are really definitely there .

Right -- banded are~s .

And we saw this one in the

southern Aurora down on the southern celestial pole
which was quite - - pretty unus~al.

Reall y hard to

def ine at f irst too -- just what it was.
Conrad

Yeah , it looked like a part of the air gl ow, but it
was actually an Aurora - - i t changed the

Cooper

It changed the air gl ow thickness too

Conrad

Changed the air glow thickness and it changed the
smooth curvature of the earth -- it put a halt in
the black outline of the earth --

Cooper

Right.

Conrad

And i t was a very green band of what you'd -- what
kind of Aurora do you call that where it is sort of
like a sheet

Cooper

Yeah

the

stria or striden -- somethi ng like

that .
Conrad

Yeah.

Cooper

Then one other -- the only other observation other
than we did see a lot of micrometeorites and I saw

250

one large meteorite enter underneath U3
Conrad

Observed quite a few underneat h us--

Cooper

There was ver-✓ seldom a night went by that you
couldn't watch just for a few minutes to see a
micrometeorite or two of them enter.

One meteorite

came from a l ong way out burning and went in underneath,

There were two other si gnificant things.

One was the observation of the moon.
rising out of the airglow .

The moon was

We had about a quarter

moon and you couli seo the entire moon lit partially
and then t he one part o:f i t lit brighter .

It

r eally appeared in t hree dimensional wlth the sun
back over back off the horizon light:L-1 5 it .
was quite spectacular, I thought .
l ooked very unusual.

This

I bought .i.t

The other observa.ti0ns in t :'le

vicinity of the Magellanic Clouds, and actually in
t he vicinity where this Gegenschein Li1sht is- -i t appeared to me to be two to three a:~eas that
looked like Magellanic Clouds, only mu~h smaller.
.·, !

There were two or three other little Magellanic
Cloud-appearing thi!lgs,
anything.

'l'hey weren't elusters or

I think you noticed them several times

too over there when we we~e fiddling around the
Magellanic..Clouds, I never could decid•~ what they

251

Conrad

Yes, we kept looking over the area of Gegenschein
to see if we could see and I don't really think it
was the Gegenschein, but--

Cooper

There was one area right almost in the immediate
area of the Gegenschein, but not quite .

It was

very near that area by maybe five degrees or so
though.

There was this one area which appeared

like the Magellanic Clouds .
Conrad

Like a real small one .

Cooper

Yes, it looked like a small Magellanic Cloud.
That's really what it looked like.

I t was quite

near the area where we had been told the Gegenschein
should appear; but, then there were a couple of others
of these that similar types back over closer toward
the other of the regular Magellanic Clouds .

So ,

I don't know what they were , and I didn't notice
these before on my previous flight.
something that were new to me.
planets.

These were

We saw a l ot of

We did try taking the polaroid, the two

sheet polaroid filters , and rotating them to all
different positions to see if we had circular
or linear polarity coming out of the sun.

.

I

tried the sun both while well up and while setting.

~19E►~:JtA b,

252

Everytime while setting, it seemed to have linear
polarity, somewhat vertical , but I never could pin
this down to anything well- defined.

While the

sun was up, well into the sky, I could rotate
the filters and rotate them within themselves to
any degree and couldn't discern anything but
equal polarity coming out of them in all directions.
It didn't seem to have any linearity to it at all
or any well-defined specific axis of linearity.

I

never could see anything from the sun other than
with the polaroid filter in .

After the sun had set,

you could see quite a glow with the polaroid filter
in, but at the same time you could see it without the
polaroid, too .

A couple of times when we got the

Zodiacal light quite strongly--

FCSD Rep

Can you see the stars down through this airglow?

Cooper

Oh yes.

You can see the stars right on down through

the airglow.

The Gemini window is much cleaner

in general , apparently, or much better visibility
out of it and night visibility than the Mercury
window, because we were seeing down to about
seventh magnitude of stars .

We saw the clusters

in Orion and we could see seven stars in the belt
of Orion.

We saw a great many stars which we couldn ' t

"'-=eOMFlf>El'4TIM.

,>

begin to see in the Mercury flights .

In f act , on

the basis of the number of stars we've seen, our
recommendations are that you crank up the planetarium at Moorehead and increase

the brightness of

it over the l evel at which we were studying it because it was, to me, rather confusing when we got
up there due to the number of stars we actually
were seeing.

Didn't you think we needed to up the

number of that you actually see?
Conrad

Yes, very definitely.

You see quite a bit of the

sky.
FCSD Rep

Did you get any pictures of opportunity of something
--something that you really remember-- that wasn't
scheduled?

Conrad

Pictur es .

You mean photographs?

FCSD Rep

Yes .

Conrad

Oh, I think we have some outstanding photographs
in there if they came out .

FCSD Rep

I mean something that m~be you wanted to take a
picture of that wasn't on the--

Cooper

Oh , yes .

\.le took a number of pictures because--

Conrad

We got some real good pictures coming across the
states , with the clear day we never expected to see,
where we got two or three of the big major cities

254

in the middle of the States , like Dal l a s , For t
Worth , and J acksonville .
Cooper

I tried some nighttime photographs with the 200 mm
l ens on high speed film with s ever al different
speed setti ngs just to see i f they would come out
and what they would come out like- -

FCSD Rep

Of what?

Cooper

Oh, of Orion and s everal of the constella tions-several celesti a l fixes--once of some airglow ,
I t ook a picture of that aurora tha t we saw over
there and , of cour se, all kinds of su~set s , sunrises , and the moon coming up through the airglow,
and things of this type .

A l ot of di:n light stuff

we took with hi gh speed fil m.
come out , I don I t know .
of the exposures .

It may or may not

We were gues,3ing a t some

A gr ea t many thi ng:3 on the ground,

of course, we took pictures of tha t w1~re unexpec t ed
things tha t we just thought were real t arge t s of
oppor tunity .
FCSD Rep

Okay , that' s the end of the experimen·~s .

255
12.0 PREMISSION PLANNING
12 . 1 Mi ssion Plan (trajectory )
Cooper

On these l onger flights you have to be prepared for
more real - time mission pl anning, which we were .
And we had planned on this perhaps being the case
and we hel d al l the flexibility that we could in
our pl anning.

You need to get a ll of the key things

that you ' re going to do planned and trained for as
well as possible, but the way you fit them together
has to be flexible .

This applies more to the flight

pl an than it does to the over- a ll mission plan.
12 . 2 Flight Plan
Cooper

Flight plan almost invariably winds up being
l argely real-time planning.

12.3 Spacecraft Changes
Cooper

Spacecraft changes has al ways been a sore point with
me and stil l is .

I can ' t emphasize enough to give

the crew and everybody el se a fair shake by hol ding
spacecraft changes to a real firm, hard freeze date.
No more changes should be made after a certain date
because it adds hardship to everybody invol ved, and
does not allow the crew time to train.

Some changes

are going to be necessary because of what you find
out on the preceding flight, but I think they should
Jl

~ WFIDel>~TIAL

256

be held to an absolute minimum.
12.4 Mission Rules
Cooper

I think that the mission rules were i n general very
heal thy .

I think the attitude of the FOD toward

mission rules was very good.

It was obvious that

just as we have seen many times before, that FOD
uses the mission rul es as guidelines and certainly
wil l deviate from them to keep the f l ight going, but
keep everything as safe and as smooth as possible.
I real ly can ' t quibble with the mission rules we
wound up with at all .
Conrad

I think they were very good.

The mission rules on the fuel cells were the best
things we ever had, they were written real operationall y.

I would l ike to compliment the people

who wrote those rules .
12.5 Experiments
Cooper

Experimen ts is a sore point with me b<?cause I again
feel like the flight crew get trompled on all the
way down the l ine.

There is no polic;r that has ever

been held to or ever backed up on adhBring to an
experiments cut-off date.

Very obviously, there

were a couple of experiments thrown in on a political basis and nothing else .

I feel that this is not

fair to the experimenters and to the flight crew,
I

257
nor is i t fair to the operations people when experiments get cranked in past the experiments freeze
dates .

I feel that these freeze dates shoul d be

estab l ished early, agreed to by everybody concerned,
and shoul d be hel d very rigidl y to .

Unl ess a safety

of flight or a significant development occurs
warranting a spacecraft change, the f r eeze date
shoul d be adhered to .

If you don ' t , ,you affect

hardware, you affect al l the previous and subsequent
training a..~d planning involved , and you compromise
everything as well as the experiments which did
meet the agreed- to schedul e .
12 . 6 Training Activities
Cooper

We were extremely short on time to do adequate
flight plan training.

Although we had it pretty

well in hand, but it was still very marginal .

I

guess it was just as well since circumstances required considerable real- time pl anning.

It woul dn't

do much good to get timing patterns down real pat
on these things anyway.

Us ually it boil s down to

doing them real time.

There were s everal experiments

that I would have liked to have had a l ittle more
time to run practice on the simul ator, or, at l east
sit down and lay out exactl y how we were going to

258

do it .

Although experiments worked ,) ut r e l a tively

we11 , we could have used a 1i ttle mo:c:-e time on them.
Conrad

Concerning mission planning.

I would avoid wiring
,:.

experiments such as MSC-1 .

They clo·:iber up very

critical time phasing in the mission.

For instance,

arming the Bus Arm Switch at SECO added an unnecessary step at an extremely time-cri ti,::al time, which
is just pure lousy engineering pl anning.

That door

cou ld have been blown by any number ,)f circuits.
It didn't have to put i t on that one.
Conrad

The next thing is the laying out of t he flight plan .
It became obvious that we were crowd,3d ,

So , I think

they should take a more objective l ook at thesequential aspects of f light planning, particularly
in terms of how long it takes t o complete one experiment.

This business of being pitched a ll the

way to the nadir, going backward, th,m having to
pitch forward again to pick up t he next target , is
time consuming.

Neither the flight plan peop l e,

the crew, nor anybody el se for that rnatter picked
this up until we were flying .
Conrad

Sleep cycl es,

On the long flights you have to plan

for dual s l eep cycl es.
not transmit .

Stations shoul d monitor and

The crew shoul d sleep at the same

'

259
time for a period of 6 hours , at least .
Conrad

I am firml y convinced the first three orbits shoul d
be devoted onl y to wringing the spacecraft out .

"

There was a tremendous mistake made in the pl anning
on our f l ight.

We assumed that everything was going

to run correctly in the very beginning.

We didn't

even test anything but the thrusters and that was
a mistake.
checks .

We had the time to make several systems

You have to do a good platform check.

need to check the scanners .

You

You ought to have a de­

tailed procedure laid out in advance.

If we ' d have

done that, we'd have lmown that the primary scanner was
no good.

You should have a computer check, which con­

sists of going into Catch- Up mode, hitting Start COMP,
maybe inserting a few numbers and see what they read
out .

We ran into one computer anomaly where the com­

puter kept running and running and I still don't lmow
what that was.
Cooper

Had that occured during the REP exercise we would have
really been up the creek.

Conrad

That's right.

In pre- mission planning we should lmow

what the most critical systems are to be checked. For
us there was the Platform, Computer and Scanners . One
of them bit us and that was the Primary Scanner.

We

260

were forced into being p11t

all the wa;'{ back into the

first orbit, and it was a mistake.

'Th-e--mis s i an\

rules ,.were goud.and I agree with the comments Gordo
had on the experiments and the training activities.

261

13.0 MI3SION CONTRO:
13 . 1 GO/ NO GO
Cooper

GO/NO GO ' s--I think we ' re fine .

I don ' t s ee anything

wrong with the GO/NO GO's.
13. 2

13

Pl~ and CLA Updat~s
Cooper

I thought those went all right .

Do you?

Conrad

Yes , we had a hip pocket place to go on every or bit .

Consumables
Cooper

Consumables--In general we had a pretty good handle
on those.

:.,onrad

The oxygen, the OAMS- -

We had one anomally on the OAMS .

I still don ' t think

we lifted off with the right OAMS propellant .
Cooper

No , I don ' t think so either .

We had 87 percent- -

Conrad

87 percent on liftof f and they never answered that
question for us .

Cooper

We did ask why we had this r eading rather than 100
percent and we never got that answer .

We asked this

shortly before liftoff .
Conrad

..

This may have had to do with the fact that we had
full fuel but not a full load of oxydizer based on
that 1 , 25 mixture ratio.

My understanding was that

we were supposed to liftoff with 100 percent on the
gage.

I ' m not saying that wa s correct but it took
I

us by surprise when they blew the Squibs a
couple of minutes before liftoff and had 87 percent

«e~FIDi~il.l;<L

on the gage.
Cooper

Electrical--1 don't think there was a:ny problem on
the electrical system.

The problem Wc,s in the

cryogenics rather than the electrical.

I should say

in the cryogenics and in the water product of the
fuel cells.

These were the limiting things rather

than the electrical power we were using.

As long

as you could run the fuel cells there was no limit to
the power you could pull off of them.
Conrad

Let I s put that to bed right now.

The GPO fluffed

powering up those fuel cells after thny ' d been
powered down .

If our electrical prob:.ems didn't do

anything else, we got to cycle electr:_cal loads all
the way through the flight on those fuel cells .
As far as I'm concerned , those fuel CBlls are flight
proven.

Every fuel cell in every spa<!ecraft that

goes off should carry the maximum loacl of RSS
supply so that he has all the electrieal power that
he wants to use.

He can run that pla·;form, computer ,

or any combination of electrical gear that he wants
anytime during the flight.
experiments.

The same ·;hing with the

You ' ve got to have that platform.

We

kept pinching electrical power and pinching electrical
power.

I think we proved that the fu<~l cells can take

@~,FIQ~t,.~TIAl "

,.,,

the load .

It shouldn I t be any problem to

fix a couple of things like that .

There ' s no

doubt about it, those fuel cells can go up and
down, and up and down under load and they will ha.ck
the course.

We sure gave them a beating. Especially

that Number 2 fuel cell .
Cooper

Can ' t say enough about the fuel cells .
they did real well.

I just think

I was extremely impressed at the

end when we kept loading them down .

We loaded them

down even more and the doggone thing began to come
up rather than fail, go down or poop completely out .
Conrad

That thing stayed on sixty o~ seventy hours of the
whole flight .

That ' s a lot .

It must have been

sixty hours at least .
Cooper

I think that the fuel cell really goes into a
hybernation period when you cool it down .
it almost hibernates like a

Conrad

storage battery.

The way to bring it back to life is to load it down
to get it warmed up , and then to purge it .

•

I think

And I

would have liked to super purge that Number 2 cell
a couple of times to see if I couldn't have brought
it up higher.
Cooper

Yes , I think it probably would have wor ked.

The

I

Conrad

We didn't always agree with Mission Control.

One

example--! would have l oved to argue with them
about the heater circuit on the OAMS.

I was against

turning it off .
Cooper

On fuel cell--do you want to go back tc OAMS.

We ' ve

already gone by it.
Conr ad

Yes , I ' m a curious person by nature and so is everybody else that flies one of these spacecraft.

When

you s end up something you ought to tell them why
you 're doing it .

Especially when we get into these

screwy conditions .

We didn ' t have any choice when

t hey said shut down the fuel cell but to shut down
t he fuel cel l.

It wouldn't have cost them another

t wo words to s ay what they were trying t o do.

I think

i t was obvious to us what they were trying to do .
I tell you , they made some decisions down there on
t he ground t hat I 'll still sit back here and argue
wi th them about .
Cooper

Yes , you are right on that OAMS heater .

Conr ad

OAMS heater was one of them and another one is the
manner in which they conducted that solenoid warmup
idea on the OAMS system to unfreeze i t .
poor way of doing it.

That was a

EeJNFIOEr-qTIA t
Cooper

That was a very poor plan.

Conrad

That wasn 't thought out very well.

265

I think, in that

particular case, we had all the time in the world
to discuss that with the ground .

We could have

gone a couple of revs talking that one over and it
wouldn ' t have made a hill of beans .
Cooper

I think the time that they chose to do it was ill
planned .

Every test that they laid on us wound up

to being a test in the middle of the night .
know why.

I don ' t

I ' m sure this wasn't planned that way,

but that is the way it turned out.

Anything else on

the fuel cells , batteries, or mission control?
Conrad

No .

13 . 4 F'light Plan Changes
Cooper

Flight plan changes--I think here is one thing that
we want to say about mission control.

I ' m well

aware that the flight plan people were kept extremely
busy having to do this tremendous amount of real
time flight planning.

I think in general Flight

Planning back there did a fine job .

I'm sure there

were a lot of the people coming in and adding this
and that and changing this and changing that.
There wasn't enough thought given to the crew.

The

crew was extreme~ co,.u.romised throughout the whole

€0NFl91!1'~ 1-1Ai.

266

flight in the way the flight plan changes were made .
This was unintentional, I'm sure .
Conrad

We had to blow the whistle on it.

Cooper

They did things like trying to keep one man busy
a l l the time , just to keep him busy.

It was obvious

that was exactly what was being planned .

Certain

experiments were put on one man when th,~ other man
was asleep then the other man whe he wa:, asleep
without any thought being given to who had what
or which side of the cockpit.
Conrad

I think , that we documented this \vell enough, and
I don ' t think the 4 crew emphasized it enough; but,
the people on the ground don't realize how long it
t akes to perform these other mundane taf,ks that
aren't scheduled such as :

hygiene , food., etc .

They did a llow long time periods for focd, but there
were other things that they didn't allo~ the time

Cooper

for such as :

garbage , cleaning, etc .

That's r ight .

General housekeeping and cleaning

up the spacecraft .
Conrad

I think we can straighten this out with them.

Cooper

I do to , but we are talking here about flight plan
changes in mission controlling.
as critical as it sounds .

I don't mean this

I want to say I think

'l@ Ot~FIDE ►~TIAl
they did a fine job .

I think they made a good effort

to salvage a ll we could ou of a poor situation . .

"

I think they really did a fine job .

As a resul t

of what we found , and we didn't know before we got
into the real time situation; we discovered that the
people compromised are the flight crew.

They

wound up cutting into sleep periods and certain
functions were performed at the wrong time for each
one of us.

It could have been better planned as

for as who did what when.

13 . 5 Systems
Cooper

Mission Control for syst ems .

I think the biggest

handle you have on systems is right on board , and
I still think so .

I think we had a good handle on

what was going on.

The things that presented a

real question were the rate of decay , the rate of
dwindling, some of these cyros , etc .

The ground

got a good handle on them and began to give us some
good informat ion on what we could expect.

Although ,

I think some of them were new enough that the ground
wasn't aware of what was going to happen .

For

example, they didn't know when they would vent and
when they wouldn't , what the rate would be when
they vented , etc .

£:Of4£10E~~TIAL

~EIDE~~TIAL

26s

13 . 6 Experiment Real Time Updates
Cooper

I think these worked out pretty well .

We mentioned

about needing a platform before and abcut needing
attitude control .

And our OAMS system got worse

and worse where we had no attitude cont rol t o speak
and weren't allowed to use any, I think, a great
many of these things that were put in ~ust hoping
we might drift through.

They were sort of wasted .

It was a waste of time .

They could ha.v-e saved

our time , theirs , the writing time , and. everything
involved, because trying to get some of these
experi ments while in drifting flight i~ completely
imp.o ssible.
Conrad

It was really funny.

It couldn' t have been better

planned to work out opposite.

They'd say get a

D-4/ D- 7, like the Milky Way--You ' d expect to
drift through the Milky Way long enougr. to get it .
Anytime we had the gear fired up we nev-er got
anywhere near the Milky Way.
Co oper

No , we would always be pointing at the ground .

Conrad

There was one time when I tried to do it .
pointed at the Milky Wa;y.

We were

By the time I found out

that we were going to drift through it and the t en
minute warm up time for the gear passed, we were

ct> ►,FfDE~~Th*lll.

I

COt◄ FtDEt-ctflM:
out of it again.

269

I'd leave the darn IR gear running

for a while and we would never get near anyt hing

...

we could look at .
Cooper

We never did get that end of the sun picture and
yet the sun wa s in our eyes every time you would
turn around.

When t hey would give us some of these

locations to photograph and gave us pointing
informa tion, it was good.

When we had a platform

to use , I think , their pointing information was
extremely accurate .

I was well pleased with it .

I thought it wa s right on t he money,

We never had

a plat form to work from so we couldn' t evaluate
the air-to-air,

The air-to- ground was quite good.

And you need this .

COl>4FIDE►~TIAE

270

14, 0 TRAINING
14 .1 Gemini Simula tor Procedures
Cooper

The procedures that we went through in-·it- and our
t raining was pretty accurate.

I think that we used

the right procedures in the development of our
checklist .

In going through the procedures we

should have ""tad; our fl ight type checkli~;t at an
earlier date in order to get a little bii.
more famil i ar with them and to iron them out a little
more in the GMS.

We should have had them j or 4 weeks earlier.

System knowledge--I didn' t feel we were t oo bad off
system knowledge wise , did you?
Conrad

No .

Cooper

We were pretty well on top of everything,

We had

a great deal of confidence in knowing the systems .
The systems training that we got in the GMS on the
fai l ure analysis a long with the lectures we got
by t he systems people , both the GMS people and the
McDonnell people , put us in pretty good s·1ape
sys t em wise.

We were in excellent shape ,:::oncerning

launch t raining.

I might say tha t i f the::-e is any

changing to be done we should emphasize the nominal
launch more.

We ran through al l types of emergencies .

We had some good sessions on the DCPS .

eot-~FIDE~~T1At

We had some

creo~4ffDEMftA~

271

wasted time down here trying to crank up some of
these launch failures that take quite a while to
reset on the GMS .

We should have gone through them

on the DCPS and let them go at that.

It

was a

waste of valuable time during the last few days.
Many precious hours were wasted cranking the program
into the GMS to go through some of the failure modes
that we could have done in a tenth of the time on
the DCPS .

Due to the shortage of time we cut way

back on nominal training.

We could have had more

nominal launches, nominal insertions , nomina l
insertion checklist, nominal preretro , and nominal
re t ro, e tc .
Conrad

The best day we had was the day before the act ual
fl ight .

The day after we had scrubbed .

about 8 nominal launches .

We ran

About 4 reentries all

the way through to the end and that really put
the fros ting on the cake.
Cooper

Yes , we should have had another day of t hat before
the first attempted launch.

As it turned out we

got into reasonable shape because of that one scrub
date .
Conrad

We really put it to good use.

We got a chance to go over the books some more and

272

learn things that really helped .
Cooper

We were short on nominal time .

Conrad

I can ' t say enough for the way Deke schEiduled the
things when he asked for t wo weeks .
on the button.

He was right

We could have used a couple more

days.
Cooper

Yes.

Conrad

A little more nomi nal training like that to polish
it off.

If we had, I don't think Gordo woul d have

put the drogue out at 70 .

And I don ' t t hink I would

have left all the Squibb batter ies off.

We shouldn' t

make those kind of mistakes .
Cooper

We would have had more time to run through the nominal
procedures and get them down.

Con.rad

We ' re the first ones to admit that we maie them,
because we just di dn't have the f light checklist
. I
finished all the time . We didn't run· ~hat thing that
many times .

Cooper

We ran very little orbita l training othe:r than the
REP .

I think we spent a great deal of t'ime on the

rendezvous and the REP, because it was the first
priority.
Conrad

One thing that slipped by us , too, was that it took

COt-c!FIDEt◄TIM.

273

us a whole day and a half in flight to realized
that these experiments were going to run so
successively close t o one another.

The one thing

that we were not prepared for on the ground and had
to learn in the air was how to organize a series
of di fferent experiments to run them in a row.
I ' m not sure we coul d have figured this out on the
ground .
Cooper

One thing we could have done if we had had the time ,
we could have taken one of these Stateside passes
that we knew would really be cluttered and run
through it in real time .

Conrad

I think the recommendation here is what
should be done in the future for a flight that
had experiments like this one .
sim-net- sim with Houston.

I ' d run a

We had individually

er ected and taken down and put up every experiment
enough times that we had no problem in assembling
anything.

We had no problem in knowing where

everything was, we knew where everything was in the
spacecraft and we got it in the shortest amount
of time as possible even in the f light .
have any

trouble in that way.

We didn ' t

The one thing that

we did miss was, and they have a sim net sim of

'90NFtoENll,_, "

274

eoMEIDEt◄ TIA •
revs 15 and 16 .

It might have been a good idea

if we ha.d listened to it in that we might have
picked up the fact that the sequential ,::-unning
required just a little bit different opnration.
Again, I'm not sure that you can practice this on
the ground, because at the times we ha.d the gear
out we wouldn't have been able to load any spacecraft
on the ground the way we wound up using it in zero g.
I had lenses floating on the floor and film magazines
hanging by just a couple of little velcJ:o t hreads
on the overhead which you couldn't have done in a
1 g horizontal environment.

You couldn't stow your

gear around the cockpit like you can during zero g.
Maybe you might compromise here.

You mj_ght consider

a sim net sim to get some idea of how things are
going to run into one another , and then if you 're
up for 4 days or something like that, yc,u might
take an orbit to lay out a series so y01:.. can learn
how to stick stuff around the spacecraft. .

It 's

not apparent to you on the ground exactJy how you
wind up storing that stuff.

We really ca.me up with

some new places to stash gear as the re~ult of being
in zero g .

..

275

Cooper

Yes, that's right.

Okay, rendezvous is not applicable .

If there was one area that we were pretty well trained
on, t hat was retrofi re .
Conrad

Yes.

Cooper

I think we were in good shape for retrofire .

We had

our checklist for a long time for pre-ret rofire
and retrofire .

We were in good shape , well-trained,

and we went right through it like clockwork.

I

think this area we were sitting r i ght on top ot

No

problem at all .
Conrad

We were in good shape in SECO, too .
those SECO procedures in dandy shape.

We went through
Got the

numbers out of t he computer and had all of the
se~uences and so forth and got that well down in
the GMS .
FCSD REP

On rendezvous, how do you feel abou t the GMS training?

Cooper

The procedures that we learned in the simulator were
fine, but you just can't take away that out-thewindow simulation.

When you add the out- the-window

element to it , it's di fferent.

It ' s easier when

you kick the REP out a.hd there it is out t here
visually you can do it fine.

The training that

we had up at McDonnell on that simulat or was just
identical to flight.

Didn't you feel like we were

\cOMilOEMlt~

276

•
almost in the McDonnell simulator when we got the
REP out?

Just exactly.

That training that we

did up there with the visual presentation was
invaluable .
Conrad

A lot of people don't realize how time critical
that whole REP maneuver was.

We didn't realize it

even when we ran it a t McDonnell.

When we ran at

McDonnell , we had a visual di splay and no outside
encumberances and no other systems.
computer.

We had a

Gordo had a ball and an out-the-window

di splay, a reticle and a hand controlle:c-.

I had

a computer and an MDIU over there and t ·:iat was it.
And we would s it there, shoot the breez,= , talk to
the guys out the window and run that tb:i.ng.

I

don ' t think we became aware of how crit :i.cal it was
until we came down to the Cape and got :m that
first sim-net -sim .
on the horn.

Then we had the ground honking

They wanted information.

We had a

spacecraft around us in the GMS , and theiy could
throw in little cliches every once in a while,
which t hey did .

It turned out tha t we e~t little

cliches in flight starting out.

The one• thing that

we spent an awful lot of hours on was the REP.

277

I'll tell you I wouldn ' t have given you a nickels
chance if we didn ' t have up systems.

We would have

had to fallen back on one of those backup jobber
doos .

That would have been pure luck.

wouldn't have made a mistake reading it.

Eut I
You

are

just reading the checklist.

They were extremely

complicated and long-winded.

Now I guess they

simplified this a lot in Spacecraft 6; we were up
against the wall.

We had to stop somewhere ; take it

and work with it or we weren't going to get it
done .

They were still in the process or ironing

out the procedures.

We did more of an eva luation,

although it was a learning process, but we were
involved in the evaluati on stage , which was not the
time for us to be doing this.

278

Conrad

Let me just add one thing.

My recommendation is

tha t you are going to have to be extremely careful
with the mission planning people becau:rn I saw what
happened to us .

Every f l ight is going to have a

different rendezvous.

Somebody is going to want

to start changing s omething, or mickey•-mousing
around.

I think it is going to wind u:;, to be a crew

responsibility and that a couple of mo,~ths before the
f light they really put the axe to them to stop.
vlhether it is the best way to do it or not , the more
you do in rendezvous, the more complicated it is
and the more time critical it is doing the maneuvers .
The computer is a complex little gadget and can really
f oul you up if you make one mistake.

'3o , training­

wise I can 1 t emphasize running the mis3ion the way
it is really going to run in real time.

We haven't

enough time to really get it down.
Cooper

Cut i t off at an early date , s o you ca1 adequately
t rain on i t .

I can't conceive that you could ever

get the off-sets that we were using in some of our
r etrofire training.

Plus , I don ' t th~1k we are using

the right torquing moments on our Rate Command
system.

The trainer doesn 1 t have anyw.~ere near the

brute power that the actual RCS Rate CJmmand has .

279

It is a great deal of difference.
Conrad

Yes , it was a pretty tight system.

This is probably

a function of each individual syst em because I
remember Jim mentioning the fact that it was so much
sloppier in Rate Command RCS and there is a difference in the tolerance.
to us .

But it sure wasn't apparent

Both the OAMS and RCS Rate Command systems

were just as tight as they could be.
Cooper

Well, the OAMS Rate Command system definitely was
tighter because you could come zapping around with it
and the second you let go of the handle it stopped
right there .

Barn, it never even quivered , just

held right there .
Conrad

Yes, we must have had an outstanding set of rate
gyros.

The RCS Rate Command there had a wider

band.

There was so much power and authority

in the RCS Rate Command that it actually gave me
a little bit of problem just hitting the point,
getting lined up on it for retrofire .

There was just

so much authority you had trouble getting just
small amounts of control force until you got
used to it.

There was so much power there ,

almost more power than you needed for fine
contr ol .

It would be interesting to simulate

280

similar contr ol torques on the GMS to Eee what
kind of off - sets it would take before contr ol
problems are encountered.

I don ' t belj eve that

you would actually set one of the rockeits off
enough to bother you.

Possibly, you could

since it is not a straightline functi on.
Cooper

We had had adequate amount of reentry ·;raining.
If we ' d had a thousand hours more we would not have
done anything differently than we did.

Conrad

The reent ry in the simul a tor and the roentry •
in flight up to a point went right down the
line , I would say to slightly after guidance
initiate .

Then, the ball angles were ~xtremely

steep in flight in comparison to the h·ainer.

I

would very much like to go back and ta«e a look at
this on the t rainer while it is fresh in my mind.
I always use the horizon for roll reference in addition to the r oll bug.

The horizon di sappeared too

soon on our reentry.

We were looking at all white

on the ball there for a long t ime.
Cooper

We pitched on up pretty good.

Conrad

Yes, we trimmed out at an awful high angle.

The

stagnation point on the spacecraft inc.icated we were

281

in the ball park with the previous spacecraft.
Cooper

It had to be traveling right because as long as you
keep your rates zeroed it is going to trim to its
proper trim point.

I agree with you completely.

It

seemed to me as though we trimmed a lot nose higher
much earlier in the reentry than we did in the
simulator.

You have less nose up above the horizon

for a longer period of time in the simulator than you
do in the actual case.
Conrad

That was the only thing that seemed different about
the reentry.

Cooper

It didn't concern me because I knew we were damped
and trimed out okay.

Conrad

Yes , I knew we were in good shape , but it was a significant enough difference so as to be a glaring difference with the s i mulator.

Cooper

I don't know whether it actually was the case or not ,
but the reentry seemed to go much faster than it did
on the simulator.

Conrad

From Guidance Initiate to 100 000 feet , it seemed to
pass at considerable less a.mount of time than it does
in the simulator .

Cooper

Yes , it sure seemed to me like it did .

That is some­

thing I think we ought to have people check into to

282

see what the actual time difference ws.s.

Maybe it

was just us.
Conrad

They can ring that out real easy.

We can improve

the reentry on the simulator a little bit, it's
different in this respect.
Cooper

Okay, Crew Station.

I have the same C)mment that I

made after Mercury on that .

I think t::lat it is just

t oo bad that we can ' t have horizontal 3imulators because that is exactly the way you are :in orbit.

You

are not laying on your back, you are ~1 a horizontal
configuration.

If your simulator ran horizontal you

would be standing just like you would be in orbit.
Orientation is entirely different.
Conrad

I compliment the Gemini crew station on the layout of
t he para.meters that are displayed to you.

I feel that

there are some other para.meters that I would like to
h ave seen displayed in the spacecraft throughout the
fl ight .

As an example, I ha te to rely on the ground

for radiator temperatures or have them call me to
heat up a cooling loop.
onboard function.

That type of thing is an

It is very nice that the ground

monitors and takes care of you.

The spacecraft was

extremely well layed out , and as we thought in the
simulator it turned out to be true in flight .

€0►◄ Ftf!JEMT
Cooper

283

I think the simulator people down here did a great
job getting the simulator up to our spacecraft
configuration.

Conrad

Yes .

Cooper

When we came down here it was pretty close to oux
flight configuration.

Conrad

Yes.

Cooper

Stowage wise, they had i t in pretty good shape.

Conrad

With particular reference with Apoll o , having worked
for 2 years in the Apollo cockpits , and having now
flown a Gemini, and knowing that these t wo cockpi t s
have been layed out as f ar as I'm concerned, with
two different philo sophies , and I think this i& the
right one.

14 . 2 LTV and DCPS
Cooper

I can't really say how accurat e t hey uere because
we had a nominal mission.
good training.

I think that they were

I think a certain amoun t of that is

very good, very essential .

I think there again we

have to be very careful not to over emphasize it.
I don ' t believe we did in our case .

J think we had

just about the right amount , although I think there
was a number of people who were concerned that we
could have used maybe more DCPS .
Conrad

I'll say one thing about the DCPS hor izon.

I

thought that that worked out just almost the way
it actually happened.
('

Cooper

Yes sir, I do to.

Conrad

Boy , that horizon came in the window just about

I would l ike to--

the same t i me you saw - Cooper

I think that DCPS should really be utilized to advantage as far as this out-the- 'window reference .

Just

crank it just a l ittle beyond and do a little bit of
work as far as out- the-window referencing and I think
it wi ll be an extreme help .
Conrad

I wonder i f we might not be able to do some help
on platforrn aligning and this s ort of :3tuff.

I

woul d like to go back again and look at the DCPS

.et◄ FteENTl,t(w

•

285

from now - having seen an alined platform.

I really

was quite surpr ised at what 0-0-0 looked like.

It

wasn I t anything like what I imagined it was going i,
to l ook l ike .

I think we were both surprised when

we got up there and got the platform alined and
really looked at 0-0-0, that it looked the way it
did.
Cooper

And you are also banked .

Conrad

Yes .

Cooper

You are banked right and I'm banked left.

Conrad

Yes .

14 . 3 MAC Engineering Simulator
Cooper

Okay.

The MAC Engineering Simulator .

Conrad

I can't say enough for that half a day we spent on
launches reading out Math Flow 6, on the computer.

Cooper

That's right.

And the reentries . .. •

Conrad

That•s the most worthwhile half a day I spent as far
as my side of the spacecraft went .

Cooper

The reentries I thought we did at MAC Engineering
Simulator were just exactly' like the reentry we did .
I think it was real good .

I think, of course, the

rendezvous we did up there .we tave al ready mentioned,
I thought were probably one of the best things we did .

286

•

14.4 Centrifuge
Conrad

We didn ' t miss the centrifuge at al l.

The fact that

we didn't go , I didn ' t feel that I wae1 left out of
anything.
Cooper

No, I don't think we missed a thing wi th the centrifuge.

Conrad

I think you should ride it, you know, a time or two
or something like that.

Cooper

I think if nobody has ever ridden cen·;rifuge--

Conrad

• . ..boost profile or reentry profile :.s worth running
a coupl e of nominals in your shirt s l eeves.

I don't

think you need instruments or anything, but-Cooper

I think if no one has ever ridden one before I think
it is worthwhile they ride the centri::uge just to get
the fee l of what it is like.
never even feel those g's .
got g's.

But, so far as-- you
You don't even know you'.ve

You are so busy doing thing13 and you 're

just "clickt y-cli ckty-cl ick."
at all .

You don 't notice them

And that l evel of g is not en ough to even

worry about.

14. 5 Translation and Docking Trainer
Conrad

The tracking tests that we did on the Agena, you know,
for the camera, was real good.

I diQ1 1 t do the one

up in Denver but the one in the Agena was real good,
up to, and of course we woul d onl y get up as far as

@@++FtDE~+.11":

287

the nadir, but I think it wa.s helpful and I think
f l ight proved the same thing that we concluded in
this , that it wa.s a. very simpl e task , once you ha.d
acquired something. . . . . . the track.
Cooper

Once you ha.d acquired something, yes .

Conrad

The one thing that I, to this day gave me the funniest
sensations though , is when you track through the nadir
and the things started to speed up and reverse I get
the weirdest sensation that we passed the nadir and
got a.bout 30° going behind us .

I almost had myself

reversed in flight, like I wa.s coming up on it again .
Now , I can ' t explain the feeling but it was weird.
Cooper

It's a real odd optical i llusion where you a.re like
you are in an inverted spin-type situation.

You a.re

looking--going back over here and the angle out is
changing such that you al most do have the feeling
that it's - that you have suddenly s tarted changing
your whole angle ... .
Conrad

And if you're looking a.t the nadir , and you're tracking through in just one axis , pitch or something like
that, invariably you're off a. l ittl e bit in yaw, you
see, and you' ll get going, all of a sudden it will
start speeding up , and if there is any roll in there
a.t a.11; all of a sudden the roll will pick up ,

288

•
so all of a sudden this target
which has been going this _way and getiing a little
bit smaller al l of a sudden the whole world will
start t o roll on you too as you are gcing away.

I

had the feel ing that I was falling over a cliff
every time we got back to the end of that thing.
Cooper

It was pretty weird.

14.6 Planetarium
Cooper

Well, here again, I just can't emphasize enough
I t hink that a lot of people under play the val ue of
the planetarium.

I think Pete even agrees with me

now that boy, that doggone planetariUIIJ is pretty
e ssential training ,
Conrad

Yes , i t felt ... . pretty good.

Cooper

The planetarium, unfortunately, is an item in your
t raining program that is very easy to cut out.

You

say well I don't really know that, I can take along
a star chart and I can recognize these, and we all
t end t o do that.

We all tend to try and fall into

t hat.
Conrad

I tell you, we would never have gotten Nye 1 s
Zodiacal light done without having gone up there at
the .. . and taken his displ ay on it.

Cooper

Oh, yes.

If we hadn't gone up there a ~d actually

gone through it we would never had don= it.

'CONFt&li►44~ /ttl

289

Conrad

And with the gun site superimposed, excuse me,
reticle superimposed on it.

Put it right there to

orient it with the Southern Cross and Grus and
Fomalhaut we would have never gotten that
experiment done , without having gone through that
really that half a day did it for that experiment.
Cooper

Yes .

That salvaged the experiment .

Of course he

will probably ruin the film anyway ,

The celestial

identification up there t I think one thing that I
recommend that we are going to have to crank up the
brightness of the stars because we have had them
cranked down to the Mercury level here all this
time and it's just too confusing when you get up
there you see so many more stars than you did in Mercury
,

I

so we are going to have to raise the level, brightness
level of it back up.

Up for the training that we

do because there were multitudes more stars than we
had been trainL~g on.
Conrad

The stars move around in orbit too fast to use them
for spacecraft orientation, as far as I was concerned.
In other words I might recognize a constellation
out there,

The Southern Cross or Orion or something

like tha t , but unless you know your exact point of
time and have a star chart sitting m front of you

290

and even with a star chart sitting in front of you
it wouldn't help you with spacecraft orientation.
I take it tha t what you are saying.

Do I know

what I am in roll, pitch and yaw to the horizon, or
something like that.

I don't think so, because

most of that stuff is moving too fast up there.
Cooper

Well , so far as it's yaw orientation :.t gives you
relatively good angle.

For instance you always

know if you swing around just one lit·;le

You

remember when we would swing around and there was
Cassiopeia, you knew that you were hended generally
north.
Conrad

Well , yes that 's true.

You knew that you were on

one side of the tra ck or the other.
n

Cooper

Pleides and the ... whenever you would see the
Pleides, it always points east, so thnt gives you a
clue and there are several pretty good clues and I
always lmow when I see Delphinus that the Summer
Triangle is near by.

Conrad

You're right, it would tell me where H was pointed
but it wouldn't have told me anything in roll.

In

othe.r words I wouldn I t say that I would use it
completely for a three axis spacecraft orientation .
It might give me an idea of which way the sky was

-IM

291

pointing but that wouldn't tell me whether I was
upside down or right side up or anything , but I
don't know the stars that well.
Cooper

With the accurate star chart updated and then finding
the stars on there , then you could use them for
spacecraft orientation.

Conrad

I'm taking this to mean you are talking about a
quick orientation, you know, I aborted in the
middle of the night on launch if I went on a
night launch, would I know which way I was going?
I don't think so .

Cooper

I don't know.

You would be very lucky, you would just have to see
one you could recognize .

Conrad

You can take your time when you are planning in
advance.

Okay.

Now you want to use Orion to

line up in a certain way with my reticle.

Now

that's a different story, but that would have to
be done at a specific time because Orion moves all
the way through the sky and it turns over on a 72
degree launch azimuth.
Cooper

Well , tracking task.

We didn ' t cover that but I

think it is pr etty obvious that you can use it for
tracking task we found .

•

@OfictFtDEf~TIAP •

292

Conrad

Oh yes .

Cooper

Spacecraft orientation.
help on that .

I agree, you need a little

It would be a help ~o find a horizon,

but you could get pitch and yaw on it md then
maybe use the stars as a yaw orientat i on.

14,7

Syst ems Briefing
Conrad

Well , boy I can 't say enough for the t;rpe we got
at McDonnell - were relatively different in nature and
the type we got down here but I can' t :,ay enough for
both of them because they are both essential.

I'll

t ell you old Bob Snyder's one remark about that cryo
stuff being abl e to go through that heat exchanger
as a liq_uid and not bother anything would . . .

I

I

just can ' t say enough for how that took the load off
of our minds when we were up there .
Cooper

Yes, I think the --

Conrad

A lot of little tidbi ts that we had out of these,
specifically the gu:ys here a t the Ca.Pe,

Cooper -

I would sar that the content that we hE\d at the
sys t ems briefing was excellent.

I would say the

number we had s chedul ed, I would consic.er the absolute
minimum.

I t hink that you should have at an early

date some very thorough,extensive syste·ms briefings
and then at a later date , closer to the fl ight some

Pllit8E~~lhhlt

293

additional, maybe shorter , brush-ups on it .

I

think the people who have done , the McDonnell
people and some of our own people and some of the
McDonnell people and up at McDonnell is the way to
do it .

I think, I want the people to really !mow the

systems, to use the systems briefing.

I don't

think they can be over emphasized, they're really
14 . 8 Flight
Experiments
Conrad

necessary.

Simulations.

Well , we can rule out Denver because we didn't go
there, and MAC, I ' ll never consider ever flying a
flight without a horizontal seater on all the gear .

Cooper

Wait a minute now , we are in flight experiments.

Conrad

This is training.

We got simulation, GMS , Translation

and Docking and at Denver .

This is all backwards

because we didn't go to Denver.

Oh, okay , simulation.

Well , okay GMS, on flight experiments .. . . we really
didn't do an awful lot of flight experiments in the
GMS.
Cooper

No , the only thing we used the GMS f or down here was
a final stowage revue when we got all changed around.
We used it for the REP of course.

A brush through on

the REP.
Conrad

We never rigged.

I take it back we did rig.

We

294

went so far as working out the REP that the D-2
camera wanted to pull it out at real t ime but we
never put it in the window.

We riggecl a 16 mm.

Yes, we did use the GMS for all the things that
were concerned with the REP which had to do with
many stowed items, experiment items .
Cooper

Okay.

Translation and docking t raine,~s .

Let me just

say this as far as the simulations on flight
experiments.

I really think you can use a mock- up

to greater advantage and most experimnnts than you
can the GMS .
Conrad

Yes.

I think you are right.

Cooper

I think you are tyi:: g up the GMS in mnny cases over
things that you don ' t need to tie it up for .
Translation and docking trainer.

I would like to have

had maybe a little more time in it al though I think
we got 99 per cent of what we needed t o get.
Conrad

Yes , the afternoon I spent in it was worthwhil e,
running the D- 6 camera eq_uipment, takj_ng some
pictures and tracking them.

All put ·;ogerther

the GMS and the tracking thing and thn horizontal
SEDR up at MAC ended up to good familiarity with
the experiments equipment .

14.9 Spacecraft System Tests
Cooper

Okay, and at MAC we didn ' t really run 1 as you say,

-.i @el>,,FID ~►~T Jl\t

295

t he horizontal SEDR was - around the spacecraft was really the only
flight experiments thing that we did on it up there .
Let's see, flight experiments.

Briefings .

Well ,

I think some of the experiments, some were better
than others .

Some were lousy and generally the ones

that got there in politically where the lousiest,
or they didn I t bother to show up .

I think this is

s omething that should be very carefully controlled by
the experiments board.

If the experiment is going

to be chosen the people who are the experiment ers
should be forced to come in and give you a good
briefing on these, everything ahllt them , or otherwise they ought to be thr own off.

Equipment --

now this is along the same line -- I think that you
need desperately to observe freeze dates for the
operation and availability of the experiments.
Equipment for the experiments, if it isn't available
i t ought to be thrown off the flight.

I think that

s omebody s omewhere along the line ought to back this .
Maybe it has to go t o the LBJ level or something , I
don ' t know .

Spacecraft systems t est . .. . I

personaliy am not very impressed with the

multipl e

296

parallel testing.

I don ' t feel that the crew really

gets an awful lot out of, out of the spacecraft
systems tests anymore because there are so many
tests going on at the same time that you can't
really keep a handle on what's going o:n and really
get much of a feel for what's going on.

You evolve

t o an automated- type thing of calling three scripts
at the same time and throwing switches and listening
t o quite a complex thing going on.

I think that a

few of the systems tests that still go on such as the
ECS test and the altitude chamber type thing are

still well worthwhile, but I think that the parallel
method of testing has decreased the val ue of the
spacecraft systems test to the crew by great
extent .
Conrad

There's no doubt about it, though, in l>eing present
you keep them honest on many occasions.

Cooper

Well , that 1 s right.

On the- -it is good in that re­

spect , but as far as the training point of view it
does give you some certain familiarity with the systems too , but I was just pointing out i:hat it was
14.10 Egress
Training

decreased over what it used to be.
I really thought our egress training wa.s well wort h­

while- -

•

297
Conrad

Boy, I do too.

Cooper

I think that was a good exercise-­

Conrad

It was wel l organized--

Cooper

I thought it was well organized and well run and
just very well done and I felt like it gave us a
great confidence in the water situation.

Conrad

I felt real good when we hit the water.

Cooper

Yes, I don't think there was a qualm in our mind
at all when we hit the water that we were right on
top of the situation--just no problem.

In fact , I

didn't even bother listening for l eaks .
Conrad
14 , 11

Yes .

Parachute Training
Cooper

Parachute training.

As far as I'm concerned I

think if you've had any--I don ' t feel that I missed
parachute training at all .

I personally think that .1 s

one you could just delete.

I think sometime, some­

where al ong when people come in to the program,
they need parachute fami l iarity and parachute training.

Of course, I ' m of the banned school and I

believe very strongl y that we should have actual
parachute jump training.
Conrad

I do, too .

Cooper

If people think this is too dangerous for this

.

298

unhazardous occupation. ..
14 . 12 Launch Simulati on
Cooper

Launch simulation,

I thought they were very worth­

while and I think launch sims that we :~ave with the
whol e, with MCC tied in, are extremely worthwhile.
14. 13 Network Simul at i on
Cooper
14 . 14

I think net sims are worthwhi l e .

Reentry Simulat ions
Cooper

I think the reentry sims we had were ~1valuable.
In fact, I would sort of l iked to have had a few
more reentry sims.

Conrad

Yes.

14 , 15 Simul ated Network Simul ations
Cooper

Sims, net sims.

Conrad

They were invaluable on the REP .

Cooper

They were good for the REP,

Conrad

I think we got something out of the l aunch sims ,

I thought were-­

too, a l though that exercise is more fo:~ on the
ground ,
Cooper

Yes, the launch sims had diminishing r1~turns--i t
took us a l ong time to cover the grouncl that we
shoul d have covered,

Conrad

I think it stayed with the crew and wao worthwhile
j ust to get you p l ugged in to the neg ngain and get
to hear some of the thing'f! you ' re going to actually

~ •Ptf;)tNTfrA.Le

.

299
hear over the net . . . the reentry sims are more important ...because it~s a more coordinated effort
between you and the ground , and I'm convinced that
for any rendezvous situations that some net sims
have to be--be run ...

14. 16 Zero "G" Flights
Cooper

Yes , well , okay, zero g flights, ... I ' m not real ly
sure just what value you get out of zero g f l ights.

Conrad

Wel l , I l earned one thing, it was the only opportunity that I had before the flight to get--even
though it was a bunny suit at the time , a pressure
suit up there in zero g and get some idea-- opening
and cl osing it which we did many times in the flight
and so forth ...And I think we both learned a little
something there.

I would say now I've done zero g

in the airplanes and I ' ve done it in the spacecraft~
and if I f l y again I certainly don't need to go
back and do any zero g work again.
Cooper

I really--

Conrad

As far as Gemini is concerned.

Cooper

I reall y didn't--

FCSD Rep
Conrad

Oh , Oh, well that ' s a different story, yes .

Wel l,

we did do EVA's ...but if I was going to do something

€0PltFt018'fTl!Ar

300
"EVA again, yes,--

Cooper

Yes , I think this zero g airplane plane is well
worthwhile for a specific mission, especially mission training.

But so far, as just in general .. .

I don ' t bel ieve it's particularly worthwhile.
Well , it is worthwhile like Pete said, that if a
man hasn't ever made a f l ight before a~d never experienced zero g, certainl y good to f~niliarize
him.
Conrad
14.17

Yes, I agree with you on EVA .

Flight Plan Training
Cooper

Okay, f l ight plan training.

Well , we n ever did

really have much time to do any real f1ight plan
t raining, other than-Conrad

Yes, the onl y thing that we were invol'red in really
was the REP and how it was going to go , We l et
J erry Jones l ay out the rest of it without us really
putting much effort into it.

There rnally wasn ' t

a heck of a l ot we coul d do along that line .. .
Cooper

And I think for long missions this rea:.-time thing
is going to go, is going to have to go on, many
changes to be made so I ' m not sure that the over..-all
mission needs training.. . I think maybe you might just
run spot portions of it on the time-critical of course--

I

Conrad

301

What do you mean by operational check, you were
talking about system checks; in flight?

FCSD Rep

Yes, flight plan training. . .
Operation checks.

Conrad

Thruster ill umination .

Well, I don't have much

feel for that one way or another other than what I
said earlier this morning-- yes, I think I don't
know why it's as plain as the nose on my face but
I think we l eaped off the wrong assumption--that
everything was going to run right without checki ng
and I think that we shoul d flight plan up the first
orbit now with more checks in it.

That was a very

poor assumption on this part , the more I even think
about it , because it was a perfectly likel y situation
to have some part of those three systems to be not
working right , and it would have been a simpl e matter
to have gone to the secondary scanners and el iminating the problem at the very beginning that we had ,
but we weren't smart enough to know that .

,

now .

We are

302

15 . 0
15 . 1

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Crew Quarters
Cooper

One comment on the crew area here .

I think that the

crew area here is a real good place to stay and that
the kitchen facility we have set up i ~: very worthwhile , when a real tight schedule is almost a necess i ty .

However , the bedrooms are not ~:oundproof at

all.

You can hear anything throughout the whole

thing.

Any noise at all that goes on, or a tele­

vision or radio playing anywhere thr01:.ghout the whole
thing is very easily heard throughout the ent i re
build ing.

I say this only because this was one of

t he suggestions that we had before t he place was ever
build , that the bedrooms be soundproofed .
based on our old Hangar S experiences .

This was

Due to the

fact that heavy construction is going on all the
time , this place is completely useless so far as
daytime sleepi ng.

There is no possibility of sleep

around here during the day due to the jackhammers
and construction work goi ng on .

So , if any shift

work is going on , I recommend that someone keep them
a motel room, and sleep during the day at the motel
room if you are worki ng night shifts around here and

303
trying t o sleep duri ng the day and run any kind of
night tes t s .
So far as the people that we had with us that run the
pl ace - - I think the place is very adequa tely run .
I think one person her e who certainly deserves
bouquets is the maid, Joyce , who just can ' t do
enough for keeping all the laundr y done .

She keeps

the pl~ce , I think , very, very satisfactorily clean
and squared away .
Conrad

Pete , do you have anyi;hing to add?

Well , I didn ' t hear all of what you said , but I really
/

t hought the crew quarters were a great save f or
us .

I agree with all the thi ngs about the noises and

everything, with all the construction going on now.
I t 's kind of hard .

I do thi nk that there is one thing

that I ' m goi ng to have to go on record as saying we
missed in our training, and there ' s no doubt about
about it .

We were so pressed that we didn ' t have

enough time f or adequate physical training.
15 . 2 Phy sical Training and Aircraft Flying
Cooper

There were t wo things ;

we had inadequate physical

training, arid I think we were somewhat short . on airplane flight time .

I would have liked to have had a

f ew more days to be able -- when we were do,m here on
our last period of time -- to got out and just fly

~MMU.L

304
local.
Conrad

I flew l ocal once the whole time I was down here .

Cooper

Yes , I don ' t think I f lew local at al l .

Conrad

No , that ' s right .

Cooper

And I thi nk , her e agai n , we were caught in the
middle of a bad schedu ling situati on, which higher
level woul d not allow us to do anythin15 about .

But ,

I think we di d the best we could with t he short
amount of time we had .

I personall y f ,~el that we wer e

extremely short on recreational time ru1d on flying
time .

We were pretty hard pushed there and on

physical conditioning time .

15. 3 Sea Lab
FCSD Rep

Did you a ll ever get to tal k to Scott Jarpenter?

Conrad

Yes.

Cooper

Yes.

Conrad

The l ast day, the second orbit before ·,;e were at
r etro.

Cooper

Yes, just before retro.

15.4 Watches and Cl ocks
FCSD Red

Do you want to say anythi ng about watches and clocks?

Conrad

I think Gordo mentioned his Acutron stayed within

4 seconds during the whole fl ight and we only set
it twice .

305

Cooper

My clock you talking about?

FCSD Rep

It was the one--

Cooper

My own personal Acutron I never reset and it was
some 15 seconds off at the end of the flight for the
whole 8-day period .

The Acutron on the panel , the

panel mounted Acutron, was--I changed it about 4
seconds .

It ran 4 seconds f ast t he entire flight .

The Omega that I wore was some 2 minutes off the
first day and the second day was another l minute
and some odd off, at whi ch time I jus t quit winding
/

it .

I quit winding it about the third day and

never even bothered using it again .

The stop watch

that I was--that I took along--at the end of the
third day was still only about 2 to 3 seconds off.
It actually was quite good and I just didn ' t have
occasion to use one and let i t run on down.

And

then I cranked it up for reentry and started two
minutes after retrofire .

Your clock over there ran

reasonably accuratel y

your little 8 day clock over

there , didn ' t i t?
Conrad

Eight day clock ran real well.

I kept it on GMT--

the two big wrist watches I carried, I carried mainly
for the REP maneuver and didn't use them too much. I
did use them to count down to retrofire and my Glycene

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306
watch here I kept on G.m. t .

15.5 Miscellaneous Discrepancies
Cooper

OK , I have a little list of discrepanc:.es -ti~ that
I might just include here.

These are discrepancies

that I noted during the flight and somn of them
have been noted bef ore , but I might juHt hit them
real briefly.
them.

1.

Just to make sure we hav e all of

We lost the stage 2 IPS fuel

gage shortly after launch.

2.

We encountered this

POGO effect at 2 minutes and 6 seconds.

3. We

lost communications near SECO on UHF No . 1.
many of these have already been explained why, but
I just--1 1 11 get these down.

o2 tank heaters.

4. We lC>st fuel cell

5. The M..:1 experimer..t pooped out

and also I thought it was objectionably noisy.

6. The gray interior paint flecks off of the guard
bars and off several areas of the cockpit areas and •
floats and flecks around on the inside.

7. The

platform mode was no good for t he burm, and was not
holding the spacecraft as it should.
FCSD Rep

Let me ask one question.

Did you ever try that

platform control mode on the RCS system?
Cooper

No , I didn't.

Sure didn't.

I wish I l:.ad , I just-­

I guess I had just given it up at that point and
just didn I t get around to it .

I should. have.

The

platform mode should work very well.

There's no

reason why it shouldn't work very well and I just
can't help but believe it was probably in the OAMS
system.

8.

I would strongly recommend unsnapable

legs on a harness like a regular aircraft parachute
harness with adjustable buckle-snap combination
things rather than the custom made harness that we
have.

I think they would be much more usuable for

flight.

9,

The cabin temperature gage failed--

came back in the fifth day for one day and then went
back out again.

10 .

We did not use the polaroid

window covers for launch so we don't know how they
will evaluate holding on for launch.

However, they

worked out extreme~y well for flight.

11.

cycles are not observed.

Rest

Too many little things

keep getting thrown in that require two people.
12 .

The PC02 gage was very irratic.

It kept coming

up and indicating PC0 2 up around 1 mm and it did
that for a while and then ba ck down.

And, 13.

Tape

recorder quit some time during the fifth day.

That's

about it.
Conrad

We had a couple here--l et ' s see , di d we get the thing
about cabin lights getting hot?

Cooper

And melting paint?

The - l ~ i u g h ! hey will burn your

308

hands and in particular the bright overhead one is
very hot .
Conrad

One other--let ' s see, we talked about the purge
switches being 3- positioned rather than spring
l oaded .

And one other thing we noticed , one systems

glitch which seemed to affect either scanner-- out
over the Pacific a couple of times we passed some
really, really, really big areas of cload cover-,
I mean we were almost--the whole visible sky or
ground was covered with clouds or a good portion of
it and this seemed to give the scanners fits.
Cooper

These same cloud.a were that big cloud t hat had all
the lightning in it too--later on we- -

Conrad

Well , it may have been .

I didn ' t make n.ny correla­

tion that way, but I, in the daytime , I noticed that
the scanners had quite a hard time doiner their job
when they were looking at much horizon covered by
clouds .

Got very irratic .

I think that ' s a known

phenomena--with scanners , anyhow, but I just wanted
to mention that they did kind of kick up when there
were a lot of clouds a.round .

We talked about the

right auxiliary light bulb bug thing breaking off.
And I have one question ,
world where we

There was one place in the

ased at :!Ct a great deal of

rCOW:t0EblTlit

309

gigantic fires on the ground and just out of curiosity
I want to know where we were--and it happened on
the sixth day at 01 hours 02 minutes and 15 seconds
so maybe we'll be able to find out where we were.
That's all I got, Gordo, how about you , anything
more?
Cooper

No.

FCSD Rep

Oh, I got-- Pete, you mentioned. you blew that oxygen-­

Conrad

Blew the OAMS squib--could not hear it blow.
no way of telling that it really worked.

Had

You can ' t

pulse a regulator up and I did and it works just
like it does in the trainer .

It gives it a blip, you

know, and you got to keep blipping it up.

And I

built it up to about 325 from about 300 just to see
if it would do it and it did.
worked OK.

So the system

But I still don 1 t know that the squib

was blown--you know you pulse, anyhow.
FCSD Rep

Well, other than looking.

Conrad

Yeah. Well, I thought the squib was in the adapter.
No way of telling, I don't think.

Cooper

I f they are lucky they. might have--( laughter)

Conrad

Well, they found a booster-- they might find the
adapter.

"8Nf tDE~◄ Tt~H?

310

15.6 Medical Aspects
Cooper

I agree completely that the crew area.::iere should be
i solated from the medics.

I don ' t feel that the

medical department should have anythini? whatsoever to
do with crew quarters; otherwise, I thi nk the crew
should j ust go right ahead and live up to flight day in
a motel or somewhere else, because I have a very
strong feeling t hat the medical deparu~ent is trying
to make a clinic out of this place up here.

I think the crew area should be held completely devoid
of medics .

I don't think they should have anything to

do with the running of the crew quarters .

I think the

crew should establish its own procedurns of whether
they're going to have low residue dietB , or .. whether
they're not going to have low residue diets , based upon
recommendations from previous crews , fJ~om previous
flight experiences along the way, and what everyone
who has worked with it has passed on.

We hope we can

get all this information gathered up ir, a form that
each crew coming along can be given a c.ondensation perhaps
of all the previous crew ' s comments on things of this
type , such as diets, methods of defecation and urination,

€ O~◄ P'I0E~~TIAL

•

311

urination systems. drinking water systems . and preflight set- up type things .

As far as the medical-~

I'd like to hit that specifically.

5

312
We ·1a.ndeij on• t~e\ ree.Trier at ' ·"-

mid- morning, carrier time , and we acconplished not
one bit of debriefing or operational work throughout
that day at all.

We went to bed that night without

ever having done one bit of our own de1iriefi ng of any
kind, whatsoever.

The entire day was npent with

the medical community.

I don't know that we lost

anything there , particularly, but I st:.ll thi nk there
are a lot of things you could sit down and start
t aping that would be a lot fresher i n ;irour mind.
Although, I think with two people on the flight , you
tend to jog one another enough that yon don ' t forget
( .

about things you might when one person has been on a
flight.

Now, so far a.s +,ne preflight nedical aspects,

I still have some very strenous object:.ons to it and
comments to make .

I think that T- 2 day s physical -­

giving t hit extensive a physical at that period of
time i s kind of ridiculous.

I think you really drag

a guy throught the hoops there just 2 clays before his
flight and completely grind him down on a very, very
extensive physical that I don ' t agree with the medics
as being necessary.

And I don ' t agree with all the

blood- letting that was involved in thin .

I think that

al l t he number of i njections and sticko and reinsertions of isotopic bl ood and everything was completely

M).taiFtDE►,TtM •

313
unnecessary, and , again, was just a matter of r esearch rather than anything else .

j

..
..·­.
.1