NASA-UAP-D021, Gemini 7 Technical Debriefing, 1965

I
Authority:
NW 91526

\

GEMINI
TECHNICAL

VII

DEBRIEFING

December 23, 1965

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

PREFACE
This preliminary transcript was made from voice
tape recordings of the Gemini 7 flight crew debriefing
conducted December 19 through December 21 , 1965 at the
Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida.
Although all the material contained in this transcript
has been rough edited, the urgent need for the preliminary
t ranscript by mission analysis personnel precluded a final
edit prior to its publication.

-

- - - - - - - - -- - - -- - - --

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Paragraph
1.0

Page Number

COUNTDOWN
1.1 Crew Insertion . ...................... ............. . 1
1.2 Comm:un.ications . .......•.•.. .......•...........•..• . 1
l.3 Crew Participation in Countdown ....................l

l.4 Comfort . .................. .......................• . 1
l.5 Environmental Control System...............•..•.... 2
l.6 Sounds . ..•...•••.••..•.••• •••..•••••••••••••••••••• 2
l.7 Vibrations ........................ ................. 2
1.8 Visual . .................... ........................ 2
l.9 Crew Station Controls and Displays ................. 3

2.0

POWERED FLIGHT
2.1 Lift-Off cues·••·••••••••••••••••• •••••••••••••••••3
2.2 Roll Program . .................. .................... 4
2.3 Pitch Program. . .........•............. .............. 4

2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7

Aerod.y"namics • ••••••••••••.•.• •••••••••••••• •••• •••• 5

Environmental Control System ....... .•...........••. 5
Maximum q . ........................... .............. 5

Windsheaz- ......•......•.....••......• •....•...••.•• 6
2.8 DCS Upd.ates • •••.•.••..•......••.. ••.•••.•••••••. • •• 6
2.9 :Engine 1 Operation . . . ........... ................... 6
2.10 :Engine 2 Status . ..................... ...... ..... ... 7
2.11 Acceleration g's••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••••••••••7
2.12POG0 .......•........•...•.. •.....•...••.•...•.•..•. 7

2.13 Guidance Initiation............. ... .. .............. 7
2 .14 BECO • •.•.•••..••...•..•...........•...••..•. •...••. 8

2 .15 Stagi.ng' . ..... . .......... . ,. ... o • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 8

2 . 16 E]ngin.e 2 Ignition . ................ ................. 9
e

2.17 RGS Initiate.•••••••••••••••••• ••••••••• •••••• •••• • 9
2.18 GO/NO GO e1 • •• • • •• •• • • •• • •••••••••••• • • ••••••••••••••9

2.19 Systems Status•••••••••••••••• •••••••••••••••••••••9
2.20 Acceleration o• •••••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••••lO

2.21 Fairing Jettison •••• • •• • ~••••·•••••••••••• ••• •• ·••10

INSERTION
3.1 Post-SEC0 ...............•.... ..................... 10
3.2 SECO plus 30 seconds ....•..•.. ••.................• 11

14.0

TRAINI NG
14.1
Gemini Missi on Simulator ...........•••••••185
14. 2
DCPS (Launch abort simulat or) ....•.••••••• 191
14. 3
MAC Engineering Simulator ........••.••.••• 191
Translation and Docking Tr ainer ...•.•••••• 192
14.4
14 . 5 Planet ari um. . ........................••••• •193
14. 6
Systems Brief inga ...............•.•••••••• 194
14 . 7
Flight Experiments .............••.•••••••• 198
14.8
Spacecra f t syst ems tests .......••.•••••••• 202
Egress t r aining....................••.•••• 204
14.9
14.10 Parachute Tr a ining..•.........•...•.•••••• 205
14.11 Launch simulationa .................••••••• 206
14.12 Reentry simulations ..........•........•••. 206
14.13 Simul ated net work simulations ...•..••••••• 206
14.14 Ne t work s imula tions .............•..••••••• 206
14.15 Fl ight Plan t r a i ning...............••.••.• 207

15.0

CONCLUDING COMMENTS ...•....••........•........... 208

LANDING AND RECOVERY
7.1

Impact . ........... ... . ...••.•. •. •.•••••• • • • • • • • • • 54

7.4

Systems Configuration.•••••··••••••••••••••••••••58

7.2 Checklists . ....... ....................... • • • • • • • • 55
7.3 Communicatione ..••......•••••••••.••.•.••••.•.••• 55

7.5 Spacecraft Status.••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••59
7.6 Postlanding Activity..............•.............. 62

7.7 Comi•ort . ...•............•..••••• •.•.••.••••...••• 63
7.e Recovery Force Personnel ..•.....•...•..•.......... 63
7.9 F.g"ress • .••.•. • •••••••••• ••••••••••••••••••••••••• 63
7.10 S1.lrVival Gear . ..•............•....... .........•.. 63
7.11 Crew Pick UP••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••••••••64

8.0

SYSTEMS OPERATION
8.1 Plat form ...... . •....... .......................... 64
8.2 O.AMS • .• ••••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••••••••••• 65
0.3 RCS . ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• • • ••• • • • • ••• • • 73

e.4
0.5

ECS . ..........•.••..•..... ..•................ • ... 75

0.0

Crew Station ...•.............•..•.. ..•..........101

Commun.ications . .............................. ....91

8.6 Electrical . ..................................... . 95
0.7 Onboard Computer..•.........•••••••.....•••...• .• 99

0.9 Biomedical ....•••••••...•.••.••.••.•• .••.•....•. 115
OPERATIONAL CHECKS
9.1
9.2

Apollo Landmark Investigation •••.•..•.•.....•... 122
Cabin Lighting Survey.••• •••• •••••••••••••••••••130

9.3 HF' Test .•• •••• ••.••.•••• •• •••·••••••••.•••••• •.. 130
1O.O

VISUAL SIGHTINGS
10.1
10 .2
10.3
10.4

Cou.ntdo"Wll • •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• • 131

Powered Flight••••• ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••l31
Orbital Flight.••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••132
Reentry . ...•••.•.•..•..• ••...•..•..•.......... . 138

-

-

Insertion Act ivities ............................15
Post Station Keeping...........•................17
ORBI TAL FLIGHT . ..............••.•................... . 18

5.0

RETROFIRE
5.1 TR-2: 00 Power Up and Alignment Checklists ....... 32
5. 2 TR-26 Events ............•.....•..••..•.......•.. 33
5.3 TR-5 GMT Stop Clock.........•................... 34
5.4 TR- 256 .................... • • • • •. • • •. • •. • .. •. • • • .34

5. 5

TR- 1 . •• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •• • .34

5. 6 TR-0. • • ••• • • •. • • •• •. • • •• • • • • •• •. • • •••• • • • • • •• • • • 35
5. 7 Retropack Jettison .............................. 40
5.8

Commwiicatione .................................. 41

5.9 Upda ting........................................ 41
5.10 Post Retro Jettison Checklist ................... 42

6.0

REENTRY

6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
6.6
6.7

Reentry Parameters Update ....................... 42

6.8

Comm'W'l.icationa ••.•.•••••.••..••••••••••...•.•... 49

400 K . ••••••.•••.••••••••••• • • • • • • • • • • • •••••••• • 43

Acceleration Profile ...•..•...•.................47
Spacecraft Control .••.....•.....................47
100 K . ....••.•.•....•..•............•... ~ ....... 48
50 K . ...••..............••...•••................48

35 K Checklist .••.•..•..•..•.•..••..•.•......... 49

6.9 26 K Checklist •• •••••·••••••••••••••••••••••••••49
6.10 10.6 K Barostat .................•.....•......... 50
6.11 Main Check Deployment •...............•.......... 51
6.12 Post Main Checklist ............................. 51
6.13 Single Point Release •...•••.••.•..•...••••...... 51
6.14 2 K Checklist .•........•........................ 52
6 .15 LBlldiilg . ..........•...•......................... 52
6.16 Postlanding Checklist ..•..•....••....•....•..•.• 52
6.17 Blood Pressure Measurement ..•.•...•..•........••53

11.0

EXPERIMENTS
11.1 Celestial, Space, and Terrestrial Radiometry
11.2
11.3
11.4
11.5

(D-4/D-7)•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••140

Star Occulation Measurement (D-5) •...•.....•146
Simple Navigation (D-9) .....................148
Visual Acuity and Astronaut Visibility
and Vision Test (M-9 ) .......................154
Synoptic terrain (S-5) and weather (s-6)
photograph.y••••..••.••.•••....••••.•••••••••158

11.6

Proton Electron Spectrometer and Tri-Axis
Flux-Gate Magnetometer (MSC-2 and MSC-3) ...•160
11.7 Optical communications (MSC-4 ) ..............161
11.8 Landmark Contrast ..•....•........•..........165
11.9 Cardiovascular reflex conditioning (M-1 ) ....166
11.10 In-flight exercises (M-3) ...................167
11.11 In-flight phonocardiogram (M-4) and
In-flight sleep analysis (M-8) ..............167
11.12 Bioassay body fluids (M-5) and
calcium balance study (M-7) .................168
11.13 Miscellaneous ......•.......................•172
12.0

PREMISSION PLANNING
12.l Mission Plan (trajectory) ...........•.......175
12.2 Flight Plan.••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••175
12.3 Spacecraft Changes •..•...................... 176
12.4 Mission Rules ............. .. ......•. .. ......177
12,5 Experiments ••.•..•••••.•...•......•...•....•177

13 .0

MISSION CONTROL
13.1

GO/NO GO' s ••••••••.••.••.•••••.•••....••...•179

13,2
13 . 3
13.4
13. 5
13.6

PLA and CLA updat es•••••••••••••••••••••••••l79
Consuma.bles .............•.•...•..........••.180
Flight Plan changes.••••••••••••••••••••••••181
Systems . ....................•.............. . 182

Experiments real-time updatea ...•......••.••184

.. f

....
1.0 COUNTDOWN
1.1 Crew Insertion

I thought it went ve~y well.

Borman

I have no comment.

Lovell

Likewise, no comment on crew insertion.
quite a. bit done.

Borman

I think we got

It was very orderly.

Timing was good and it was done properly.
1.2 Communications

I had no troubl e at al l.

Borman

Communications were good.

Lovell

I had no trouble with communications in the cockpit or the
spacecraft, but the communications in the va.n from the
suiting area t o the other area a.re rather poor.

Maybe we

should try to get that improved sometime.

1.3 Crew Participation in Countdown
Borman

Again, I think they have been used on 4 or 5 l aunches, and

I thought they were fine.
Lovell

Right.

Countdown procedure and crew participation is just

what you expect now.
1.4 Comfort

Borma.n

Comfort was fine.

No problems?

Lovell

No problems for comfort , but I was surprised when I got in
the cockP i t, because there was a lot more there than there
was when I got in it for the stowage review.
turned out for t he best.

No problems.

But, it a ll

2

1.5 ECS
Borman

ECS worked fine.

We had no trouble with ECS at all during

prelaunch or launch.
Lovell

That is true.

The purge was a lot slower and it was just

perfect for the final countdown.

It was too fast for the

SIM Flight, which we went through, a.nd I got an ee.:r blockage.

For the countdown, it was ju.st r ight.

Very slow.

1.6 Sounds
Borman

We had been well briefed on a ll the soundsz the gimbaling,
pre- valve, a.nd erector.

As a matter of fact, when the erec­

tor started down there was no sound.

We had been told that

probably there might be a clanking or something.

I hes.rd

nothing.
Lovell

All I saw was the sky.

1.7 Vibrations
I had no problems.

Borm8ll

Vibrations.

No comment.

Lovell

Is this liftoff vibrations?

Borman

No, this is countdown.

Vibrations of the spacecraft during

coun tdown.
Lovell

No, nothing we had not heard before.
1 .8 Visual

Lovell

The windows were perfeot.

Borman

No fogging.

We had no fogging.

---

.
Lovell

3

The windows were heated previousl y as a result of 51 s probl ems, and our windows, I t hought , were perfectly clean.
Didn 1 t you?

Borm8J'l

Right.

1.9 Crew Stati on Control s a.nd Displays
Lovel l

No comment .

Exactly how we had pl anned it for months.

Borma.n

Exactl y t he way that we had seen it, and no probl ems.
2 .0 POWERED FLIGHT
2.1 Liftoff Cues

Borman

Stoney came in loud e.nd c l ea.r, counting the countdown.

Lovell

Cs.me in loud and c l ear.

:Borman

We lmew exactly when i t was, and I for one had absolutely
no question in my mind when we lifted off.

It felt like I

had been t ied back, a.nd someone cut the string a.nd there
was a slow but definite acceleration at lift-off.

Lovell

I thought you could just about put 01P COMM, V1bration, and
noise together, because the motion, vibrati on , and noise all
contributed to a definite knowledge that you were going
somepl ace.

Borman

In other words, what you are saying is that you had no problems determining lift-off.

Lovell

No, it went.

Borma.n

Okay vibration wa.s nominal during l ift-off.

Again, perhaps

4

it is because we were so well briefed on the simulations
we have run, but I had no problems.
Lovell

There was a little more noise than I expected, but a little
less vibration.

Borman

Jim said there was a little more noise than he expected.

Even so,, it was not oppressive, or a problem at all. Visual.
I did not have any visual cues.
ments.
Lovell

1What about you, Jim.

I was watching the instru­

Did you pick up any?

I had the clouds, end there was a visual cue.

Just normal

cloud cues .
Borman

Cockpit displays were good.

The fuel pressure and oxidizer

pressure were nominal the whole flight.

Just perfect.

2.2 Roll Program
Borman

The roll program, was so short it was almost like a spike•
We hardly even noticed the roll program.

Lovell

I did not notice it at all.

Did you Jim?

I heard you call it out, but I

did not notice it.
Borman

I called it out , but we only rolled,I think,about 2 or 3°.

2.3 Pitch Program
Borman

The pitch program started just as in the simulator, which
is very accurate on this.

It looked exactly the same on the

ball, and there wae no problem.
Lovell

The pitch program for the RGS followed exactly what the IGS

'

-~
..... --

-...

,

.

5

was giving for the entire l aunch.
matched perfectly--nulled.

The needles were just

I did not see any unusual

attitudes that some of the other people commented on.

2.4 Aerodynamic
Borman

Age.in, we had had this described to us ma.ny times, and it
seemed to follow right along.

In the maximum q region we

got some vibration and noise, but after we got through
maximum q it was just like going supersonic in a fighter.
You just slip through, and from then on it was just l ike
riding on a train.
Lovell

I don't think it was bad either.

2.5 :ms
Lovell

Pressure went up to 5.5 in the initial stoppage, and it
slowly leaked down to 5.1, and stayed there.

Borman

I was cool during lift-off.

Lovell

I was too.

Borman

Comfortable.
table.

Comfortable.

I mean cool in the sense that it means comfor­

Of course we can not very well comment on the cabin

atmosphere because we were sealed.
2. 6 Maximum q

Borman

We ha.ve already discussed this.

There was some noise build

up and some vibration, but nothing to worry at all about or
even discuss .

6

2.7 Wind shear
Borman

Wind s hear.

I did not notice any.

Lovell

I did not notice a:ny wind shear either.

Borman

You could not see any on you attitude gauges either, could
you?

Lovell

No, that is what I mean.

Borman

The a tti tude gauges stayed pegged.

Lovell

They stayed nulled throughout the entire flight.

Right?

I was

a.ma.zed a t the accuracy with which the RGS was following the
IGS program.
2.8 DCS Updates
Lovell

Ca.me through on schedule .

Borman

No problem?

Lovell

No trouble.

Borman

Have any trouble punching the light ?

Lovell

After the second upda.te, about 2:23 ,the g 1 s are too ~igh
to let you punch off the l ight.

So , you have to wai t for

staging, and t hen punch the l ight.
2.9 Engine 1 Operation
Borman

Engine 1 opera tion, I thought, was norma.l.

But I did noti ce

a s l ight hint of a POGO a.round a.bout, I would esti mate, two

minutes.

The slightest, faintest hint.

even noticed it.

I do not think J im

7

Lovell

I did not notice any POGO.
2,10 Engine 2 Status

Borman

It seemed to me that from about 3 minutes and 30 seconds to
a.round 4 minutes, the noise and the feel was a little bit
different than it was a.fter that, as if it was vibrating &
little bit more.
type thing,

But this was sort of, a.gain, a sensing

The inatrwnents were all nominal, a.nd it may

have just been me,

I certainly ca.n not complain about the

operation,
2.11 Acceleration g's
Borman

J.ny- problems, Jim?

Lovell

No problems.

They were pretty nominal, weren I t they?

I

could not see the g meter.
Borma.n

They were right on the money.
ha.ve are all

And, of course, the g's we

experienced in the centri.fuge , and so on.

One

thing, when the g's dropped a t staging and at SECO I had
no sensation of tumbling and no sensation of disorientation.
Nothing at all.
2.12 POGO
Borman

I 've mentioned that I detected a slight hint of one tha.t was
so smal l we cannot even really discuss it.
2.13 Guidance Initiation

Lovell

We had a guidance initiation.

It was in the form of booster

8

yaw deflecting downward, more so than booster pitch deflecting. Booster pitch deflected sl i ght ly t o the right, indicating, at guidance initiation, a booster-high trajectory.
But, they both came right back to null just after guidance
initiation, and that was it.
Borman

We did not have the feeling that we were lofted, and then
a sudden pitch down.

Lovell

No , th9re was no change of booster performance at all.

It

was just t hat the needles deflected a t guidance initiation
to say that we had gui dance initiation, and after that they
nulled and stayed that W83' from there on.
2.14 BECO
Borman

At BECO, the whole spacecraft was engulfed in a red flame .
I noticed that out of the corner of my eyes.

Jim, you

probably had a better view than I did.
Lovell

Yes .

Flames came up thP. side there to the window .

Borman

There was a definite, very brief instant of it, probably
in the order of milliseconds , but it did envelope the spacecraft and I, in my own mind, wonder if this is not the place
where we are picking up some of the smudge on t he window.
2.15

Lovell

Stagins-

Well, I did not notice any smudge at the time of staging.

Slayton You did not notice any?
Lovell

I did not notice any .
fast.

Of course, things were going pret ty

I did notice it after we got into o=bit, but not at

9

that particul ar time.
2.16 Engine 2 Ignition
Eorma.n

Again, it is so well simulated that-­

Lovell

It is very smooth.

:Borman

It is ve:ry smooth, a.nd away you go.
2.17 RGS Initiate

:Borman

We l l, we have talked about that.

Lovell

Yes, that is what I was talking about back p.!'eviously.

2.18 GO/NO GO
:Borman

GO/NO GO.

Houston, on the ground, came through great.

We

got a GO/NO GO before the 30 seconds we were waiting £or
spacecraft separate.

So, we knew we were in good shape

before we ever had the possibility we would have to burn.
Of course, we also had the IVI's onboa.rd and they are very
good also.
2.19 Systems Status
Borman

The systems were all great.
flight.

No problem, during powered

We got two delt a Plights.

Lovell

Oh, yes, that is right.

:Borman

We are talking about spacecraft systems.

We got delta P

light on BECO in the first stage that went off at staging,
then came back on during second stage flight, and then the

10

:::action 2 delta Plight did not go out a.nd it was •••
Lovell

No, J:ection 1 went on and out again during the £light.

It

went out a t, I think it went out at SECO.

Borman

That is right.

Lovell

But 'Section 2 came on and we saw that one £or the next 14
days.
2.20 Acceleration

Borman

Acceleration during stage 2 was right on the money, right on
the program.
I

I read of£, I

half g a maximum.

think i t was about six a.nd a

We read this off after SECO.

2.21 Fairing Jettison

Borman

Fairing Jettison, I did not even hear it.

I was concentra­

ting on the horizon , trying to get set for turning around.
Jim j ettisoned the fairing and punched the Spacecraft SEP.

I did not see a.nything or hear a.nything.
Lovell

I saw debris and heard it and had a definite knowledge that
a squib had gone off.

There had been an explosion.

3.0 INSERTION
3.1 Post SECO
Borman

Maneuver controller was easy to reach.
there was no problem.

I had it out, and

It came out and was ready to go.

Attitudes and rates, there were none.

The thing was as

solid a.a a rock as far as I could determine.

I was watching

11

the horizon, and the attitude remained constant a.nd the
rates were so minimal you could not even pick them up.

I

noticed no transients, we experienced no·•·•••••~•• as
far as I know that was discernible.
Lovell

Did you try to damp out the ..

Borman

There was nothing to damp out.

Lovell

Okay.

:Borman

In fact, I did not use the thrusters at all for that.

It

just sat there.

3.2 SECO pl us 30 seconds
Lovell

I have the IVI readings on a. ca.rd.

Do you have those- cards

that we took off?
:Borman

Yes.

Lovell

I am sorry. We did not get forward-aft, left-right, u.p or
down because they were so quick, and I was trying to get the
camera.

But it was 17 1n the fore and a.ft wmdow, 13 in the

left-right, and up and down was 20.
Borman

What do you mean. you did not get them?

They a.re there.

Lovell

No, I did not know a.ft or forwa.rd, or left or right, or up
or down.

:Borman

Oh, I see.

Lovell

I just saw th&t they were so small tha.t I just wrote down
the numbers as a ...

12

Borman

17, 30, and 20.

There might have been a 13, 17, a.nd 20...

Lovell

About what the numbers ca.me up with.

Borman

Spacecraft separation. We separated with minimum delay between thrusting and Spacecraft SEP.
craft separation.

Jim actuated the space­

I did not hear the thrusters firing. I

could not hear them; and I did not even helU' spacecraft
separation, but -Lovell

I heard Spacecraft SEP, but I o·o uld not hear the thrusters

firing. But you told me you were firing the thrusters-Borman

I ea.id th.rusting a.nd SEIP Spacecraft a.nd we did it and away
we went.

I thrusted for about 2 seconds.

Almost immedi­

ately, as soon as we had £inished thrusting, I started a
yaw right 180°, and the rates were right around, I think
a.round --Of course, you should be able to pick this up off
telemetry, but I would estimate they were 3° to 4° per
second turning around.

As soon as I ha.d the booster in

sight, I thrueted be.ck 5 seconds.

This is the way we tried

in silllulations, The simulations in St. Louis were excell ent.
Lovell

Turned out that was the best technique to use, 2 seconds
for the 2 seconds forward a.nd a 5 second return.

Borman

We turned around a.nd there it was, bigger than the devil!

Lovell

At that distance there was no problem staying in there.

Borman

Now, I did have some problem because the booster was bending

13

so rapidl y.

It wa.s tremendous.

It looked like one of the

autogenous lines ha.d been cut.

I guess it was cut with a

pyro, a.nd it was really bending and this was causing it to
translate as well as rotate.

And in order to stay with it,

I was having to use quite a bit of fuel;
certainly a nominal task.
trol modes switchings.

although it was

I also went through severa l con­

I sta:rted out in PULSE and I could

not get around fast enough, so I went to DIRECT a.nd then
slowed it up in RA.TE COMMAND. Slowed up the direct rate I
was using with RATE COMMAND, a.nd left it in RATE COMMAND
without using the h&nd controller for a while.
went to l'LATFOBM.
to

Finally

When I went to PLA.'f.E'OHM~ we had been off

one side of the booster.

~

. L went to PLATFORM, · it

yawed me back around, and I lost sight of the booster . .SO
we went out of PLATFORM· and flew t he rest of it in PULSE
Mo~e using the reticle on the horizon for stabilization and
using the maneuver controller for thrust.
onboard tape,incidentally.

This is all on

The air to ground communications,

throughout the f light were superior.
Lovell

I was really a.mazed a.t the communications, especially the
primary station.

Borman

The UHF was outstanding.

We have already discussed GO/NO GO.

They came through loud

and clear before we ever SEP spacecraft.

We had no need for

14

a velocity correction.
Lovell

As a matter of fact, right now would be a good time to mention that address 72 read --

Borman

Nominal was 25 804 and address 72 read 25 804.

Lovell

Can you imagine that? Right t o th~ · foot!

25 804.

I could

not believe it when I punched it up.
Borman

The orbit quantities were given to us, I think,by Bermuda..
0£ course, at this time we really were not interested in

them , although they were sort of nice in.formation.

We had

a GO/NO GO.

Lovell

It was 87-178

the initial forward quantity that was

ca lled up to ue.
Borman

Tha l'!1JU readouts : Jim read 72 and when he saw it was 25, 804,

we had a GO/NO GO from the ground.

I do not believe you

even rea4 the rest of them out, did you?
Lovell

No, I did not bother reading out the rest of the addresses

94, 97, 52, or 73, because I saw the 72 nominal. I saw the
IVI's were right in there so we did not bother reading out
anything else.
Borman

Debris • I did not notice a:ny debris.

Lovell

I noti-od debris.

I was looking out at Spacecraft SEP and

Jet Fairing, and noticed debris.

I also noticed debris be­

t ween the spacecraft and booster when we first turned around.

15

Borman

Could you identify any type of the debris?

Lovell

No, pieces.That is all I could tell.

3.3 Insertion activities
Lovell

We followed the regular procedure.

Borman

We did not have s;ny problem with safing our switches.
No problem.

I did not even stow my D-ring at insertion.

I

was too busy trying to stay on the booster, and I did not
get it stowed for the first orbit,I guess,or half an orbit.
Lovell

What we planned on doing was getting pictures of the D-ring.
I got the br&cket up at staging, and I actually had a minute
after guidance initiate to reach back there and get the
bracket and stick it up.

It worked out very nicely before

the g's started building up again on second stage.

The

bracket was up and in place s;nd no problem a t all.

Then at

SECO, I went around to pick up the camera, because we had
the camera. stowed where the Agena control bq..x ie l ~oated.,
I

managed to get the camera up, and it was already plugged

into the electric&l wire.

ill I had to do was turn the

auxiliary switch on, put it on the bracket, and push the
button, and it started taking pictures.

Just about that

time, Frank mentioned be was going to start thrusting pretty
soon so I had to go back and punch off the spacecraft.
I read up address 72.

So , I hope the pictures come out.

Then

16

:Borman

We were looking right into the sun; I hope they do too.
drogu.e pins were no problem.

The

Jim got them, but again, not

until well into the first orbit.

As a matter of fact, I

pulled my own yesterd.a.y morning there.

The problem is

solved; I think they a.re easy to get to.
Lovell

Yes. They a.re easy to pull out.

Borman

I think that we have covered station keeping wi th stage II
booater,partially.

I will mention that the booster, being

without attitude control, translating also with this impul se it was picking up from the venting, is definitely an
order of magnitude more difficult than station keeping with
a

stabl e vehicle like Spacecraft 6.

First of a ll, you do not have. anyone

control ling the thing;

you do not exactly know where it is going to go, and it
might translate because it is venting and ha.a a slight
thrust.
Borma.n

I know a couple of times we got in a little too close

and

I backed out, because you just do not da.re get as close as
you do the way this thing is spewing.
picture, a good l ook at the nozzle.

We got a real good
I thought that it

looked like the nozzle was bent in on two places on the
booster engine.

It l ooked like the nozzle, the ablative

skirt had been bent in.

But then, it may have been just a

17

shadow, because the next time I looked at it, it looked just
like a new engine.
mage.

The booster itself had no apparent da­

The only thing we could see was this big spewing

where the venting was coming from.
ing from the roll nozzle at all.
Lovell

I did not see any vent~
Did you?

No, the venting ca.me from some line right along the bottom
edge, near the engine section of the booster.

Borman

That is right.

Lovell

It was a line of some sort that was open, and fuel was
spewing out of it.

Borman

I hope

they got the data they wanted on the D-4 and D-7

Experiments. It wa.s,again,a very uncomplicated maneuver, one
that we practiced many times, and it worked just lik~ it
does in simulation.

Had no difficulty at all. Toe lights

on the booster worked fine.
3.4 Post station-keeping
Borman

We did not do anything with stowage on the first orbit at
al l .

D-ring, pins

I have already mentioned, we did not

get those in at all.
Lovell

Arm restraints went down at 55 seconds.

Belts- We did not

even loosen them until after we had done D-4, D-7.
vests

The life

we left right on the harness for the entire flight,

but the ha.mess did not stay on us for the entire flight.

18

The sequence light test. This was done after the first orbit.
We really had this insertion checklist in two phases, one
at insertion and then one after D-4, D-7.

4.0 ORBITAL FLIGHT
Borma.n

We have already disou.ased the station-keeping.
problem.

That is no

I think the situation that we used,going off with

about 2 seconds--2 to 3 seconds--a.nd thrusting back with 5
seconds while you a.re still on your side getting back to the
booster as quickly as "POssible ,solves the problem and takes
a lot of the orbital mechanics out of the situation.

hope the film comes out.

I

The one thing that did make it &

little difficult on this one is when we looked back, we
were looking back into the sun, and the booster was right in
line with the sun.

It was ju.at like flying formation when

the leader makes a. turn, a.nd you are down,..sun.

It is dif­

ficult to see, and I tried to move off to one side and
swing around and look a little bit more to the north.
think it was north.

I

I guess I was trying to look to the

south where I could get the sun out of my line of sight.

I

also had a cut-off on the booster at station-keeping at 88%
fuel, so that at 88% fuel we were already in darkness, although we had not reached the time for the D-4, D-7 separation which we.a to ooour a.too, 25.I think it was about '00: 23 or

19

00,21. So when we reached this limit and we were in darkness,
I ~~nt ahead and separated, thrustil:lg dawn.
Lovell

We actually separated earlier than 00: 25. We actv.ally separa­

ted at 00:-21.
:Borman

That is right.

So we separated because we were in da.rlmess

and because we had reached the limit on fuel.

We had been

in darlmess for awhile. One thing I di d notice was that the
docking light was not particularly helpful on that stage of
the business.

I guess it is because we were not close

enough to the booster.
Lovell

We tried but the docking light just did not work.

:Borman

I suppose because,a.gain,we were looking at a lighted horizon
with the docking light , and it did not work as well as it
did l ater on with Spacecraft b, The booster measurements
went off.

We got

indications on the needle ,on the measure­

ment needle ..
Lovell

The recorder did not get on until 27 minutes.

That is a

guess. I am not too sure, but as I understand it, they had
live transmissi ons up until th.at time, to Bermuda, 8Jld Ant i gua., wherever it is, so we were okay there.
Borman

The booster measurements were normal.
was perfect for that.

Again, the simulator

The lights. Jim McDivitt had made

some comment about not being able to judge distance because

20

they only had two l ights on there.

We had four lights

on and I will be darned if I will try to judge distance
by four lights or fifty lights.

You have got to have

illumination or you have to have a stable vehicle.
Lovell

You have to have something tha t illuminates the vehicle,
not a light that flashes because you cannot tell from a
flashing light.

Borman

Especially on vehicles rotating.
possible to control them.

I do not think that i t is

You have to have a controlled

vehicle before you can judge distance from it, as far
as I am concerned.
problem.

The GO/NO GO, 17-1 TR were no

We ran through the platform-off post station­

keeping checklist just the way it is listed.
Lovell

Yes, that is where we caught most of the things.

Borman

That is where we caught most of the things like putting
the D-ring away and the drogue pins and so on.

Only one

time in flight did we require attitude control fuel to
change attitude for critical delay time playback.
was no problem.

There

Communications, as always, were superior.

The D-4/D-7 Void Measurement was again no problem;
just lined up on the black and ran for t wo minutes.
Purging of the fuel cells.

This is the first of a long--

21

Lovell

Yes , but we did not do it then,did we?

Did not we wait

until we powered down and then waited two hours?
:Borman

Tha t is right .

This is one of the things t h&t they

had in the f light plan that we asked them to change
because
Lovell

Yes, we did not purge the f'uel cells then.

:Borman

Originally, this came right after power down e.nd all
of the f'uel cell people recommended that you purge
before power down , or wait until two hours after power
down .

So we did not do it at this t i me in the flight.
D-4, D-7 star measurements.

This was changed.
was no probl em.

There

The eta.rs were well selected, and we

were right on them.

Right Jim?

Jim copied down, on

the procedures book, a check where we got the maximum
return on the needle.
Lovell

D-4 , D- 7 was a well organized experiment as far as
:Brentnall keeping us hopping about what to do .
have to admit th.at .

I will

22

:Sor:ma.n

Re did a very good job.

We knew just what to do.

had

W&

all the equip,nent with us and everything went very smoothly.
MS0--2 ana,..3 turned out to be not :much of a problem because
at about the seventh dq we turned it on and left it on for
the rest of the flight.

The Berigee Adjust :tv1.a neuver

ma.de the ~erigee Aijust Manuever.
out a platform.
up.

Jim

0

We did it on stars with­

I was timing for Jim and I think I fouled

We planned to use a perigee to 102 miles, and I think

we wotmd up with about 15 feet per second too much.
seemed like about 117 miles.
causing this was

It

One of the reasons that was

we had come back into the vicinity of the

booster, and just about midwny through the burn

the booster

venting that was still occurring suddenly lit up, became
lit up.

It looked like we were flying through a lot of

foreign objects or debris.
to hit so.m ething.

I was afraid that we were going

At the same time this trailing wire came

forward and slapped the spacecraft.
Lovell

That is where I stopped.

:Sor.man

Yes.

After we had stopped and it nit us, I looked down

and got confused and s aid, "No, we haven't burned enough",.
·&> we burned for about five seconds :more.

We had a trail­

ing primer cord that would flop around and we didn 't know

what it was at the time, but it came forward when Jim
stopped burning and flopped on the spacecraft.

It ,nade a

23

noise and I thought we had hit some of the stuff t~t was
spewing out of the booster.

I wasn't sure that it was just

fuel.

Lovell

I think the ground people thought that this wire came forward because it had gotten in the way of the thruster fire.
It definitely came forward after I stopped burning,because
I stopped burning and this wire came slapping forward.
still had the momentum, you know.
front of the window.

It

It slapped right in

I think the people got the impression

that the thing had hit a. thruster.

It hit in front of us,

then we stopped bu.ming. But we stopped' mm -taen-·ths:t thing
hit a.nd we added some more because we were still at ~ ogee.
Borman

The first a:f many powerdowns was no problem1o We went right by
the check list.

Some of these switch functions in the space

craft, particularly toward the latter pa.rt of the flight,
toward the 12th or 13th da.y--we were getting, I won't say
la.r in making the.m ,but it see.med more of a chore to make
these things right to the minute.

Things like the ~!OJ.VIED

recorder and so on--we lost interest in having them turned
off on the second.
on and off for.

We knew what they needed to be turned

We didn't do as good a job from about the

10th day on as we did the first pa.rt as far as making those
right to the minute.

24

Lovell

As a .matter of fact, why don't we get out the flight plan.
I think we might have a lot of comments on it.

Borman

Let's start from the beginning.

Lovell

The recorder was on at 27 .m inutes.

D-4/D-7 measure.m ents.

The GET of .measurement that the COLD IR was outside the

two degree field of view of the booster was at 30 ,13.
Borman

At 40s58 we had 84 %fuel left. We were right on the flight
pla.n there.

Lovell

There was another GET of measure.ment where the spacecraft

was lined outside the field of view or the booster at 38:00.
Borman

We saw the booster for 2 or 3 revolutions after tl:at.
lights were still working.

The

We called it out and t~ ground

got readings on this.
Lovell

The moon and booster were in view at 43:00.

The booster

and .moon were in view and we might get an erroneous read:tn.g
because we were almost on the .moon.
Borman

Here we have a note that at 2z32 the fuel cell Delta P
l i ght blinked off at 2 ftours and 30 minutes and then came
back on.

Lovell

Okay ,

That is t he section 2 dalta Plight .

then as far as stowage goes, the · M-1 cuff was t urned on

at 3z03,
:Borman

We put the bypass hoses on at this time also-- the ECS
bypass hoses,

Incidentally, they turned out to be not too

.m.uch of a problem,

They were very handy for the type or

25

work we did without suits on.
Lovell

Right. We took the s/c out of the horizon at 2:08 to get
some measurements,as requested fro.m DOD,after we measured
the stars.

This is after we powered down the equipment.

We connected the bypass hoses at 2:32.

This was 2 hours

plus 32 minutes.
Lovell

Crew status reports. We bad 3 or 4 a day.

Borman

5:20,we started unpacking the meals.

This is one thing

that we had trouble with• lbth left and right food boxes
were jam packed.

Fortunately ,we changed the lanyards. v,e

changed this during our stowage review , &l though it was
difficult we got them out.

Several of the meals had lost

vacuum.
Lovell

Which .made them more difficult to get out.

Borman

Really you can't co.mplain about this.

The people did the

best they could. We had an awful lot of food to store
and we were able to get them out.
Lovell

We had several blinkinge of the Delta Plight during this
period.

It went out at 6 hours, a littleleas t han 6 hours,

then came back on again at 6:27.
Borman

One thing that I wanted to find out a.bout,and I still don't
understand,is why we turned on the crossfeed valve right
after l&:w\oh.

The FC o pressure was just on the minit11.Um
2

26

or 150 pai at launch.

I called up Houston and said I

would like to leave the

gauge in the FC02 position

rather than the ECS o2 positlon.

Chris said, "No, unless

we really felt strongly about it, they would rather have it
in the ECS o position". So we left it there and after we
2
were inserted and we were still with the booster, they

came in with a recommendation that we open the cross feed.
When we did, this immediately raised the pressure to 250
psi.

The thing that was bad was that we had over 100%

o:xygen and we were down to about 100 lbs. on the FC0 2 •
We agreed that we would fly at least 50 lbs. above the do.me,
So, I really didn't see the need for opening that valve
although it didn't cause a:n:y problems.
Lovell

They wanted to pump up and make sure.

Borman

It worked fine and we got right back up to 250 lbs.

Lovell

That is one syste.m that did work fine.

Borman

The first 7 hours was pretty no.m inal.

All throughout the

flight plan we have notes that the Delta Plight went out
and came back on and so on.
Bor:man

At 16,40 we sighted a satellite .much lower and
on a slightly higher inclination path than we were.
passed underneath us.

It

It was so fe:r awa::, it looked like

a sighting from the earth.

It was just a refiection.

were very religious about the exercise periods.

We

We s-ot

27
thos e t hree times a day wi th the excepti on of the last day
and one other day when we got only two.
very good idea .

I think this is a

I t is difficult and requir es discipline

because the last thing in your mind i s the desire to exercise.

You get lazy very easily.

We di d a very extens i ve

operation with t he bungee and also i sometrics three times
a day.
Borman

They were programmed 10 minutes.

I think a more realistic

one would be about five .m inutes , three times a day.

I did

60 pulls on t he bungee cord with both hands, 20 wi t h each

leg, and then ended up with 10 with each ar.m on the bungee

cord in addition to the few f or the crew status reports.
Lovell

I did 60 pulls on the arms and 60 on each leg and it didn't
.make any differ ence.

I could have done 20 on each leg and

would have proba bly been better off.
Borman

At 45 hours J im started taking off his suit.

During that

first 45 hours our noses were clogged end stuffy, our eyes
were i rritated, t he cabin was hot ; it was miserable.

As

s oon as Jim started taking off his suit, the cabin even
though he was out of the suit and I was in, got better than
it was with both of us in our suits.
Lovell

I didn't real i ze it was that long.

We were almost up there

two full days befor e I started taking the suit off.

28

Borman

At 49t53 we got a picture of Houston with the 250 .mm l ens.
I hope it comes out.

Okay at 69t40 we did a Perigee Adjust

Maneuver, Delta V 12.4, 16.5 seconds, and came right on the
money, using the stars, no platform.

I don't think that

there is any problem at all with the proper stars in .m aking
a gross adjustment.
Lovell

I think it was an excellent idea to do it without a platform,
it takes two people.

One person times and the other person

burns on the star fro.m attitude.

Both people check the

attitudes by looking at the star charts and getting the
updates.

Then ma.king sure that the s/c is alined right

and the reticle is up to get the accuracy pretty good.

After

that, once you get it s et in your mind what you are aiming
at, one guy is in the cockpit with the watch or event
timer and clocks it.

The other guy bas to look out the

window because you can't go back and forth.

If you look

in the cockpit at the watch, you can't adjust to look out
f or the stars.

So it takes two people for that.

I think

you can do a good job without a platform.
Bor:ma.n

I do too .

Bor:ma.n

There is one thing that was a pain in the neck, and I hope
they get some good out of them, were UHF and the RF tests.
That was an hour and a half transmitting every five minutes

29
and having the HF/DF on.

I'.m not sure what kind of data

they got but I hope they got so.m ething.

The first one we

had to do on the lKJRIZ.AN SC.AN; it took so.me fuel and I
wonder really if it was worth it.

Borman

At about 166,40 we noted our drift rate picking up and we
finally determined this was from the water boiler venting.
It resulted in a left yaw rate and this continued periodically throughout the mission.

It certainly would not be

objectiona.l if we had fuel to counteract it.

During a

night period, in which we didn't do any attitude control
at all, I timed the rates during the 13th day, and when we
woke up they were about 7 degrees per second.

I timed

them around the horizon and came up with 7 degrees per
second. About the only thing you can say about it is that
it requires fuel to stop it.
It occurs primarily in left yaw and left roll.
Lovell

There are two things in the s/c that causes the yaw left
for so.me reason.

Gus first noticed it and I think it is

characteristic of the s/c.

One is the water boiler and the

other is,every tie you turn off the power it fires two
thrusters that give it a left yaw.

The same two all the

time.

Borman

We tried to beat that ever way we could.

Every time we

30

shut down 1 we put it in a different control mode and it
still fired t he same t wo t hrusters.
Every time you turn off ACME bias power it would go"boop, "
11

boop~ just like that.

Every time we were without attitude

control for extended periods we ended up with a left yaw
and a left roll.
Finally a.t 191>48 we got both crewmen suitless.
the best decision in the whole flight.

That was

The perfor:m.e.nce of

the Cryo bottles was fantastic.
Lovell

That was one thing we were worried about.

The eyd.rogen

bottle I thought was never going to last.

Forty per cent

of the eyd.rogen bottle was still left at the end of 14 days.
One thing I wanted to try was to blow the squib.

Remember

they said t1Did you blow the squi b?" I forgot about it.

Just

prior to retro, I wanted to go over there and blow that squib
that opened up into a vacuum.
:Borman

It would have taken several hours for it to do a:n:y good.

Lovell

Yes, I know, I

just thought :maybe we could hear it or

so.mething.
:Borman

One thing that cropped up more and more as the mission
progressed, it seemed to get worse as it went along was the
fa.ct that things were cm celled because of weather.

We

picked up large areas of clouds over the U. S •·and over s .

31

Ameri ca.

About the only area that stayed clear was North­

west Africa.

A lot of the experiments a.nd a lot of the

Apollo landmarks were shot because of clouds.
Borman

On the 6 l auncht the second ti.met we were abl e t o track
it.

We were not able to pick up lift-off because of c l ouds

again, but whe.n i t got t o the con l evel t above the cl ouds,
we were able to pick i t up a.nd we tracked it using IR until
we coul dn't see anymore.

Even above the con l evel I

think we were tracking the exhaust from the stage two engines using PULSE mode.

I hope we got some good data on

that.
Borman

At 2661 16 we really got col d; the sui t i nl et t emperature
dropped below 40 degrees a.nd we started squirting.water
out of t he sui t inlet hoses.

We informed Houston about thi s

a.nd they determined that the water boi l er had frozen up
a.nd they recommended a procedure t o cl ear it.

We did thi s

with Gemi ni 6 watching; esse.n tially i t involved putting the
radi ator t o BYPASS and changing some switches.
Lovell

Evaporator heat on.

Borman

Put the evaporator heat on and setti ng up t o 10 degree per
second r ol l rate.

Lovel l

That's the picture you saw i n the movies.

Borman

It actual l y threw a lot of fue l out a.nd a lot of water out.
It l eft a g lob of ice on the side of the S/ C, about 10

32
inches in diameter at the exit from the water boiler vent.
Lovell

There were only two problems that we really had.
were the Fuel Cella and the two thrusters.

There

We a lso had a

cold Spacecraft.
Borman

Yes, that is when we had that water boiler problem.

Lovell

Before that; the first time we woke up, it was 20 degrees
oolder inside.

Borma.n

Oh yes, I'm sure what had happened du.ri ng the night was
that we vented the water boiler, used the water boiler.
This is the day when we woke up and had such high rates
o.n the S/C.
survey.

Lovell

We have all that in the cabin temperature

The wall temperature was 20 degrees lower.

It was just freezing in there.

5.0 REIBOFIRE
5.1
Borman

TR-2:00

Power Up and Alignment Checklist

We had a slightl y different procedure as far as retrofire
goes.

Powering up for i t took two hours.

The power up

and alignment checklist was called up from the ground
since we had open circuited two stacks.

We turned our

ma.in batteries on and the squib batteries back on at TR
minus two hours.
Lovell

During the flight they had powered us down on the squib
batteries and put in the bus ties about the l ast week of the

33

fl i ght.
Borman

We were flying with bus ties and tu.el cells and no squib
batteries.

Lovell

To conserve the squib batteries for the r etrofire period.

Borman

Right.

Lovell

Because of that configuration, and because of the f act that
we lost two stacks, we had to modify our power up procedure.

Borman

Right .

Incidentally because of the f a.ct that we bad two

degraded thrusters, 3 and 4, we didn't use t h e ~
mode at all for this alisnment. We aliened it all manually.
The thrusters were degraded, but there was still enough in
them to allow you to get i'ine maneuvers, fine control.
used less control by turning off the circuit breaker for
thruster No . 12 and used 11, giving back t hrust and this
would give you right yaw•
.5.2 TR-26 events
Borman

At T- 26 the event timer was set, we didn't read anybody
because of our orbit , and we weren't able to start our
event timer counting down until T-20.

Lovell

T-20

Bor.ma.n

Read ou.t fro.m Carna.rvon.

I

. 34

5.3 TR-5 GMT Stop Cl ock
:Borman

At TR-5 Jim got the bug on the ei ght minutes , no probl em.

Lovell

Yes , I got tha t okay.

5 ,4 TR-256
;;,

:Borman

TR-256 Sequence light came on exa.ctl y on schedul e.

Lovell

The digital clock never lost a second during the entire
fl i ght.

:Sorms..n

We didn't touch it.

Lovel l

We di dn't touch that digital cl ock one time during the
enti re f l ight.

That i s the best instrument i n the whol e

s/c, especial ly f or this type of f l i ght when you have a
lot of updates a.nd everything.
:Borm&n

Electri ca l was no problem.
perfectly.

5.5
:Sorman

Control system, the RCS worked

It just worked beautifull y.

.Tii::1.

Retro a ttitude minus 20 degrees pi tch.

The ball had been

a l igned for two revolutions and it was perfect.

I f we

had not had the bal l , I would have been happier if we
had retro fired in the dayl i ght.

SEP OAMS , as advertised.

You hear i t.
Lovell

Yes!

:Sorman

You feel it sli ghtl y.

Lovell

That is right, a.nd you even f eel SEP ELECT.

35

Borman

Yes, and you really fee l SEP ADAP'l '.

It felt like I had put

in f orward thrust at t hat time.

Lovell

Yes .

Borman

It was really a good thud when we separated the adapter.
Retrorocket squibs were armed a t TR-30 .

Arm AUTO-RS1I1RO was

actually done at about TR- 10 .
Lovell

We did that a littl e bit early.

Borman

The event timer was perfect.

MDU, Jim got all the readouts

and they were exactly what ha d been called up.
Lovell

Yes .

There was one or two that the last digit was one nu..n­

ber off, but that is nominal.

We didn't bother that.

5.6 TR-0
Borman

From the time we got the countdown at Carnarvon we really
didn 1 t talk to a..~ybody a t all until we heard Houston at
TR- 10 seconds come in with a count through Canton.

Lovell

We didn' t think tha t they were going to come in, as a.
matter of fac t .

Borman

No, we were wondering...

Lovell

That is a very poor place to retrofire.

Canton had p oor

communications co~pared with the rest of it.
Borman

But they ca.me through t hat time.

LoYell

Yes, they ca.me through.

Borman

We really didn 1 t need them because we had every indication

that our timing was good on-board.

They did come through

but not until TR-10 seconds.

At TR equals zero the s/c

attitude was 20 degrees down.

s/c rates were easy to con­

trol, but I thought that the thrust fro.m those retro-rockets
was high.

I really had a sensation of being accelerated.

Didn't you Jim?
Lovell

Well, it was different from what I had expected because we
were so used to zero g fl i ght.

Borman

The only thing I could do was fly instruments, the needles
and the ball.

Trying to hold it right on the ball.

I was vecy glad that I was in RATE COMMAND.

I had to con­

trol it in RATE COMMAND a. little bit,particularly on the
fourth retro rocket.

The first three went bing, bing, bing.

Then there was a pause of about ½ a second and the fourth
one went.

The fourth one seemed like it was a little mis­

aligned, I think it was left yaw.

I had to bring it back.

I would like to emphasize this. I thought those retros were
really powerful, and that you were holding on to something

that if you really didn't have good control it could get
away from you pretty easily.
Lovell

But, I was sure happy to hear them go.

37

Borman

Control mode was RRte Command , ano the I VI readouts• theredid you write those down?

•

Lovell

I have them here.

BormA.n

Fe cal led them off and we h?ve them .

Lovell

This is whr,t I've been usins-.

Borman

And '.i 1e f t .

Lovell

Yes , an:i ) l eft.

'B orman

1

Lovel 1

This is usua.llJ about ....

Borman

They called up the nominP l s .

Sheparn.

':'he~' were 113 and 296 .

Lovell

Yes .

·.'hat were the nomil:.a.J s'?
nominals were.

It was 29P , and. 112 .

Let ' s .iust r.iake a not e of what the

~At was 2 off from nominal , I recPll that .... 298

actual , and 112 actuA.l , 298 aft and 112 down as the a.ctua1 s·.
l3omP.n

And 3 right.

Lovell

An<i 3 right .

'Boman

So we got in 01 ose t o the nominril , A.nd when you figure this
out on our onboard che.rt s you come up with a bank

angl e

of 50 decrees .
Lovell

That ' s why I cou 1. dn ' t unrlers tand the ~ 5--we11 , maybe I ' m
wrong but let 's take a look at this thing again.
go through it.

Donnan

All right .

Le t ' s

Lovell

That ' s a minus 1 error here, r ight?

And a pJus 2 error

there, right?
Bonnan

Right.

Lovell

Okay , so I went in here and got to a plus 2 error here,
right ?

Bom"'n

fl ight .

J,ove) 1

Wp..nt up here to a

minus , here ' s the zero mark right her e,

to a minus one error ; where this thing crossed this thing
right np to here , plus 2, and by eosh, it came right out to

50 degrees or s3 degrees .
Borman

They

gave ue 55 degrees roll l eft, which is what the nomi­

nal l evel was . ..
Lovell

I ' ve got i t right here .
what they gave us .

Fi fty degrees and 60 deGrees is

Bank l eft 50 degrees and bank right

60 deerees.

"'B orman

Yes .

T,ove ll

~n~

so I looked up the ch~rt and it said 50 QeP,rees as t~e

b~ck uu angl es--everything was working just l ike a charm
anrt then I went back here to the ban k contonr line to get
out our down range defl ection , and it was 1 or 2 miles , I ·
think it was , no , 5 mil es overshoot ; which w~s just ahout
as cl ose as you can hack it .
t■

And I t hought oh boy, this

realJy , talk about nominRl reentry , this is the one

that's eoinc to be it , and then the? came up wi th 35
degrees , 45 deerees, and I rni sinter~reted it ; I was
a rgui ng with Prank e.fter r e t ro fire ann he says no , that ' s
30 degrees-- 50 deerees.
:3orr.ian

50 degrees .

Love ll

53 decrees is what he ' s sayin[j .
down to a l ittle finer line .

!-re ,ius t wan t s to ge t it

J\nd then Prank called bnck

again An•i SR.id , "!'To , it wr-ts -i5 de£7ee s , " so I non ' t know
what t he s t or;y w?. s there.
Borman

'P.;e :-'D I as .fA.r as the r e trofire r,-oes , i t was r.o rrohlem .

.

It worked out t:'ine , ano I jus t l ike to have 1. ' ' I t h:ink .
If you ren. 1 ly were forced into it you cot>ld <io i t on rate
neerll.es , but you ' d have to have a lo t of confiiience in
your ability to hold i t .

T

wou ldn ' t. want t o do it with­

out r:ate Command; and again , I did it in ;:ate r.omrnRnd .

T' m not e ven sure how nuch the t hr usters we r e flrjnc -ivrincret rofire .

DU you riotice?

I was watchinc the b,·l l , f'.r rl

I dUn ' t noti ce .
Di d it light up the horizon pretty hadl~r?
Lovell

H

WfW

real ly r.ot too b~d .

But ac t ua lly ; yeo , it ,iir1 , it

lit i t up ouite a bi t .
;i'CSD !leo

Okay .

Lovell

There was a point in the flight plan that they wanted the

40

Pilot to evaluate the horizon for a night, no pl atform,
retro.

And the thing is this:

you can turn out all the

lights , you can get lined up for BEF retrofire, without a
plat£orm if you get the stars and everything.

But once you

start firing, you &re going to have to use the ra.te needles,
if' they are working,

to hold position, because you can't see

the horizon 8J1Y longer, because the thrusters do blank out
8J1Y sight outside.

And also, if you've got the lights

turned up in the cockpit, so that you can see thingeJ that
means that you can't see outside.

So, you have to go either

outside to get cues, or you have to turn the lights out in
the cockpit.

And if you're going to use stu£f inside, then

you have the lights on.

I would be hesitant to make a night

retrofire without platform too.

I think I would probably

wait £or a. da.y one.

5.7 Retro Pack Jettison
::Bonnan

The retro pack jettison - Jim fired ••• the one thing here on
manual f ire , Jim fired the manual retros the wa;y we alwqs
have.

We fired in the wa;y we a.lwa;ys h&ve, one second a..fter

TR equals zero, but we go t an auto retrofire .
Lovell

Yeah, because the first one fired before I pushed the
button.

41

Borman

That was right on the money.

The retro pack jettison was

accomplished 45 seconds after, when the amber light came
on, and you could feel and hear this one going; of course,
it was pitch black so we couldn't see a thing.

This was

one of the things that we didn 't see, the REI'RO ADAPrER ,
the ADAPI'ER , or the RETROPACK .
Lovell

No , I didn't see any of that stuff go at all.

Bor:ma.n

Total darkness.

Lovell

Besides that, the thrusters blank out anything you could
possibly see.

5.a Communications and 5.9 updat ing
Bor:ma.n

Com.unmications were rather sketchy there.

I was very glad

though, that we were able to get through to Houston.

I

think it was over Guaym.as when they came up and told us to
change in retro angle, and bank angle; I don 't know who did
that but that was good work on the ground following up that
computing, and getting us real time updates, I guess they
must have done it after tracking.
Lovell

Yes,

That 's probably what it was.

Borman

That's probably how they did it.

Lovell

Yes.

Borman

Because the 35 degrees, I was flying right between 35 de­

And that was darn good.

grees and O degrees most of the time , and if we'd have
followed the 50 degrees, we'd have ended up way short.

42

So that was very good work on the gro-.md ' s part.
Lovell

It looks like the initial computation of retrofire time
was off, and they already had a good o~bit on us.

Borman

I don't kno~ what it was, but they corrected it when we
came in.

Borman

5.10 Post Retro Jettison Checklist
The post retro jettison checklist was accomplished with no
problem.

Oh, I'm thinking; we did have some discussion about

as far as the retro goes.

With the--we ' ll cover this more

fully under su.i.ts. The question was whether to leave those
hoods on or off for retrofire. We found th,'3-t the noise and
the--I don't know why ~e didn't notice this at launch, but we
did during reentry , the noise from the air blowing in the G5C
suits was an impediment to crew discussion.
Lovell

It would go on the mikes and make a lot of noise on th;
mikes.

Borman.

The mikes picked up a lot of whistle.

Plus the fact that the vision out of that thing certainly
needs to be imporved.

So, we didn't kno,1 what to do--·,.;e

finally decided to leave them on for retro.fire.
6.0

6.1
Borman

REENTRY

Reen-gz Parameters '[:edate

Reentry.

400,000 feet, we had that time updated; and at

400,000 feet I rolled left 55 degrees, because this ... or
fif ty degrees, the value of the backup angles at tha t time .

43

6.2 400K
Borma.n

Spacecraft attitude a.t 400,000 feet wa.s difficult to determine.

We di dn't h.a.ve & horizon until we were below 350,000

feet, a.nd I was having & lot of trouble trying to find it.

Jim, you got the horizon first on your side.
Lovell

Yes, the horizon ca.me up first on my side.

Well, we did not

have it right at 350 ,000 feet, but we coul d look out between RCS firings and see the air glow, if you'd stuck your
face right up there and l ook out.

But when you're doing the

reentry on the instruments you have the lights up so, one
guy ca.n't do it, you have to have two guys; one to look out
and find out where the horizon is and- Borman

That was a heck of a thing.

I'd like to be a.ble to cross

check between the balls and the horizon once in a while t o
make sure that I knew exactly where we were.

As it tu.med

out this was a completely instrument reentry.

We fina.lly

found the horizon &nd Jim would tell me yes, it's about in
t he right pl&ce.

But I just watched the ball.

And I think

that it would be vecy difficult t o back up a reentry by
watching out the window.
guidance for you, and tell

One person could provide backup

44

you where you a.re and what the ba.nk angle looks like with
the horizon.

But, I don't think tha.t a person that i s fly­

ing the reentry ca.n. cross check between the ball a.nd the

horizon.
it.

I think you have to ma.ke your choice and l ive with

Okay, roll commands were just like the s imula.torJ t ime

correlation was good.

The guidance initiate came right on

the money, and the needles jumped indicating an undershoot,
a slight undershoot.

From then on we just flew it the way

we 'd flown them a hundred times in St. Louie and in the simulator.

I think we were ve-ry well prepared for t his .

I

tried to fly it so that we took i t down.range, and we got a
slight overshoot indication on downrange of about 1 needle
width, 1 dot.

Then as we got down to a.round 2 g's or 2½- g's,

I tri ed to start zeroing it out , so then when 3 g's oameJ
the downra.nge was pegged right on the money.
indicating zero on the cross range.

And we were

And at 3 g's I switched

to flying the roll bug, and. just zeroing the roll bug; and
a.s we came on down further and further the do'Nnrange stayed

zero, but the cross range started going off full scale.
Well, this really doesn' t mean anything because all the
cross ra.nge is indicating is

45

your per cent or miss verses per cent of capa.bili ty.

And

down on that range what it was really doing was, we were
coming in a little bit sho~t, and it was sacrificing the
cross range in order to get the down range cleared up, because the cross ra.nge wu vecy sm.e.11 ~ •
Lovell

There -was a bias in the dow ra.nge needles between his ball
and m:y ball, a.nd I think, th.&t fortunately,~ ball -wa.s the
one that was out.

Because when he was right on.

:Borman

You said we were overshooting &11 the time.

Lovell

Yes.

Re was

right on - I said you were overshooting, it wa.s

about a needle and a half width bias.
:Borman

Okay.

The initial indication of g's, I remember Jim called

over and sa.id, "how ma.ny g's a.re we on now." I said l ess
than one" and you said "get serious." I think you coul dn't
believe it. The first onset you feel like you ha.ve about a
ton on you, but then as it builds up it never seems to get
mu.oh worse.

It's almost u

if it were a. step function.

As

soon as you get the g you rea.lly notice it, and then you
don't notice it much more.

And the ma.rlmum g's th.at we

pulled during the reentry were 3.9.
Lovell

Yes, that a.ma.zed me.

I actu&lly thought we did pull more

g's.
:Borman

3.9 g's. So, it was a long extended time.

Lovell

Yes.

Borman

During the later part of it I started out in PULSE Mode and
:rolled over the 55 degrees in PULSE Mode, and. then when we
eot Guidance Initiate I went to DIRECT.

I was finding that

in order to keep the cros11 range zeroed, and we had been
told that Wally

had trouble with his cross range, I was

banking back and forth quite frequently maneuvering the
spacecraft around the full lift point, from one side to the
other and I was overshooting a little bit in DIRECT.

I was

also starting to pick up some pitch and yaw oscillations, so
then I went to single ring RATE COMMAND.

And boy, this was

really a great control mode, it "'8.S steady as a :rock.

You

could put it right where you wanted and it st~ed there.
But pretty soon we eot dow a:round, I guess it was when the
g's were coming off, after 3.9 g•s.

I started losing it in

single ring RATE COMMAND so I threw two rings on and it held
it like a rock.

:But they were sure firing.

Lovell

Oh, yes.

Borman

Boh, those thrusters were really firing.
getting abla.tion off the heat shield.

And we started

It was coming back in­

and hitting the nose of the spacecraft, and that was pretty

47

sensational.

Jim was giving vivid descriptions on what was

happening, a.nd I was watching the ba.11.
Lovell

That's one thing that no one had ever told us before.
a.ma.zed.

I was

Maybe it was peculiar to the spacec.raft.

Borman

No, Tom and Wally

h.a.d mentioned it.

Lovell

Oh, is that r i ght? That ablative material went back and hit
the forward end near the recovery section, rather the RCS
secti on; and I thought well, I never heard of this before,
and I was a little worri ed that maybe we were too fa:r off,
a.nd the stuff was going to start getting into recovery
sections.

Borman

But

it tiirned out to be okay.

Another thing was that the windows really got scrounged up
on that ree.ntry; that's something else.
out of my window.

I could hardly see

Stu.ff was coming over from the heat

shield and hitting it.

It was really gunky.

6. 3 Aceelera.tio!!,_Pro.file

Borman

Okay.

The acceleration profile was very smallo

It was a

very high 11.ft reentry, and of course, this results in a
low g and long duration build up.

No problem at all.

604 Spacecr&ft Control
Borman

Spacecra.ft control was excellent until we g'Ot down to
100,000 .feet or even below 100,000 .feet.

We turned on

48

the LANDING SQUI:B a.t 100,000 feet and sat th.ere and watched.
it.

6.5 lOOK Feet
Borman

I started losing it; I think we may have run out of RCS fuel
between 100,000 feet a.nd 50,000 feetJ at lea.st I thought we
had.

6.6 50K Feet
Lovel l

Wel l, didn't you turn off the RCS?

Borm8Jl

I didn't turn th&t off until a.fter we got on the drogue. We
were starting to build up the yaw and pitch rates.

Then at

50,000 feet, I was anxiously a.wa.i t :l ng the drogue, because
these rates were building up a little.
bad yet, though.

They weren't very

I pushed t he drogue expecting it to de­

crease, and all it did wa..s a.m.plify th.em.

And we got a. .real

ride on the drogue for a. whil e, sounded like the one Jim and

Ed discussed.

It was r e&ll y going pretty bad.
About 70 degrees.

Lovel l

Our angles were what?

We pitched up?

Borman

Oh no, I estima.te we were oscillating back and forth maybe
20 degrees.

Lo<rell

From the drogue here pitching up we were rolling back a.:nd
forth more than 20 de.grees on that initial pa.rt.

49

Borman

We'll have to see.

We don't have readings on that .

Lovell

Okay, because I'm sure we did more than 20 degrees.

:Borman

Then I t hrew the motor valves back open age.in on the thrusters, and that seemed to stop it.

So I left them open a

while and finally turned them on again and it stopped, and

As

it settled out, and it was pretty smooth on the drogue.
a matter of fact, when we got dow to ma.in chute, it we.a

steady as a rock on the drogue.
Lovell

Yes.

6.7 35K Checklist
Borman

I turned off the RCS motor valves a.nd blipped t he thrusters
to clear the lines between 30,000 feet to 26,000 feet.

And

Jim then opened--The 40K ba.rostat worked fine.

6.8 Communicatiol_!!!
Borman

And we gave the reentry status report.

I 'm not sure th&t

Houston heard it, but we told them the drogue was all risht
and okay.

6.9 26K Checklist
Borman

Jim, at 26,000 feet you opened the vent air snorkel

50

and we got a cabin full of

I don't know what it was.

Lovel 1

You had your hood off.

Why?

Borman

I took my hood off to try to find the horizon , so I made
the reentry with the hood off .

Lovell

Okay, I had my hood on, and I think when we opened up the
snorkl e; the way that works, the snorkl e draws air through
t he suit compressor, and then into the suit circuit•
I had my hood on ; and the flow comes out of an opening
back here in the hood, and flows down .

I got an eye

ful l of something that was an acid.
Borman

Acid, eh?

Lovell

Yes.

Really burned my eyes.

My eyes were watering when I

finP,lly got the hood off.
Borman

We 11 , we accomplished all t he checklists, and we had no
problems; as a matter of f act, i t went pretty smooth

in

the time between the drogue deploy and the 10.6 barostat.
6.10 10 . 6 K Barostat

Borman

It was just like the s i mul a t or.

One th i ng I did notice,

initially, when we were on the drogue, t he altimeter was
completely inaccurate.

You couldn't even read it.

We

were oscillating so bad l y that it was jumping in thousands
of f eet per second· , oh maybe not thousands, but the needles
were going a l l over the place; and I remember thinking boy ,

51
if this oscillation doesn' t s top, I' ll have to punch the
main chute on the amber l ight, rather than the altime ter .
But the oscil l~tions did stop.
6. 11
Boman

Hain Chute Deployment

I punched the main chute at 10 , 600 f eet as indicated on
the altimeter , and just a millisecond. aft er that, the
yellow l i ght came on the 10.6 baros tat l ight .

The

thing deployed immedia t e ly into a reefed condit ion , and we
examined it in the reefed condition and it l ooked very good_
LoveJl

Frank thought it was in the reef ed con<lition for 3 months .

Borman

It seemed like it s tayed reefed for a long time , then it
unreefe<l , and I couldn ' t find one gore or one pane l that
was ripped or frayed or anything .

Love ll

It was a good chl1te .

Borman

Perf e ct chute.

6. 12 Post Main Checklist
Rorman

We accompl ished the post main checklist, anrl then we
braced oursel ves very well and wen t to the single point. of
a ttitun e .
6.13

Bormim

Single Point Re l ease

When we went to the s ingle point attitude it was exac tly
the same as we had had it at St . Louie--where they ' d
rigged--they had a test after John and Gus ' s fl ight .

They

put a test capsul e suspens ion at St . Louis, and this was

52

e:x:actly the same.

You get a. good whack and then you sit

there and vibra.te ba.ck a.nd forth for a little bit.

6.14 2X Checklist
Borman

2,000 foot checklist we accomplished with no problem.

About

this time, at 2,000 feet, I heard Air Boss calling and we
started communicating with Air Boss.

I saw him flying around

while we were still on the chute. Houston came throU8h
a.bout this time and wanted to lmow if we had a. main chute.

I'd ca.lled a.11 these things off, but I guess th.at the comxmmica.tions-maybe the Auto Cats weren't working or something.
Lovell

Air Boss should have called back a.nd said•••

Borman

But I called back and confirmed main chute.

6.15 Landing
Borman

We hit the water with a. pretty good thud, and your window
went under water, didn't it? Jim's window went under watero
We hit in a drift. We were drifting to the right rear, and
there was a 14 knot wind, and when we hit the sp&eecra.ft
rolled to the right, and your window went under the W&ter,
and mine eticy-ed up.

Lo-vell

Nothing serious tho'U8h,.

Nothi.n g serious.

6.16 Postlanding Checklist
Borman

We extended the .RF antenna. to get e. test for them &nd went
on HF-DF; I hope that somebody heard it. But they had

53

swimmers there in a.bout 4 minutes, and so I put the HF
antenna back down to keep it from getting da.maged.
conducted the electrical check.

And we

I musts~ that I'm gl ad

that the electrical check was simple, because it was hot in
there, and we were tired.

I was worried about this before

and I would never have been able to sit there Blld go t hrough
this complicated, long check.
Lovell

We had both pl8l'llled, that what we were going to do was take
off our suits in the spacecraft, and wear our orbital flight
suits. And I think that we probably would never have gotten
out of the suits, because we were just too hot and too beat .

:Borman

It was even hot in the spacecraft, so Jim came through with
the idea of opening the :repress valve, and this wa.s great.
We bad a.11 that oxygen and you weren't going to use it.

It

blew all that cool oxygen out and we had o2 HI RATE and the
snorkel on.

So we stqed pretty cool when you get right

down to it.

So it was a. good idea.

I don't know if you got

the blood pressure measurements or not, did you?
6.17 Blood pressure measurement
Lovell

I took them, I don't know whether they came out or not.

I

put the reprogre.mmer on in the water and started ta.king blood

54
pressure measurements a.nd--but that ' s harrl to do.
ought to comment on that.

I

Because to take a blood

pressure measurement you had to pump up the thing and
leave your handsstill, and leave your arms still until
it bleerts down ; we ll it takes a little while for it to
bleed down.

Meanwhile , Frank ' s got the checklist out and

the guys out there are putting on the collar, and we're
trying t o throw switches and take this and t hat; I ,just.
thought I might as well start doing it with my other ~a.r.n.
Ilorman

Same way with the blood pressure they requested over
Guayrnas during reentry, I make a comp1ete testimonial here ;
I think once the reentry starts that everything e lse cets
l eft aside, and you <lon ' t nP-ss around with blood pressures,
or experiments or anything else.

From then on it ' s sort

of a case of surviving the darri thing .

I didn't wan t rim

messing a.round looking for a bl ood pressure ; so we diiln 1 t
do it.

About thA.t time we cou ldn ' t find the horizon any­

way.

Lovell

We got called up from the MCC

Borman

But , anyway, we didn ' t do it.

Lovel]

That ' s the first I 'd heard of it when they cal l

So it didn ' t bother us .
up.

7.0 .LANDING AN]) RECOVERY

7.1
Borman

Impact

We were drifting backwards, blunt end forwar d , rather, as

55
we hit the water,

Although it was a good jolt, I wouldn't

say it WR.S anything outstanding.

We hit , and Jim, your

window went under water, right?
Lovell

The snacecraft rolled to the right, I believe .

Borman

Yes.

We hit, rolled to the right, and you went uncier water

and bobbed right up.
Lovell

Right

Borman

I released the parachute and it fl oated in front of us for
several minutes.

Lovell

I saw part of it on the left hand side there, or rather on
the right hand s ide as i t fl oated by my window,

BoI'J'llan

It stayed there for several minutes .

It ' s just the way

it 's been described before.
Love11

There was an awful lot of fog on the window, though.
noticed tha t
see out.

I

the humidity was such that you could hardly

Very foggy .

Borman

I'm not sure that was humidity or that was f rom reentry .

Lovell

Might have been from reentry, I don ' t know.

Borman

I did see the S2F on the chute.

We saw it whi le we were

sti Jl on the chute coming down,
7 .2
Love ll

Checklists

The onl y thing I had about the checklists; during the
recovery phase, I had a hard t ime doing the checkl ist, in
fact, I had to give it to you, because I couldn't move my

56

ann doing the blood pressure work.

And that compl icates

the recovery phase of it quite a bit .
Bonnan

Yes .

Lovel l

I think it also compromised the blood pressures that way
too.

Borman

We didn't feel like running foot races when we finally hit
the water.

We had planned to get out of our pressure

suits into that orbital flight suit, but the effort was
just too great . So,we jus t opened t he repress valve to get
some more cooling in there and sat .
Love l 1

That ' s right .

We opened up t he repress valve; di d we have

the cabin fan on?
Borman

No, we didn ' t have t he cabin f an on .

He had the snorkle

val ve with the suit fans and t he o HI HATE and the re­

2

press valve open.
Borman

The checklists were all right then as far as you 're concerned?

Lovell

Yes.

I thought the recovery phase was very good.

I missed one or t wo.

I t hink

I know I didn ' t turn all the s tack

switches off, but the power and control switches were off
during the reentry phase; so, there was no problem there .

7 , 3 Communications
Boman

UHF .

We had communicat ions with Air Boss whi l e we were

still on the chute, and we had very good communications

57
with them in the wa ter.
via UHF were poor.

The communications with Houston

Once we were on the drogue they kept

calling us asking us to confirm main chute.

I' m not sure

they ever hea r d us conf irm main chute.
Lovell

I've often wondered about t ha t .

Watching the other apace­

craft come in, why they don't call; and I found ou t that
they do call but they ca..~•t get through.

Must be the

rel ay pl anet troubl e or something.
Borman

Communi cations wi t h recovery forces on UHF was excel lent.
HF:

we ext en<ied t he HT<' ant enna, put out HF- DF t one for

awhil e.

Again I am not sure if anyone picked it up or not .

We retracted it af ter i t had been up only 8 minutes , because of the f act that we did not want to get the HF
antenna broken of f during the recovery operation.
Lovell

There was no need for HF communications since we vere so
close to the recovery group.

Bonnan

The chopper was over us about 5 or 6 minutes after landi ng .
We had much better UHF communications, so, we di d not use
HF.
On point of impact, onboard data.

Within t he l i mits

of the readability of that scal e, it was excellent .
range and cross range needles were fine.

Down

We actua lly

ended up about 8 or 9 miles from the carrier.

You just

can't get much finer infomation out of the down range and

58

cross range .
Lovell

Did you have any kind of a mal function in the accelerometer?

Boman

No, but Spacecraft 6 did .

I don 't remember that being

a condition of the be t.
J.ovel l

I didn ' t either.

Boman

Ground Information .

The ground gave us excellent inforl!la­

tion, as f ar as everything we needed to know, inc l uding
recomputing the guidance angles after retro .
did an exce llent job.
receiving that .

The ground

Tracking data, I don ' t remember

When Spacecra ft 6 was ent ering, they

kept tell ing them that they were fine, a.nrl they wer e goi.ng
right down the s l ot anti everything.

J do not remember

ever hP.aring from the ground on anything Jike that on ours,
do you?

Perhaps we did and we were s o engrossed in flyi ng

it, t hRt we did not notice it.
Love Jl

We ll , we had good communications pri or to b l ackout over
GuayrnRs .

After we started guiding, going into th e atmos­

phere, communications went t o pot.
Boman

Status of recovery.

I <lo not think recovery cou1d have

been any better .
Lovell

Very smooth .

7. 4 Systems Configuration
Borman

The ECS, as we said before, we had o2 HI RATF. with both

59

suit fans, snorkel valve open, and the vent valve open .
We a]so opened the repress valve.

Electrical:

We per­

formed a simple electrical check.

We turned off 3 and 4J

l eft 1 anrl 2 on, and watched for the variation in voltage
on the main buses.

The bus that is fed by land 2 bat­

teries varied with wave action.
But 3 and 4 dirl not move from zero.

Lovell

That is right.

Borman

And then you turned off squib batteries land 2 also didn't
you?

Lovell

I left squib battery 3 on.

Borman

Squib battery 3 was the only one that was on.

Lovell

Control:

We turned off the platform, the computer,

the circuit hreakers to the thrusters, and the RCS
thrusters.
Borman

He l eft the comput er in PRELAUNCH for 48 seconds or more,
before we turned it off.

Aeromedical, no comment.

Except

blood pressure being a nuisance, anrl perhaps even a
hindrance when we were trying to go around the cockpit
with the switches and you had to ho 1d one arm stil 1.

7.5 Spacecraft Status
Boman

RCS fumes:

When you open the snorkel at around 26,000

feet you get a good load of them.
Lovell

I am not sure what kind of fumes they were.
familiar to me.

They were not

I have smelled the results of fuel in the

60

RCS system,and I know what that smells l i ke i t . It did not
sme l l that way .

I got a burning sensation in my eyes ,

which was diff erent .
centrated one .

Now, I might have got a mor e con­

I still had my helmet on , and zipped up ,

You had your helmet off .

I be1ieve, t hat witr. the snorke l

open , the compressor ~u1Jed the ambient air through the
snorkel through the compressors and into the suit circuit .
That i s why I got a concentrated rlose of whatever was on
the outside, which causert my eyes to wa t er ann to burn .
Whether it was the ablative material , the shing1 es , or
the RCS f umes , I do not know.
Borman

The main chute was perf e ct .

Lovell

Looked beaut iful .

Borr.tan

I coul d not see a rip or a t ear or any fraying or anything ; i t wa.s just perfec t .
flight .

The windows were fo(!gy in

I thought they fogged over and the visibi lity

out of them during the hot part of the re entry , was very
poor a l so .
Love11

They started to burn a little bit .
on the outs ide.

Rorman

Started to peel off

I do no t know what i t was .

When we eot on the wa ter t hey were fog~ed over with humidity and salt spray .
Leaks:

I guess you have to expec t that ,

There were none , that I know of .

Conldn ' t se e

61

any or hear any.
Lovell

I did not see a:ny leaks.

Borman

Electrical Power:

We mentioned we had 1 and 2 main

batteries on, and when we evacuated the spacecraft, we
turned all four of them on per the checkl ist.
everything but the rescue beacon.
ampl e, very good.

Turned off

F.lectrical power was

We were running both suit fans.

Lovell

Oxygen:

Went to repress valve open.

Borman

We went through that swiftly, as a matter of fact , to
keep cool.

Love ll

'vie noticed before we got out

that both the bottle pressures

were down to zero.
Borman

Hatches:

After one of the swimmers said we were clear to

open the hatches, I unlocked mine.

It operated very

freely and easily.

I could budge it about 2 i nches, but

I could not lift it.

I probab ly could have if I had

exerted a l ot of effort, and gotten my Jegs up under me.
However, the swimmer was right outside, and I asked him
to he l p.
wel l .
Lovell

Ile helped and it came right open, worked very

We had the suit on and left them on.

We were warm, undoubtedly.

Getting out of the spacecraft

as quickly as we did helped us.
Borman

That was the smart thing to do.

62

Lovel l

I wouldn 't want to sit in there with our suits on.

13onnan

Plus , I thought the visibility of that suit during reentry left a l ot to be desired.

That is why I had to

pu1 1 my hood back to find out where we were end what
position we were in.

I think the suit is an exceJ.lent one ,

but i t is going t o have to be improved.

We be tter grab it

and start working, modifying it ; to make it acceptab l e for
Apoll o.

The sea condition was very goon ; 2 to ,1. foot

waves .

We bobbed around, although I got a 1itt l e queasy,

I did not get nauseated, Jim didn't either.
Lovell

The sea condition was outstanding for landing.

7. 6 Postlanding Activity
Borman

Postlanding act ivity was well organized.

We were a li t t l e

busy.

We did not get t hru until about 10 o'clock that

night.

Is that right ?

Lovell

Yes, that is right .

Borman

He harl a little misunderstanding about riding a bicycl e.
We understood we were not supposed to rirle until 18 hours
after impact.

They wanted us to ride it thA.t night after

we had been through a full day of medical exams, and
finally had a good supper.

So , we told them they would

have to hold off until 18 hours after impact.

FCSD Rep

You are still in the spacecraft for this part.

On :postland.1nc we just sat there .

Borman

Okay.

Lovell

We l l, we went through the check-off list.
the time .

That took al1

I saw the swimmers, checked the electrical

system, that they wanted us to do for postl anding.
that time the swimmer had the collar up.

By

I couJrl see the

collar going up, and then he got the jacket on .
Borman

We ha.d good commun i cation with t he swir:uner through thA.t
jack .

Lovell

Excellent communicati ons with the swimmer.

7 . 7 Com f ort
Borman

It gets pretty wa rm in that sp~cecraft.

I would hate tn

spend any great deal of time in there without any F.C:i .
Lovell

I can speak as an authority on that.

7.8 Recovery Poree Personnel
Borman

We covered communications, it was exce llent .

Flotation

co1Ja.r was fine, wor ked good.

7 ,9
Borman

F.gress

Egress was normal, just as we practiced in Galveston Day
several times.

These helicopters did a fine ~oh.

I

think someone said it was about 23 minutes after we landed
that we were on our way back.
7.10
Bom an

Survival Gear

Even the underarm life pr eservers inflated this time .
Wonder of wonders.

No prob1em .

64
7.11 Crew Pick Up
Boman

The crew pick up was nominal.

Lovell

Nothing else.
8.0
8 .1

Borman

Everything was fine .

SYSTEMS OPERATION

Ple.tfom

We aligned the platform 3 t imes.
just as advertised.
prob] em.

Lovell

W:ach time it worked

Daytime alignrnent,of course,was no

We got very ample yaw reference out the window.

Caging, for fast heat dropout took approximately 23
minutes.

Boman

Night time, the initial alignment is a litt1e difficult i f
you do not have a full moon.

With a fu 1 1 moon it is al­

most as easy at night as it is in the daytime.

It rea 1.ly

lit the terrain up.
Lovell

To get your initial spacecraft attitude, the full moon
is very nice .

Borman

Right, without a full moon, I think it woul d take you a
little whi le to align to get your Spacecraft BEF, so that
you would not have to torque the platfom too far for
alignment.

Lovell

You get to know the stars.

"!3orman

Yes, you have to use the stars .

It would be difficult

to pick up the ground and track it.

Platform Morl es: CAGE.

Jim ~aid that took 23 minutes for a fast heat drop out.

65

SF.F worked perfectly.

BEF worked perfectly.

ORB RATE

s eemed to be fine ,

We used it preparing for the rendezvous

with Spacecraft 6.

After running OP.BRATS fo r

approximately an hour , and then going back to align S P.P ,
we did not notice a great amount of misalignment.
only time it was on F'RF:E was during reentry,

?he

I cuess the

FREF. worked fine .

Lovell

No probl em about displays , were there ?

Boman

lfo , not at all ,

Lovell

Been using- them for a couple of years now.

'B orman

No prob l em about contro l s .
well ,

~'h~ PLATFORM mode worked

During our last alienment, we had degraried opera... ion

in thrusters~ and 4; so we aliened it manually f or 2
orbits .

It was very easy to no , ann it worked fine .

We had eJ l the confidP-nce in the worl ri as far A. S atti tude
reference is concerned,
8 . 2 OAJIS

'Rorinan

OAMS

operational che ck, Pad:

I

tr.ink we went arnunn

the horn about~ times before they were satisfieri.
Lovel 1

It took three circuits to s et them ,

Borman

Ri gr t ,

Inflight O~J~S :

The on ly ooerati0nal er.eek we harl

is when we lost the complete authority in yaw richt,
thrusters 3 and 4,

We noticed this first 1n PULSE mode;

•

66

we switched to DIRECT and in DIRECT we did not e;et. a.ny
ignition at all as far as I could tell .

In t he OAHS PULSE

yaw righ c, we were getting slight little pops .

It seemed

we had about { control authority that we had before we
experience~ the probl em.
effect
a.

We went to DIRECT, to see what

DIREC11 ha<l on it and we got some thrust, but i t was

'1•hishing.

thrusters.

We weren't getting any sound of the

It was a whishing sound .

T think we were only

getting an impulse either from the oxi<lizer or the fuel
escaping.
Lovell

We couJd hear a cJicking of the solenoids or the operation
of the va l ves, whatever they were back there .

They were

worki ng all r ight, but we were not eetting any resuJtant
thrust.
Borman

Right.

Systems Monitoring :

Source pressure was fine .

Went right down t he predicted sche<lule .
Lovell

As a mRtter of fact, the s ource pressure dropped, just a r
pre<licted , when we ran out of initial 0.Al18 fuel before we
went to the re serve tank.

Tt came back in at;air. when we

actuated the squib.
Ilorman

?To , that wasn't the source pressure, that was the regul ated
pressure.

Lovel l

I mean the regulated pressure, I'm sorry.

Borman

The source temper ature

worked fine throughout the flight.

67

The regul a t ed pressure stayed at 300 , r ight on the money,
throughout the ent ire flight until the auxiliary tank was
actuated .

We ot:>erated the auxiliary tank when the nressure

dr opped about 30 psi .
Love l l

Yes .

IlonnAn

Right .

It went down to about 260 or 270 .
It crune right ba ck up , and the system worked just

exactly as advertised.
worked fine.

The prope1.1ant ouantity gauge

Por most of the flight it was right in

ae-reement with the ground comt:>utations.
Love] J

1

Borman

About 2 percent to 3 percent .

Lovell

And we s ti ll had 300 psi r egulated pressure .

Borman

Source pressure remained about 1,000 psi .

:/hat wa.s the final pro"9e lJ ant quantity reading?

OAMS propellant remaining:

Monitoring of

On board in fomat ion I thought .

The OAMS propellant quantity gauge, wor ked fine .

was good.
Lovell

At least it was on the s i de favoring us .

:Sorman

Yes.

The ground in.formation was excellent.

At the end of

every da,y they gave us ground r undown of how much O.AMS fue l
we had remaining.

O.&MS fuel.

It worked out fine.

Any time we di dn't have a s~ecific assi gnment,

we were in drif t ing f l ight.
tioned.

We were short on

That's one thing we want men­

Every time we powered down we' d turn off the ACME

bias power and the ACME inverter, and invariably t h i s would

68

• two pulses of
end up in

yaw left and roll left.

ti

ti
tha t would tend to
bump, II "bump,

And the natural tendency of

the spacecraft to yaw left due to water boiler venting,
I guess, and perhaps ECS venting, was aggravated by this
added impulse of two blips when we shut down the ACME.
How about the selector controls and switches i n the
cockpit?
Lovell

No comments t here.

Borman

I don't have any either.

The attitude controller, I thought,

was fine.

Maneuver controllers were fine.

Lovell

No problems.

The right hand maneuver controller was a very nice operating
controller and it was very handy.

Borman

Very easy to operate.

As far as inflight malfunctions or irregularities, we lost
aut hority on thrusters 3 and 4.

We got some of our yaw

righ t capability back by turning off the circuit breaker for
Thruster 12 and then thrusting backwards with the maneuver
controller in order to give us yaw right.

This wor~ed very

well and enabled us to check yaw right drift rates and
enabled us to make yaw right maneuvers.

The only thing-­

you couldn't get very small control inputs with this mode.
Lovell

And you used a lot of gas.

Borman

And you used a lot of gas.

I was very happy when we finally

··-◄ - ..-...
.;J,, ... , : · -

-

L.

:-...

..

•-t

'ii

69

._
~

aligned the platform for reentry that we were able to get
enough control out of 3 and 4 to align the platform.

'When

we did this, of course, in order to get yaw control we went

I don't have

to roll jets - pitch, and that worked fine.
anything to add to that malfunction.
working.

We heard the solenoids

When we went to DIRECT we could feel we did get an

impulse, but we did not seem to get ignition.
more like a swishing noise.

It sounded

The ground ana.lyzed it and

seemed to think it we.s a problem with the valve seats.

I 'm

not certain what it wa.s. I do know that we also tri ed s econdary drivers and that didn't help.

I coul d tell that wasn't

the problem when we f i rst heard it.
Lovell

We tried different modes--PULSE, DIRECT, a.nd RATE COMMAND ,
but tb.a.t didn't help.

Borman

I think it was mechanica l problem.

RATE COMMAND is a very tight control mode.

I'm very glad i t

was there.

I think it is very important to have that for

retrofire.

We also used it for reentry.

very good mode.

I think it is a

Of course, it is expensive in .f'uel .

We

used it also for all our thrusting when we were making orbi t
adjust maneuvers.
Lovell

Let me ask a question.

When did you go to RATE COMMAND

during the reentry?
Borman

I went to RATE COMMAND during reentry Lfte:r guidance initi-

70

ate and after I started f lying the needles.
Lovell

Because you were overshooting with DIRECT?

:Borman

Right.

I was not able to get the fine control I wanted.

It would not stay in there.

It seemed like the spacecraf't

was picking up a torque in roll also, and I was having to
watch it too close.
Lovell

And this was different th&n what we had in the simulation.

:Borma.n

Yes.

REENTRY RATE COMMAND we never used.

DIREC'l! we used

once for tracking the Reentry Minuteman in order to catch
it.

It was moving so swiftly.

We a l so used it in the ini­

tial phases of reentry, and it worked fine.

The PULSB mode,

of course, was the one we lived with most throughout the 14
days.
Lovell

I thought it was an excellent mode.

It is a gas saver and even when you do have a platform the
PULSE mode is adequate for mos t of the work you can do-- for
any attitude control, ground terrain observations-except
for rapid rotations where you need a faster authority.

:Borman

Right.

All ground tracking, PULSi was adequate.

not have any problem at a l l.

We did

We were able to track the

Polaris using PULSE.

Everything except the reentry~ we

could use PULSE mode.

The IlORIZON SCAN mode was fine.

The

only thing I noticed there was at sunrise and sunset sometimes, we were driven to a 30 or 40• nosedown pitch attitude

71

by the thrusters .

The scanners worked great except at sun­

rise and sunset.
Lovel l

They woul d l ose lock•••

Borman

Sometimes they wouldn't lose lock but, remember, they drove
the spacecraft nose down.

Lovell

About 40° pitch down.

The one big thing, which wa.s the question in all our minds,
actually b• PP4D•d,

Another spacecraft nearby will interrupt

the HORIZON SCAN mode.
Borman

Right.

Lovell

It does effect the scanner operation, so it i s something you
have to take in consideration.

Borman

That ' s right.

When 6 got between us a.nd tha aun, the scan­

ners were inoperative and lost lock. PLA'Tlt'ORM mode worked
excellently when we had it, and we 'll.lled it to align the
first two time ■ we had the platform.

I think that you can

do a finer job, and, you can a lign the platform more closely
manually.

Thie is becau se the deadband on the PLA.TFOlffl mode

i a l arger than you can control manually.

But it certainly

i a a worthwhile mode and for station keepin&' it is a superior type of operation.

Tra.nal&tion maneuver• at apacecr&ft

aepa.ra.tion at SECO + 30--I did not hear the thrusters.
jwst thrwsted.
the thru.aters?

Jim hit the SEP spacecraft.

I

Did you hear

72

Lovell

No.

I did not hear the thrust ers.

One reason why we didn't

hea.r the thrusters in t h.at particular case, whereas we did
later on, was the fact t ha.t we ha.d our hoods on and the air
was blowing in and making a l ot of noise.
by feel and by sight.
Borman

Right.

It Wl!.S strictly

No sound.

Peri gee Adjuat Translati on.

Accel erometer bias was

what they thought it was prelaunch, and it remained that way
throughout the f light.

This was a. no platform Perigee

Adjust, so, really that doesn' t have any meaning there.

The

timing on the first Peri get Adjust Maneuver was off, thanks
to me.

Jim ma.de the maneuver.

on a. star.

We did it without a platform

And, as I mentioned earlier, about this time we

were in cl ose proximity to the booster, and we started flying through some particles, but I wa.s not sure exactly what
it was, so I told him to stop thrusting as we approached
this.

Then, when we got in there, when we stopped th.rusting,

this wire came forward, hi t the hatch, and I lost the timing
again.

We thrusted, I guess , a little too l ong.

sure exactl y how l ong i t was.

I a.m not

I think we were aiming for a.

perigee of about 102, and ended up with about 120. M.&¥be
they changed their minds and went for a perigee of 120.

I

don't know.
Lovell

Well, that time which they gave us was not consistent with

73

the flight plan.

They e;a.ve us one minute and 16 or 17 sec­

onds, &nd the flight plan called for 46, I think.
Borman

Well, we may get that cleared up when we talk to the ground.
But, it was greater than I thought we had planned to do.
Updating throughout the flight was excellent.

Checklist

wa.s fine and, of course, we did not use the computer.
Lovell

We might mention here that both Frank and I think making
adjust maneuvers without a platform is very feasible.

You

can use the reticle for alignment and use the stars a.s a
reference.

Since you a.re usu.a.lly using the aft thrusters,

you do not have thruster light to worry about.

turn down the lights.

You can

It takes two people thoughf one per­

son to burn, hold attitude on the star, and watch the star
reference and the other person to time.

It required two

people, but it is & very feasible method of doing it.

I

think you get some very good accuraciea with it, because we
found out from the second burn.
8.3 RCS
Borman

RCS operational checks were nominal.
all with the RCS.

We had no problems at

System monitoring was perfect and it did

not drop one bit during the 14 da.ys.

After we actuated it,

it vent from 3,000 to about 2,600 to 2,500 psi on the source
pressure.

No problems.

Control mode-s, RATE COMMAND.

.AJJ I

74
have said, it is a very tight and fine mode.
during most of the reentry.
not use.

We used it

REENTRY RATE COMMAND we did

DIREC~ I used for the first part of the reentry,

and it seemed that we were picking up rolling torques , and

I was also starting to pick up pitch and yaw oscillations
as the gs were coming on.

They were slight ones but I

really wanted to get the spacecraft steady, end I was real ly
trying to lock it in on the attitude indicator, so we went
to RAT~ COMMAND.

I didn't see any reason to bring back a

lot of RCS fuel anyway.

REENTRY RATE COMMAND we did not use.

The PUISE mode wa.s used in the reentry prior to guidance
initiate, and it worked fine.

Retrofire attitude control

was excellent and I'm gl ad we bad RATE COMMAND there because
we had no outside reference at all.

Retrofire was done on

the ball with the rate needles, and I thought the rockets
were outstanding.

Yes.h, outstanding, I thought they were a

little more powerful than I had anticipated.
Lovell

Q;uite all right.

Borman

Reentry attitude control deadbands and rate damping was
fine.

The only thing, I guess, that was wrong with RATE

COMMAND was the fact that it uses an awful lot of fuel.
But, it certainly holds that spacecraft steady as a rock.
The heater lights - we solved that problem very easily.

We

75

turned on the RCS Heaters on the second dtcy and left them
on through the entire £light.

They sequenced and went on

and of£, I am sure, but we did not know about it.

We never

saw the light, and we did not have to worry about it .
Lovell

The temperatures kept right around 80° a ll the time.

Borman

No comments on thruster f iring, worked fine.

We shut the

RCS system down initially around 35,000 feet, shut off the
motor valves and then the oscillation on the drogue built
up even greater than it was.

So we turned them back on

again, and I'm not sure if it is my imagination or not but

it seemed like this had some effect on damping the oscillations.

It may have been just the position in the reentry,

though.

I had the feeling that perhaps we had run out of

RCS fuel prior to drogue depl oy.

I am not certain, but if

we di dn't then the RCS didn't have the authority, because
we were oscillating before drogue deploy.
any RCS fumes after impact.
Lovell

After impact? No.

I didn't notice

Did you, Jim?

I think that our system of turning the

Repress on and getting the ..•
8.4 ECS
Borman

Why don't you comment on suit mobility?

Lovell

This was a flight that actually did some evaluation on the
suit.

We had the new light weight suit.

Mobility is better

than the 4-C suit, but mobility in the Gemini cockpit with
the 5-C suit still restricts the person such that it degrades his performance for long duration missions.
still quite inunobile in the 5-C suit.
of trouble with it.
to the flight.

It is

We still have a lot

The suits checked out all right prior

We did not do any integrity checks with the

light weight suits during the flight.

The

air flow

through the suit was adequate where the flow got to the
body.

However, there were many pockets where the &ir became

stagna.nt, especially in the crotch area..

It would heat up

in local areas of the body and would not provide adequate
cooling.

Humidity goes right a.long with temperature.

The

areas where the air flow did not go across the body, was
very humid.

We also noticed that it gave you sort of a wet

clammy feeling when the cool air went in there.

It gave you

sort of a. cold, clammy feeling where the flow went th.rough.
Places where the air did not res.ch were hot and clammy.
:Sorman

Also, the humidity in the ca.bin was very, very low when we
were in the suits.

The ca.bin was dry and hot.

Very, very

poor.
Lovell

The humidity dew point was between 52 and 58 most of the
time.

We have some accurate figures on that.

I don't recall

any instance of even seeing the CO2 gauge move other than

77

during tape dumps.
~ pressure

We h&d no evidence of co 2 •

suit is compromised.

Com.fort in

It restricts mobility

and the Gemini cockpit is just not th.at big for long duration flights where you can live with the suit.

Suit con­

trols were very a.dequate. no problems there.

We bad abso­

lutely no problems with the o2 demand regulator.

The elec­

trical umbilical is unga.inly a.nd heavy.

The connection

right angle sticks out in the cockpit.

It could be better

designed.

We did not have fingertip lights.

Our mode of

operation. with the suit on, was pr:1.ma.rily with the hood
off, the cover visor on, and the gloves off.

Maey' times we

also unzipped the big zipper through the crotch and up the
back, and left that zipper open.

We found that the big

opening in the neck, with the crotch zipper closed, most of .
the air would go out through the neck and would not adequately vent the lower stoma.ch area.
plan to try going suitless.

We had planned in our flighl;

As per plan, about the second

cl&y, I got out of my suit and found after settling down to

the environment that the skin became drier.

There were no

wet spots or dampness in the underwear area.

I put my suit

inlet hose along side of me on the center stowage area with
the opening facing aft blowing air do-wn alongside the seat
blowing &ft.

The exhaust hose was put back into its stowage

78

position, with the screen on, a long the lower right hand
footwell e.rea.

This provided adequate ventilation du.ring

most of the time.

When we exercised we found out we built

up quite a bit of extra heat.

I would then move the inlet

hose to a position along side of me, along my left leg,
and tie it down along the side pedestal with the opening
facing upward.

This would provide more cooling into the

basic cockpit area and woul d actually keep me a lot cooler
then I had been before.

We found out that without suits on,

the cockpit actually became bigger.
tunity to move a.round.

There was more oppor­

You could move the body, there was

lees hesitancy to exercise, less resistance to exercise,
you could get to things easier.

You actually had more con­

trol and more comfort without the suit on.

We stowed the

suit on the seat, putting the visor a.long the outer part of
the top of the seat rest a.nd doubling the legs back against
the back of the seat.

We stowed the harness in the juncture

of the back and the seat of the ejection seat.

During zero

g we were floating up and we never touched the back pa.rt of
the seat.
Borman

I have some flight notes tha.t I will just read out for the
record.

Ventilation without suits,

The bypass hoses on the

Gemini provide excellent return ducts for the suit compres-

79

sors.

They were mounted with the inlet on the outside wa.11

near the individual crewma.ns outboard knee.

The suit inlet

hose wa.s then positioned to secure different !low patterns.
]ecause no provision had been made for special inlet hoses,
only two positions were tried.

The one most often used was

the suit inlet hose located near the inboard shoulder pointing forwa.rd.

This produced a flow pattern from righ.t to

left down across the body.

The body was never really in the

flow but a very comfortable circulation pattern was set up.
The other primary pattern consisted of leaving the suit outlet hose in the same place, but putting the inlet hose nea.r
the outboard lrnee, pointing 90• from the direction of the
outlet hose.
pattern.

This pattern a l so produced a comfortable flow

In truth, I believe the cabin is so small in

volume compared to the amount of air introduced by the suit
circuit that almost any- arra.ngement would provide enough
&ir to provide efficient cooling.

We also have some sketch­

es of how this went.
Lovell

We also believe, after spending several dteys without suits
on that the theory that at zero g there would be no con•
vec'Ji.on cooling•••

:Borma.n

I am sure that there isn't a:riy, due to oha.nge in the heating
condition.

..

80

Lovell

The mass of the air being pushed out by the compressors is
enough to give adequate flow throughout the entire Gemini
cockl)it.

:Borman

We had no problems with air flow.

It would have been a very, very difficult task to stay in
those suits for 14 days, i f not impossible .

We cer t ain­

ly woul d have been in much worse shape when we got down.
Lovell

I believe so.

We were requested from Houston to try the

hose position evaluation where by the inlet and outlet hoses
we.re together.
:Borman

Yes.

Lovell

We tried it and to be perfectly honest, with the small cockpit and the 8.lllount of flow out of the inlet hose, we did not
find much difference, it was adequate, but it was awkward
to use it that way.

We di d find out that if my exhaust hose

was put on Frank 's side t hat we would ge t stagnant spots on

my side of the cockpit where although I wasn't uncomfortable...
:Borman

•.. that is with yo~ inl et hose being turned off.

So all

these flows were introduced on my side and both the return
hoses were on my side.
Lovell

That is right, they were on your side.

I found stagnant

areas, I wasn't uncomfortable, but I did find stagnant area.a
where there was no flow going on on my side.

You have to

81

have adequate positioning of the exhaust and inlet hoses.
Borman

I think really to solve the whole problem, if you want to
design efficient cooling for suits off operation in spacecraft, design it the same as you would on the ground.

Lovell

Right, I think you are right.

Borman

You would have no problem.

For instance, in J110st 0£ the

airplanes now that are pressure cooled the flow is so great
across them that you have a continuous flow patte:r.n 1n there,

coming out usually .f.'.rom one inlet located up around you:r
right shoulder a.nd a couple 1n around your feet.

I don't

think you have to worr:, about the bll88,boo of no convection
in zero g because it is overshadowed by the large kinetic
energy input through the l arge amount of air.
Lovell

Cabin pressure was 5.5 on lift-off, came dow.n to 5.1 and
st!cy-ed there exactly 5.1 for 14 dqs .

It did not move when

we jettisoned the ad&pter and went on the bottles, it stqed
exactly 5.1.

The only time I saw it move was on the water

when we used all the o:zyge. up and it went to ze:ro.
Borman

Well, i t was below 5.1 when we opened the :Inlet Snorkle.

Lovell

Inlet Snorkle.. yes, that is right.

Borman

You were talking about the inlet bottle pressure.

Lovell

Yea, tb&t•s right , the bottle pressure.

82

:Borman

The temperature va.ried with the suits on and the suits off
operation.

I have gone through my notes here, and I note

that it says when we both had suits on and we were just
barely cool enough with both suits on and the :B pumps running.

On the other hand, when we were both out of the suits,

the :B pumps only running, we were very comfortable.

When

we were up working and opera.ting, we noticed that the temperature level in the cockpit was just right.

We were run­

ning most of the time with the suits full cold, the heat
exchanger full cold, and maximum air flow on both controls.
Then for several days when we went to bed, we left the controls that way, a.nd we would wake up very cool.
Lovell

Well, there a.re several factors .

I think the size of the

Gemini cockpit and the fact of & completely closed loop
system is very dependent on 2 factors.

One was the heat

output of the people and two was the amount of heat you get
in through the windows due to the sun.

At night our heat

output decreased, we put up shields on the windows, including some aluminiz~d foil to reflect the sun, and I think
the combination of both these things with the systems we had
during the day time really dropped the heat in the cockpit.
Then, during the day when we were active and had the windows
open a.gs.in, the temperature increa.aed inside the cockpit so

it was very com.fortable.
Borman

That is right but the last couple of dqs we turned dollll the
suit flow at night and it helped out.

Lovell

To compensate for this thing we turned down the suit flow.

Borman

There's a lot of inertia in the cooling system and it takes
& long time from the time you make a move on the oontrols
before you can feel it.

Lovell

Just to regress here one minute.

When I was out of the suit

and Frank was in it, we put my suit flow to .i'ull decrease

&nd his to full increase to give him ma.rlmum cooling in the
suit.

I was not uncomfortable with the full decrease flow

in the cockpit.
Borman

The humidity in the ca.bin was higher with the suits off.
It W&s a much more comfortable cabin.

Your skin di dn't get

dry, and the nose problems we ha.d the first 3 or 4 cla3"s went
awa::,.

I am not sure that we ca.n contribute this solely to

beina' out of the suits or whether it was the fact we were
becoming more acclimated to the 100 per cent o:r:ygen.
Lovell

We have some accurate figures.

I believe thou&h, that with

suits on the humidity-temperature ra.nge w&s &bout 20 degrees
difference.

With the suite off they went a.round 10 degrees,

I suapect.
:Bo:rman

We have them &11 there.

The onl y time the CO

2

jumped at &11

84

was dlll."ing t ape dumps, it would go up a.nd then come b&ok
down but we lrnew this before flight though.

Comfort dq

a.nd night, with and without suits .. .There is just no comparison.. I have the notes that I wrote down while we were
still up there.

There is no comparison between suit on and

suit off operation.

The suit off is 1,000 per cent better.

I think I may have been conservative.

It wa.s ma.ybe a lot

better than tha.t.

Comfort without the suits was by and

large very good.

We used the cabin fan only once in the

entire mission during one of the checks with the suit off.
This was when we had Jim's ■uit inlet hose blocked off &nd
my inl et hose operating in my side &nd the two suit outlet

hoses in my side of the spacecraft.

As we already mentioned

here, Jim noticed some stagnant areas in the ap&oecra.ft, and •
we turned on the cabin fan to see if this aleviated the problem, and it did help.

There was a definite circulation

with the cabin fan on.

The only problem is the cabin £an

draws a cons iderable electrical load, and we did not have
the power to run it continually.

The cabin pressure r egu­

lator worked perfectly, it never worked at all .
Lovell

That is right, never heard it, thank goodness.

:Borman

That's the pressure relief valve.
It never actuated.

Right, never hea.rd it.

The cabin pressure regulator was ae

85

steady as a rock .

AB Jim ha.a already mentioned it st~ed

5.1 the whole flight, a.nd•I never saw it budge at a.11, until
you opened the snorkel.
Lovell

Right.

~SD :rep

Cabin vent va.lve.

Lovell

We had a double vent valve with the tip bent up to protect
t he stop. We never used tha.t until we got down to the
checkl ist during the reentry portion of the flight.

Borman

The Cabin Repress V~lve was on the entire flight because we
had the M-1 Experiment hooked to it .

Then, of course, we

actuated it aga.in when we got on the wa.ter just to get some
cooling oxygen into the spa.oeora.ft.

I have no oomments on

i t, we bad no problem with it, the friction had bean increa.sed on it so tha.t it worked quite well.
the open posi t i on for the entire flight.

It st!cy"ed in

The Ca.bin Air In­

l et Valve, we used•.•
Lovell

Just during the reentry phase•.

Borman

Right.

Lovell

•.•with the snorkel valve, th&t is when I t hink I got a

Just during the reentry phase.

whiff of that stuff through there.
:Borman

All the time with the suits off, we were running with the
Cabin Air Reci.rcula.tion Valve closed.

The r est of the time

when there was one person in the suit and one person out of

86

the suit we r&n. with it in a 45 degree position.

When both

people were m the suits, we ran it in the 45 degree position.
Lovell

I'd like to make one comment· on the C&bin Inlet Valve, I
think a. future procedure woul d be to either open the visor
or unzip the hood prior to using the snorkel va.lve, so you
do not get this concentrated ambient flow into the suit in
a small concentrated area.

Okay.

Primary o

2 System

Monitoring.
Borme.n

System Monitoring was no problem. The cryogen2
ics bottle for ECS o orygen did vent •.. I think i t was
2

Prima:ry o

a.bout the 8th d~ it started venting.

Performance of the

cryogenics bottles have been outstanding.
ECS o , started venting tod~.
2
heat to the other two bottl es.

The first one,

And we were still adding
Let's see, this was Sunday

morning so that woul d have been the 8th day that i t started
ventmg.

The quantity measuring system worked fine.

flow rates were adequ&te .

The

I just ca;nnot emphasize enough

the desirabil ity of going without suits.
temperature remained just nominal.

The pressure a.nd

We had dome plots &boa.rd

the spacecraft, and we checked them out.

We had to use the

auto heater on the ~S o bottle perhaps, the first two days
2
or so and then we were able to turn the heater off complete-

87

ly.

That bottle had a big enough heat leak so that it main­

tained pressure itself.
the 8th day.

As I said, it started venting on

We never used the manual heater on the E'.JS

o2 bottle.
Lovell

As a matter of fact, the prilna.ry o2 helped, rather we utilized the primary o to pump up the pressure on the ro o2
2
sometime in the early pa.rt of the portion of the flight.

Borman

Yes, we used the crossover valve.

When you hit the squib

or when you hit the switch to open the solenoids, even
though we had been led to believe that i t takes some time
for that pressure to build up, it looked to me that it went
to about 250 in the FC o2 bottle almost immediately.
went from 100 to 250 almost immediately.

It

I imagine it will

come down when we talk about the FC o2 problem.
Borman

Secondacy o System Monitoring was nothing, we checked it •••
2
all the time, but GO/NO GO decision once a ~ . It stS3"ed
exactly the same throughout the entire flight--5400 and
5300.

Lovell

It did not budge at all.

Borman

Quanti ty meaauring.•we do not measure except for pressure,
and as we said that stayed constant.

Flow rates, pressures,

end controls were nominal in the secondary o2 • You could
not tell when we had gone off the primary onto the seconda.ry

88

o2 .

We have already talked about the co 2 partial pressure.

It was below zero the entire flight except during tape dumps

when it jumped up due to a glitch that the tape dump puts in

the TM system.

Radiator operation and configuration••• We

ran radiator on all the time except for two checks that were
made.

Actually when we opened circuited the fuel cells be­

fore we brought them back on the line, we went to RADIATOR
BYPASS twice.

Then we went to ·RADIA'IDR BYPASS once when we

wanted to get the water out of the ECS System.
during the flight we were picking up water.
a good place to cover that.

One time

This might be

We were picking up water coming

out of our suit inlet hose, in quite large quantities.

We

called the ground, and they suggested that perhaps the vater
boiler was not venting.

They called up the procedure that

included putting on evaporator heat, turning off the radiator and going to bypass on the radiators and rota.ting the
spa cecraft at 10 degrees per second.

This threw out large

amount of water and things got back to normal.

Later on in

the flight we noticed the same thing, but we were busy aligning the platform and other things and we did not want to
setup rol l -rates.

All we did was put the suit coolant to

warm and put both suit fans on and blew the water out of
t he system, and that worked also.

We did notice that during

89

the flight, down in the vicinity of my right foot in the
center pedestal lower area there, around the cabin heat
exchanger, we got a lot of condensation.

It was very wet

on the walls a.nd the blotter paper was sopping wet, a radius
of about 12 inches on the lower right pedestal, on my side.
I do not know how it was on your side.
Lovell

It started getting wet on my side, the inboard.

Borman

Yes, inboard side.

That is the only place in the spacecraft

that I noticed any condensation.

As far as I know the evap­

orator only operated during l aunch and the first orbit.

We

also had one other day when we woke up and were tumbling
quite badly and the wall temperatures were 16 degrees to 20
degrees lower th.an we ever recorded tb1;!m before.

I suspect

that the evaporator might have worked that night.

We men­

tioned this to the ground and••. let's see, I have some notes
on that.
Lovell

It probably got filled up from the moisture going into the
system.

Borman

This was noted in the data for the cabin temperature surveys
also.

I don't remember exactly what day it was, where we

noticed this big change in temperature.
Lovell

It was &bout 5 or 6 days after the mission started, wasn't
it?

90

" orma.n

Yes ..here it is here••• it was 158 hours a.nd 27 minutes when
we got up, a.nd we had a. wall temperature of 64 degrees and
a. pilot ha.tch temperature of 66 degrees.

Comparing this

with 144 hours and 5~ minutes, the hatch temperature had
been 84 degrees, so there was a. 20 degrees drop du.ring this
one evening. ~ I attributed this, plus the fact th.at we noticed la.:rge drift rates when we woke up, to the fact that
the water boiler must have been opera.ting during the night.
It was the only time during the flight that we noticed these
large drops in tempera.ture.•. the very cold wall tempera.tures.
We were on double loop, B pumps most of the time.

Finally,

went to A pump twice in the flight when people were in the
suits in order to at~ cool.

We went to double A pumps, of

course, when we were powered up.
Lovell

We bad one time when we bad one A pump on.

:Borman

Twice we had it on.

Lovell

Twice, but just one primary pump. We did not go to two A
pumps.

l3orma.n

No.

A pump in the primary loop was on twice to keep cool.

Lovell

Right.

Borman

Never on except during periods when the platform we.a running.

Lovell

Right.

Borman

Now, as I mentioned before, when we were running both B

The second.a.ry loop A pump was not on.

91

pumps with the suits off, it was comfortable.

When we got

the suits on, &nd both B pumps going, it was not enough to
handle the load.
Lovell

It was .m arginal.

Borman

That is right.

Normal mode was all we used on water manage­

ment.
Lovell

Never touched the---

Borman

Never touch the condensator.

Lovell

The drink gun worked as advertised.

Borman

One thing I would mention is the fact that this logging
every ounce you drink was an operational nightmare.

Lovell

I think the gun is adequate for flights if all you want to
do is to know the total quantity of water that is going out
for balliet purposes or CG purposes.

I do not think there

is a requirement to know just how much each crewman is drinking as long as it is adequate.

There is no need to log, all

you have to do is report counter readings once a da,y for the
guidance people and .fuel cell people to know just how much
water is being consumed.
Borman

Right.

It says flush mode.

We never used the Flush mode or

Evapora tor Fill mode.
8.5 Communications
Lovell

The interphone Operation and Quality was okay, without the

92

hood on.

The G5C suit ma.de communications poor, because of

the flow of the air to the hood.

Other than that I thought

the interphone was pretty good.
Borman

Yes, we should mention the fact th.at the G5C suit with the
hood zipped did introduce a lot of noise.

Lovell

Yes, a feed back into those two mikes and there was a lot of
noise.

Borman

The quality of the interPhone was excellent.

With the suits

off we didn't use them most of the time, just like t alking
in a room, so we didn't need it.

My UHF was a little fuzzy

during countdown.
Lovell

Mine was good.

:Sorman

Yes, yours was good and mine was a little fuzzy.

I could

hear people all right but they claimed that I was a little
weak.

In orbit, I just can't say enough nice things about

the UHF.
Lovell

UHF was excellent in orbit for the entire 14 da;ys.
little static.

High quality reproduction.

Borman

With the squelch on zero.

Lovell

Right, the s~uelch on zero.

Borman

The UHF performance during recovery wa.s excellent.
blems with that at all.

Lovell

v~~~

We did have trouble getting back to Houston.

No peo­

93

:Borman

I was very pleased with the entire Voice procedure operation
a.round the world.

I thought they did 8J1 excellent job. We

didn 1 t have a:ny problems at all.

They were quiet when they

were requested to be during our sleep period.
Lovell

They were outstanding.

:Borman

They were outst&nding, yes.

Lovell

The voice tape recorder operation was fine.

There were

no hitches as far as operating the voice recorder.
easy to, well , that's three feet of change.

It was

We used mostly

the CONTINUOUS mode rather than the MOMEN111A.RYa

MOMENTA.RY when we just wa.nted to m&ke a comment.

I used
As a. mat­

ter of fact, I think the MOMENTARY position does save a lot
of voice tape, because you dontt have it on and forge t it.
However, we had a procedure with the voice tape that was
going to record the quantity of urine that was dumped.

And

this led us to leave the voice tape on quite a long time
when we weren't doing anything or saying anythin~-and using
quite a bit or tape.

I think that i t would be helpful if

we had some sort or a little light of some sort to let you
know that t he tapes on.

When we have a flow meter which was

being eval uated for future flights and might be a standard
piece of equi pment then it would certainly be nice to have

94

some indication if the tape is on.

On long flights you

can't ha.ve the tape on all the time like the short flights-you ha.veto conserve tape.

Cartridge change was no problem.

The controls were adequate.

Data Recording? We tried to

record as much data as we could.
:Borman

We didn't indulge in a l uxury many times of recording both
in the log book and on the tape.
a 14 day mission.

We only had 20 tapes for

If we got a good representation of it in

the log book-we didnJt put it on the tape.

Now, we find

out we probably brought back some unused tapes, too.
Lovell

We did.

It was hard for a 14 day mission to adequately

budget the tape.

We would try to budget it so th.at we could

get the in:f'orm&tion on there 'Without leaving long periods of
inactivity on the tape.

However, we didn't budget it well

enough, and we left about 1 or 2 tapes without any recordings.
:Borman

Digital Command System updates were good, no problem--everything worked fine.

Real-time transmitter, and delay-time

transmitter were no problem.

As a matter of fact, tb.at

whole system I thought was excellent.

The only problem we

had in the area of Digital Command System or the telemetry
was th.at we lost the tape recorder and ••• goofed up the de1,cy-ed time.

The procedure that we worked up for operating

95

with Spacecraft 6 in the air, I thought went very well.
posed no problems.

It

Communications Controls &nd Switches­

Voice Control Center, Audio modes, Keying and Antenna Selection, were all nominal.

We might mention in Sleep Configu­

ration--we never used the Sleep switches bees.use we had the
situation where we pretended it was night and went to sleep
every evening and the ground never call ed us.
they ever violated that for the 14 days.

I don't think

They never called

us during the sleep period.
Lovell

So that worked very well.

Borman

Beacon Control was no problem.

We didn't use the Reentry

C-band Beacon until reentry.

The TM controls, tr8Jlsmitter,

and antenna again were no problem.

It was operated just a.a

advertised due to all instructions from the ground.

8.6 Electrical
Borman

Now we have some interesting things to talk about.

Lovell

Well, we monitored the electrical system pretty closely.

Borma.n

Yea.h, I guess we did.

Lovell

The only thing we can say here is reiterate what we have
probably said before.

On lift-off we had delta Plights

come on for fuel cells--both sections.
off several times and went off.

1

blinked on and

2 blinked on and off

several times and stayed on through insertion and stayed on

96

most of the t ime during the 14 days.

We have recorded in

the flight book of the flight pla.n--those times th.at it went
off and on to the best of our lmowledge.

I'm au.re we missed

several of them.
Borman

When we were sleeping particularly.

Lovell

When we were sleeping we missed them, but it appears to me
that there are two things now that these fuel cells have &
lot more latitude than we really first realized:

1) We can

oper&te with the fuel cells with delta Plights on more than
we thought we could.

.As a matter of fact , we were doing

normal purges with the .t'uel cell delta Plights on whioh the
systems book said flatly not to do.

But we had some excel­

lent guidance a.nd assistance from the ground in keeping the
sections running.
Borman

I think so, too.

Lovell

I think that's what kept Stacks 2C and 2A going as l ong as
they did go .

The gauge is a little inaccurate to monitor

the system.

If we are going to have troubles with fuel cells

as we did on this flight, and if the ground is going to keep

requesting accurate stack a.mp readouts.

The gauging system

is poor because it is ha.rd to read accurately the amps when
they are down in the low 1 and 2 amps.

Each indicator is

canted a different way-alternately throughout the 6 stack

97
readouts.

The ones that are canted inward away from

you are hard to read.

Bor:ma.n

The fuel cell, as Jim said, was an interesting thing.

We finally lost stacks 2A and 20 about the 11th or 12th

day.

stack 2B re.mained on and I'm sure there is a

whole history written on the ground of the things they

did and tests they ran at McDonnell when we were in the

air to see just what they could do and how far they could

go with these fuel cells.

I thought they did a.n excellent

job,and we ended up being able to run them the whole time.

As a matter of fact, we turned on our Squib batteries about

the 10th day-used the Bua Tie switches and were running
entirely on the f'uel cells the latter part of the flight.

98

Borman

The onboard cues for monitoring the el ectrical system are
adequate.

We found out one thing in this f light , t hat is

the Delt a Plight s really don't mean a lot .

We had been

told before the flight never to purge if you had a Delta P
light.

We ended up violating every s i ngle one of t he ca.r-­

dinal rules that we had.
I think the t hing to note about the entire electrical
syst em was the f ine work done on the ground.
with solutions.

They came up

They evidently were running s imilar t ype

cel ls a t MAC, St. Louis, and they kept them working
f or l onger than they should have.
Fuel c el l operation, as far as I was concerned , Section 1
was i deal.

Section 1 maintained its share of the load the

whole fl ight.

Section 2, we lost stacks 2-A and 2-C

event ual l y, I believe on about the 12th day.

I was a

little concerned on the 13th day with the sta t us of Secti on 1
because we had had a delta Plight on Section 1 f or t he
firs t time and we had been running almost 24 hours.
But, t he ground came through and read us up a technical
report from St. Louis that explained the whol e thing.
made me feel a lot easier when they did that.

It

Rather than

having t he ground comment blindly on it, "the fuel cells
are going to be good for 24 hours," I would like t o get a

99
little background information on it.

How else could we

know it was going to be good for 24 hours, and what had
they done to prove it would be good for 24 hours?

They

read it to us over CS~, it eased my mind a lot because I
wasn ' t anxious to miss the WASP.

On the 13th day, I

wanted to be able to go the full 24 hours rather than have
to land in the Pacific.

So the whole story of the electri­

cal monitoring, as far as I a.m concerned, was great work by
the ground.
The main batteries held constant between 22.5 and 22.7 amps
for the entire mission, and we checked them once a day at
the GO/NO GO stations.

When we turned them on · 2

hours

before retrofire they carried their share of the load and
were operating fine when we were i n the water.

We turned

off the squib batteries about the 10th day and used the bus
tie switches.
last five days.

We ran entirely on fuel cell power for the
When t he squibs came back on, the voltage

was 25.5 after they had been turned off for five days.
They operated properly for the last 2 hours of the flight.

s.7 Onboard computer
Borman

During t he l aunch it was absolutely a nominal case.

The

pitch status, yaw status, and roll status, were zeroed
except for a brief period at guidance initiate when they went
out about 2 to 3 degrees , and then zeroed.

We had no violent

1JO

pitch down at guidance initiate.
nominal all the way through.

Attitude indications were

At insertion , the nomi nal

velocity on address 72 was 25,804 and when we read it up, i t
read 25,804 .

The orbit maneuvers using the computer and

the platform were right on the money.

The accelerome ter
1

bias did not vary, and we burned them off on the IVI a by

insert i ng them through the MDIU, and it came out very well .
I did not burn on time , we burned on t he IVI 's.
Borman

The updates were all made in the PRELAUNCH mode as agreed on
before fl i ght .

There was no problem, no mi sunderstanding,

I think F0D did very well i n this regard.

I know t hat in

Gemini 5 t here was a little mix-up, but we had none of that.
Borman

Retrofire occurred automatically at the exact second.

All

four Retros f ired and the IRS was right on the money.

Reentry

guidance was nominal.
that we had f l o.m.

I t was very s i mi lar to the s i mulat ions

There was one little anomaly in the guid­

ance, i n t hat we were gi ven back-up reentry angles of
50 degrees.

We computed wi th our onboard char t s a reentry

angle of 50 degrees, back-up angle of 50 degrees.

But t hen

after tracking, the ground called up a 35 degrees which proved
to be closer to what we actually f l ew.

I am s till not aware

of the reason for change; why it changed from 50 degrees t o

35 degrees. The important t hing i s t hat it did change and the
ground was able to update u s in real time, and it agreed very
well with the a

101

Borman

The MDU worked perfectly the entire flight.

Computer modes,

PRELADNCH, ASCENT, CATCH-UP, RENDEZVOUS , REENTRY, were all
perfect , no anomalies in any of those,
8.8
Borman

Crew Station

Controls and di splays,

The sequent i al tel elights o~erated

exactly as programmed.

At minus 2:56, t hey came on to the

second.

They a l l turned green when they were punched, no

probl ems there.

The event timer was used only intermittantly

throughout the f light for timing, and for the last 20
minutes.

It worked f i ne.

The IVI's also worked exactly as

planned.

The Flight Di rector Indicator was again, a nomi-

nal case.

One sli ght difference between the simulator and

the Flight Director Indicator i n the spacecraft, was the
little outer roll gimbal i ndi cator in the simulator always
came up to the top.

I'd grown used to flying the reentries

by using that as a lift vect or.

In the spacecraft when we

got all set up for reentry, low and behold, the outer roll
gimbal was down at the bottom, so I had to fly the reciprocal of it.

But it was just a minor change and I ended

up acclimating to it with no problem.

I think it is just a

function of how you happen t o go through zero.

If you go

through zero just a little bit to one side, the gimbal goes
to the top, and if you go through the other side, it goes
to the bottom.

102

Borman

GLV fuel and oxidi zer pressure gauges were nominal.

The

concept of sticking the decals on the outside of the gauge
is poor at the best.

But, we all know this has been done,

and they're not going to change the gauges, and it worked
fine.

I would suggest never going this way again.

I think

we ought to change the meters in the future.
Borman

The alti meter worked fine.
the altimeter was

The only problems we had with

when we were oscillating violently on the

drogue , it was not indi cat i ng descent.

As soon as the

drogue oscillations st eadied out , the alti meter came down
very well.

Rate of descent indicator was likewise.

As a

matter of fact, I can't tell you what the r ate of descent ·
was after we opened the main chute.
good when we looked at it.
frays.

The main chute was so

We didn't see any gores or

And when we went to s i ngle point release, I didn't

even look at the rate of dascent indicator.

Did you?

Lovell

I couldn't see it.

Borman

Did you even think about it?

Lovell

No, you mean to tell me you didn't look at the rate of
I

descent indicator?
Borman

We could tell from the altimeter we were going down very
slow.

The acceler ometer seemed to give us slightly lower

values thttn the recorded.

I think on the reentry the highest

value we got was 3.9 g's.

During launch the highest that

103

was recorded on the a~celerometer was about 6.75 g's.
understand that the actual value was over 7.

I

On the nominal

profile, it i s.
Lovell

Was the reentry a little higher than 3.9?

Borman

I don ' t know, I doubt if it was, it was so near ful l lift.
Switches and circuit breaker panels.

We had a coupl e of

cases knocking of f circuit breakers.

We did have one fuel

cell control ci rcuit breaker pop on us twice .
Lovell

I am not real sure i t popped.

I don' t know whether I hit

it ina.dvertantly twice.
Borman

No, you didn't.

The second time I watched it pop.

Other than that, I thought the switches and circuit panel s
were well located.

I think it i s very important that we

have those guards on there, particularly with changing suits.
Lovell

The fuel cel l switches, the power and control switches,
should be LIFT to move switches.

They should be over center

locks that you have to lift to move them up.

There was a

guard over i t, but still it was so easy to reach up there
and hit those things .

I was a l ways worried about throwi ng

the control switch of f, which would have really foul ed up
the fuel cells.
Borman

You mean like the squib switches? ...

Lovell

Yes , like the squib switches.

I think that is the way they

ought to be ~ecause you never touch them unless deliberately.

104

Bo·-m.a.n

Yes, that is a switch that is never moved unless there is
a failure in the fuel cells.

Lovell

They should be a little better type of switch than they are.

Borman

Mirrors.

Operating without suits on, I found that I seldom

needed the mirror.

I don't believe I used it more than

2 or 3 times except to check and see how far m;r beard had

Lovell

grown.

Row about you, did you?

Well,

they were good for things like looking way back in

the corner, and shining a light back there.
Borman

I was mobile enough that without a suit on I could turn
around very easily and see all around.
you need the mirrors.
that you take them out.
need for them.

There is no question

I am not suggesting even remotely
With the suit off it cuts down the

The swizzle stick we used once to pry up

the center line stowage bracket.
line stowage after launch,

When we opened the center

the bottom bracket sprung down

about ~/4 inches, and we bad great difficulty to close it.
We only closed it twice during the flight after that.

We

just kept it velcroed partially shut.
Lovell

I think the boost acceleration sprung it out of position.

Borman

Either that, or when they put that fix on there to beef
it up, it resulted in an out-of-tolerance eitua.tion. I hope·
that the people did not fo~ce it shut and then let us take
off that w~.

That was a pain in the neck to get it shut.

105

Lovell

We had to use the levers of the swizzle stick to get the
thing back together again.

This was bad.

We also used the

swizzle stick to keep the manual heater switch down on the
FC H which is a real big pa.in. I t is a very a.m all swit ch
2
and you have to hold it for a long tiine. That gets to be
a lot of trouble.
Borman

Lighting, indicators and instruments .

There is one

instrument in the spacecraft that should be lit that i s
not.

Tba.t is the digital timer.

valuable instrument onboard.

That is the most

We used it continually, it

never varied one second in 339 hours.
reset that once.

We never had to

It was exactly on the money.

We checked

it periodically and it never gained or lost a second.
Lovell

But it had to be lit.

Bor.man

It should be lit because it is right on the center panel,
and there is no lighting on it except for the bright l i ght
from the back.

Ma.ny times at night and when you are trying

to :maintain dark adaptation you end up having to use the
flashlight on it.
Lovell

It should be a red light for night work.

In the day time

you don't need it because the cockpit is lit up anyway.
It really ruined night vision to turn on that flashlight
to find out what time it was.
Bor:ma.n

The left panel was fine when it was lit up with the display
~

106

light.

The center panel and the right panel were all right.

There is no question that the lighting system on the LEM is
superior.
Lovell

We used the red lighting more than I thought we would ever
use it.

We never used it in simulations.

The red lighting

turned out ve-ry nicely when we started looking out the
window, using the stars, getting oriented and things of this
nature.
Borman

The pedestal, console and circuit breaker areas just aren't
lit.

Same way with the water management panel, when you

wanted to check that,the only thing you could do was use
your flashlight.

It was not a big problem.

The little

flashlight that CSD developed, and put in, was one of the
most valuable pieces of gear we had.

We used it continually

throughout the flight, it is much more valuable than fingertip lights. I see no reason for fingertip lights because
you're not going to fly with gloves on most of the time.
If we would have had them, they would have been stowed.
This little flashlight turned out to be a little jewel.
utility light I did not use once in the whole flight.
Lovel l

I turned mine on once to see if it worked.

Borman

The flashlight was much easier to get to.

We velcroed it

right in front of us, and it was very handy.

And at the

end of 14 days it seemed as bright as it was before.

One

The

107

of the serious deficiencies in the flight was the dirty
window.
Lovell

I just talked to John Erinkman about the film.

He said a

lot of it was good, but a lot of it they could tell the
window was dirty.
Eorman

What about the booster film?

Lovell

They haven't processed two rolls of film yet and they don't
have the Polaris launch yet.

The Houston one turned out

sort of hazy and I thought it was a clear day.

He told me

there was haze on the ground.
Borman

Did they see Houston all right?

Lovell

They could make out the International Airport.

:Borman

You took that with the 250 mm. lens .

Lovell

The high speed film.

They don 't want to process it until

they tal k to us to find out what kind of ex:posures we used.
We had all kinds of ex:posures.

I think the picture that was

in the paper was from the 16 mm. camera.
The window was very dirty.
taken of it.

And I have a ... a picture was

Shows the ...

Borman

Jim drew a sketch of the window in the S-8/D-13 log.

Lovell

There was a greenish, greasy film over the whole thing right
in the center.
effect.

Outside of that was a sort of a haze or fog

Right along the outer edge, it was clear.

If I

focused on the nose of the spacecraft it would be blurry.

108

Just off the nose it woul d blurr out.

There are two theories,

one group of peopl e sey it's the nose cover that is ablating
on launch, others sey it is

staging.

We saw quite a bit of flame at staging and it looked like
there were several streaks there caused by staging.

There

is also a general deposit like a stagnat ion point right there
that might have been built up during the entire launch, which
might be the nose cover.

So, it might be the combination or

both.
Borman

It might have accumulated due to the urine dumps throughout
flight.seve~al times we saw urine crystals come·back e.nd hit
the nose cone. We never saw them actually hit the window.
I am not sure that some of it, that was practically invisible,
might have hit the window.
flight.

Lovell

l-zy- window was

It did seem to get worse with

not nearly as bad as Jim's.

Frank's was better than mine.

Whenever I could I would

give him the cameras to take a picture.

He did a lot of

the Apollo landmark and S-5 and S-6 pictures while I was
controlling the spacecraft.
We have to improve the windows somehow.

We've got to have

some sort of cover or get some certain ty:pe of material.
The windows were perfect when we got in the cockpit.

The

problem they had on GT-5, where they had fog and humidity
because of the difference in temperature when the White

109

Room was dismantled, was not there this time.
Intensity control was good, no problem.

We had two white

lights in the center cockpit, this was our request a long
time ago, and after using it I think we ma.de a mistake. We
never did use the thunderstorm light that we stuck in place
of the red light.

Right now Frank and I think we could

have used the red light again because we both did use red
lights a lot more than we thought we were going to, for
night work.

It gets your eyes accustomed to the night, and

you can see the airglow and stars a lot better.

If you have

bright lights on in the cockpit , at night, with glare off the
window and your eyes adjusted to the white lights, you could
never see out.

It ' s just black.

Onboard data: checklist cards preparation, excellent.

I

think the people who made them up , Chuck Stough, has to take
a personal bow because I think that he did an outstanding
job of making up all the onboard data books and cards.
are very, very good.

They

What we did was, tear off the lift-off

cards prior to reentry and just had the reentry section, so
we wouldn't get mixed up.

There are several minor things

which we could change to make it a little bit more compatible ,
like getting one card with all the data on it so we didn't
have to flip the cards back and forth when MCC gave it to us.
As a matter of fact that i s exactly what I ended up doing,

110
I took the core card, and after I read the various cores for
the reentry parameters, I got the nominal IVI's, also the
bank angle updates and things of this nature, all on one
card·.

Then I went back to the other section and transposed

them in there .
:Borman

One of t he most i mport ant things about the checklist on
this flight was t he fact that we had them about a month
before the fl ight.

We used them in training, and the peop l e

responsi ble for that di d a great job, Chuck Stough and Ted
Guillory.
Lovell

That is important.

On GT-4, because of the newness of the

system, we were still rearranging cards and books just prior
to the f light.

Learning from that flight, on GT-7 we really

gained a lot by having the cards and books early in the
game so we could train with them.
Checklist cards useful ness was outstanding.
:Borman

The maps and overlays were fine.
orbital display m.e.p.

We carried the larger

I'm not really sure we needed it.

was a little cumbersome i n the coclq)it.

It

It was all right,

but general areas would have been just as readily available
on a small map.

When we were doing the Apollo landmarks,

particularly those with coastal features, I thought Apollo
landmark •

maps were entirely adequate.

reason for photographs.

I did not see any-

If you really want photographs, the

111

best way to do it would be to fly over them with an airplane
and then change the scale to whatever you wanted it.
Lovell

The photographs were important , but I don ' t think you have
to spend

valuable

fuel and time to get them.

An airplane

can do the same job getting photographs that we need for
Apollo landmarks.
Borman

That's right.

No questi on about that.

Lovell

I found it difficult to move the map overlay.

Borman

It got better as the flight went on.

Lovell

Yes , because we wore it in.

The overlay we have , with

periods , orbits , and the map underneath , I think that can
be improved.

We needed a very simple device with two rollers

on the end, or some system a little bit more elaborate, but
a lot easier to handle.
Borman

I don't know , it worked all right toward the end, Jim.

If

you get it too elaborate, or too easy to roll , then it is
going to change on you.
Lovell

It has to have a system where it can ' t change .

Borman

It was valuable.

Lovell

We used it more than we used the star charts.

You knew where you were all the time.
Mainly, we -

used the star charts for the no platform burns, for retrofire posit i on, and for SEF and BEF positions.
Borman

By and large the maps and overlays were well prepared.
were available early to us.

They

We knew how to use them and i t

112

was a very , very fine job by FCSD people responsible for
them.
Borman

Data books:

We were using a system that was started in GT-4 ,

furthered in GT-5 and I think it is working out very well.
If there is any derogatory remarks on it at all , it is the
r equired amount of logging you have to do.
double entry system.

It is really a

But, hopefully this will cut down the

postflight activities and give people a better idea of
what they are looking for.

I would not suggest even for a

moment that we change it.

We did delete some of the redun­

dancy to endeavor to save voice tape.

We tried to log

everything in the book, but many of the things we did not
put on voice tape that were already in the book because we
wanted to save the tape.

We only had 20 tapes for 14 days.

Everything that was done is in the books.

Most of the

critical things that were time significant are on the tape .
Borman

Star cha.rte, Polar and Mercator.

We used the Mercator almost

exclusively.
Lovell

I'm not saying the Polar was not any good, but the Mercator

I enjoy that

was very adequate and we knew how to use it.

particular ty:pe of chart a little bit bett er.
Borman

It was preference more than anything else.

We did check the

Polar out during flight and it was apparently accurate.
didn ' t see any reason to change those star charts either,

I

113

did you?
Lovell

No, I think we have enough stars on there.

I think they're

adequate.
Borman

Stowage at l aunch was a l i ttle gruesome.

When we got in we

found all the stuff stuffed on the floor over our feet.
Once we got into orbit and started going through our prearranged procedure there was absolutely no problem.

We used

the food bags to put the refuge from each meal in.

We usually

stored three meals in the front until we were ready to
dispose of them, and then we would put them behind the seat.

We filled the debris guard areas we had behind the seats in
about eight days.
bags we had.

For reentry, we placed them over the seats as

we had done before.
Lovel l

A.fter that we stowed the used ones in the

It worked fine.

When we first started training for the flight , there always
seemed to be a de-emphasis on exactly how much we were going
to stow.

For instance , the size of the food bags was a lot

smaller than i t turned out.
was a lot smaller.

The size of the tissue we used

I think that we ought to look at it

realistically early and make sure that we get the right
s i zes.

We were led down the path there on that first

stowage revi ew in St. Louis.
Borman

Yes .

We caught up with it on the third one

doubled the si ze of everything.

though.

We

114

Lovell

That i s right .

:Sorman

We took an actual meal and ate i t and got the refuse .

Lovell

It was very fortuna te that we did this .

It caused us to l ook

for new places to s tow t hi ngs.
:Sorman

As it was it worked out real f i ne.

The cockpit was cleaner

when we reeentered t han when we left .

Another i t em that

was very helpful from the cockpit cleanliness standpoint
were these by-pass hoses with the screens on them.

They

acted as vacumn cleaners on the whole flight.

All the gar­

bage and refuse would get collected on them.

We could clean

them off and put them in the bag and it worked great.
Lovell

We never had any l arge amounts of dandruff or anything
floating around.

Borman

The harness we took off.

All you can say about the harness

i s it is a necessary evil .
to st ow.
Lovell

Once you get it off , it is tough

J i m, you sat on yours , didn't you?

I stowed mine between the seat and the back of the ejection
seat because it was a dead space for me .

:Sorman

I stowed mine on the outboard si de of t he seat.

We never

took the life vests off the harness.
:Sorman

Waste disposal and stowage.

We used the aft food boxes for

the defecation gloves and the urine sample bags.

J i m filled

up his first and then I started filling up mine.

We ended

up putti ng one day of food and s ome other refuse in the
t

115

left- hand food box in addition to the defecation gloves and
the urine sample bags.

One thing we :might note is the

horrible odor every time we opened those boxes to put something away.

Lovell

It was a necessary evil, Frank.

Borman

We were a little concerned when we opened the vents on the
boxes for the reentry that the smell might be with us for a
couple of hours, because we had to open them early before we
put our suits on.

But evidently the vent is just fine.

It

is large enough that it equalized the pressure, but it is
not large enough that it lets the odors escape into the
cockpit.

e.9 Biomedical
Oral temperature measurements and thermo.m eter, no p:roblem.
Although, it seems strange to .me that we have to have a TM
temperature.
Lovell

That thing got in the way.

Yes, the tube got in the way and floated around, and you
almost poked your eye a couple of times with the thing.
is a thin probe.
of them.

It is very awkward because there are two

One is in the lightweight headset, and i f you do

not have the suit on, you have to stick it down through
here.

It

If you have the helmet on, it is supposed to be

sticking out here, and it gets in the way.

If they want

inflight te.m perature , we should take along a regular

116

thermometer.

We had a lot of glass in the cockpit.

I do

not see why we cannot carry some sort of a plastic thermometer.
Borman

It seems ridiculous to me to have to TM a temperature,

I must admit I did not even know I had a blood pressure cuff
on except when I filled it up.
problems or anything.

It did not cause any skin

It is probably as good a way as we

can go.
Lovell

It seemed like I pumped up nzy- cuff a lot more inflight than
I had to on the ground for the same measurement.

Sometimes

we would not get the comment that, your "cuff is full" from
the ground until after your arm was quite puffed up.
times your arm really got to be sore.

Some­

I do not know what

you can do about it.
Borman

We used the M-3 equipment not only for the medical or the
crew status passes, but we used it regularly three times a
day.

It is a very valuable piece of equipment.

It ca.me in

very handy and it certainly was useful for this reason.

I

guess there is some reason for it for medical data.

I did

not understand why we could not stow it the last day.

We

had already checked and they s ai d, "All right, go ahead and
stow it, you do not need it." Later they said, "You have to
unstow it.

We want to get one more pass on you the last

morning of the flight."

After 14 days of flight I did not

understand why we needed it, but we did it.

Jim left it out,

117

actually.

You left it right over the circuit breaker panel,

didn't you?

Did it come out during reentry?

Lovell

No.

There was no problem.

Borman

There is no water problem.

Lovell

There might have been a little air in it because we got air
in the food all the time.

I do not know how it got in

because the food packages were evacuated.

We would put the

gun in and pump it up with water, and yet there was air in
the food 1every time you opened it up.

There was probably

some air in the water, but it did not bother us too much.
Borman

No .

I thought it was a minimum amount , too.

tasted good.

It was cool•

The water

The gun, as we have already

commented, was very adequate.

I think it is inconceivable

that we continue to have to log drinks the way we did.

I

think if people want to know how much water you drink, you
can read them off the counter on the gun, and that is it.
We went crazy logging these things by numbers and counter
numbers and everything else.
Lovell

It is operationally unacceptable.

For flights that are not primarily medical all they have to
have is a counter reading once or twice a day for the systems
p~opls,

They could just divide it by the number of crew and

come out very close to what the actual consumption per man
is.
Borman

The food , I thought , was by and large

very good.

One

118

suggestion on the food is that they try to reconfigure the
meals so that Meal A is more like you would think of as a
breakfast, with :maybe SQme toast, cereal bars, and sausage
pattiess rather than fish, potato soup, and clam chowder
for breakfast.

The idea of .making our day like a regular

Houston day was a very, very valuable one.

I t would also

be rather nice to have the meals correspond to the type of
meal you would eat on the Earth.

We ought to have a break­

fast that is brea.k fasts a.nd so on with lunch and dinner .
One breakfast we bad shrimp, sauce, peas, and I think
potato soup.

This is all right, but it would be more

desirable to have had something like cereal cubes and sausage patties and things like that, so.m ething you are more
used to.
Lovell

The disinfectant pill crumbles.
when we got them out.

They would crumble

The pieces would flbat about, and if

they got in your eye they burned because i t i s a chlorine
base pill of some sort.

It happened to me once early in the

flight, and it happened to Frank towards the end of the
flight.

We had to use the exhaust hoses to vacuum down the

spacecraft to get rid of these things so we wuld not get
the'!D. in our eyes.

I think tha.t we can probably go to eo.m e­

thing better in the future.
i mprovement in food.

There is a lot of roo.m for

It was good.

It was adequate.

We

119

lasted 14 days.
food.

We could have lasted a lot longer on the

But that does not mean there is not room for improve-

ment.
Borman

The concept, as far as packaging and everything goes, is
good.

What is lacking now is really an adequate quality

control for uniformity.

If everyone of the food bags had

been as good as the good ones, there would have been no
problem.

Some of them did not have velcro on the.m, some

of them burst, and that sort of thing.
Lovell

You could get the soups out of the spout very easily, but
trying to get tuna salad and shrimp and sauce out of there
was a real job.

We should change the size of the spout

according to the type of food we have.

We noticed at the

beginning of the flight that dry solids were especially bad.
Borman

Yes .

Beef bites and bacon and egg bites are horrible and

should be deleted from the menu.
Lovell

GT-5 reported that the beef bites were crumbly.

Every

single package of beef bites that I got out was crumbs.
They would float all over the place, and you had to get out
your exhaust hose and gather them all up again and throw
the.m away.

If we did not ba.ve that technique, did not have

the screens on the exhaust hoses, they would either go into
the ECS sys te.m or float around.

I could see where GT-5

got an awful lot of crumbs floating around.

120

Borman

Sleep periods .

This is one of the areas where we really

made a wise decision.

We decided that we would sleep simul­

taneously on the regular Houston schedule.

We did slide it

back every day to correspond with the precession of the
orbit .

When we were scheduled for house-keeping and sleep,

we would close up the windows.

We found that the polaroid

filters were not adequate t so , we cut up an aluminized food
bag and placed it between the window and the polaroid shield.
Then , it was really dark inside, it cut out the heat, and
this left us with a real simulated night.
concerned, it was night time .

We would get up the next day ,

go to work , and it kept us regular.
on a constant type of schedule.

As far as we were

It kept ue relatively

I thought it was very ,

very good.
Love ll

We are going to have to go to that for any of the long
flights , any of the lunar missions.

For any of the long

flights we are going to need to use a regular Houston or
Cape day and not change the routine .
Borman

On Apollo , with three men , you probably will have to stand
a watch.

Lovell

True.

But still, you are going to have to keep from getting

too irregular.
fortable .
Borman

I thought sleeping in zero- g was very com­

I slept like a log that first week.

Yes, I had troubles sleeping.

The M-1 was the culprit.

It

121

was a pain in the neck.

We decided to leave it on though

on the theory that if we turned it off the first thing the
experimenter would say was, ''Well you turned it off'.
was not a valid test ."

Then some crew in the future would

have to fly with the thing.

So, we left it on for two

weeks and listened to it " clank".
didn ' t do any good.

It

As far as I know it

Maybe that ' s the end of the M-1.

Invariably, in a state of semi- consciousness it would rouse
me again.
Lovell

I did not like that.

Sleep configuration was very easy.

You just clasp your

bands are still clasped together.

There are no pressure

.
hands t ogether and hold them there. When you wake up your
points.

You can have a book up there , go to sleep holding

the book, and wake up the next morning and the book is still
right there , still at the same page .

It was outstanding.

If mattress companies ever find out how to make a zero-g
mattress they would really have a fortune .
Borman

Sleep period mission briefing.
briefed.

Lovell

It followed the way we were

Very good.

Fl ight controll ers were very outstanding.
during the sleep period.

Keeping quiet

As a matter of fact, they even

called up Wally one time and told him to be quiet.
they told him to be quiet .
Borman

Everything went fine.

It was our sleep period.

Yes ,

122

9. 0

9.1
Borman

OPERATIONAL CHECKS

Apollo Land.mark Investigation

We should first mention the weather because this casts some
reflection on the whole i dea of Apollo l andmarks as a navigational aid.

The weather was the big bugaboo i n this

flight as far as achieving any Apollo land.mark photography .
I do not know whether it was the particular t argets we were
trying to get or what.
Lovell

Invariably, there were clouds.

As can be seen from the map , anything south of 15 degrees
north l atitude in Africa is no good for Apollo landmarks
because it is i nvariably cloudy.

South of 15 degrees north

l at i t ude is invari abl y too cloudy for Apollo land.marks .
Borman

Right.

Lovell

Al l of South Ameri ca is out .

As a matter of fact everything.

south of 15 degrees north latitude all the way across the
m~p is no good.

We found out that North Africa and South­

west United States and parts of Mexico , as previous crews
stated a long time ago, (that includes Saudi Arabia , Paki stan
Va lley) have predominantly clear weather in the morning, but
not in the afternoon .
Borman

The Red Sea area was one of the clear areas all the t i me .
Even the South-west U.S. and Mexico were clobbered most of
the time on our flight .

123

Lovell

Right.

Weather is the big bugaboo on Apollo landmarks, or

using earth land.marks for Apollo.
Borman

The acquisition data was good.

The pointing data was good

on all the experiment updates, except for one.
the time on an S-5.

They missed

We caught it, and did it ourselves be­

cause we knew where the a.rea was supposed to be.

The point­

ing data given was great throughout

The updat­

ing wa.s fine.

the flight.

We bad no problem.a at all.

Pointing instruc­

t ions were good.
Borman

Concerning taking acquisiti on photographs for the Apollo
l andmarks, it was pretty dam hard to determine anyt hing
when we pitched 30 degrees down to pick up the landmarks.
We could not pick out the air f i elds or anything.

We would

point the camera and take a picture, but we did not lmow
what we were taking pictures of.
the naked eye.

We could not see it with

I am thinking of the airfield in Brazil.

We took this acquisition picture without any idea of what
we were taking a picture of until we finally got to the
nadir.

Then, we looked down and could see the runw~.

think it was in Belam Province in Brazil .

I

The weather was

a very definite f actor in photographing the Apollo l a.ndma.rks, and of course, it wuld be a very definite factor in
using the Apollo landmarks o
Lovell

We had to use the sun angl e that we had at the time we got

124

over the target.
Borma.n

Evidently the people who called them up were taking this into
consideration, because the sun angles for a ll the Apollo
l andmark attempts were good as far as photography goes.
Sightings were tough on a lot of them, primarily because
of clouds.

Lovell

Apollo l andmarks of i nterior Afri ca, whi ch they gave us
several times, (like islands, lakes, Leopoldville in the
middle of the Congo) , were very difficult because there is
nothing down there but jungle and little streams and things.

Borman

By far the best l andmarks a re interfaces of beaches and
water.

Lovell

That i s right .

Sandy beaches with blue water.

There is

no doubt about that.
Borman

There i s good contrast, and with a good map you do not need
the photographs .

I do not understand the value of the pho­

tographs, I do not see why they do not engage the Army Ma.p
Service to aeri a l photograph these areas and print the
pictures accordi.ng t o the see.le they want.

It would be a

rel ati vely easy j ob to do and certainly would be much less
expensive than taking the fuel to do it on an operational
mtssion.
Borman

The designated targets were clouded over more often than
not.

We did take some alternate targets and pointed out

125

some prominent featu:res along coastlines in Africa.

We

have them logged and we will be able to go over them with
t he Apollo landmark people.

Even an area like Dakar, which

you would think would be a r elatively clear area, we tried
three times to photograph and each time it was cloudy.
Lovell

Mostly in the afternoon.

Borman

The maps and Apollo landmark data package was all right.
One of the problems with the maps was it is difficult to
orient the map segments on the page, so that several of the
targets were anywhere near the middle of the map.

You might

end up with a map with an Apollo landmark right on the edge
of it.

It is then difficult to associate the surrounding

terrain with it .

The big map that we had in the front of

the book solved a lot of this problem.

We could get the big

picture from the big map and then go to the detailed one for
the detailed pictures.
Borman

Photographs, 350 and 352, the Cairo area, you don't need a
photograph of the Nil e River running into the Mediterranean.
That was one of the most prominent features we had.

The

Suez Canal , the Red Sea, and the coast of Arabia were loud
and clear the whole flight.

The junction of the two rivers,

the white Nile and the blue Nile, were also very prominent.
Again, you did not need a photograph to

126

determine those.
Lovell

The Red Sea and the Gul f of Eden as it goes into the
Arabian Sea were very prominent.

Borman

Yes.

Lovell

The 90 degree bend was very , very prominent .

Borman

We have a difference of opinion here , but I thought the maps
were entirely adequate.

Mountains were, as far as we could

tell , adequately portrayed, a l though , we did not have any
landmarks that were in the mountainous area.

Most of ours

for some reason were in the tropical areas and they were
cloudy all the time.

The cities that we saw were by and

large over the United States .
Lovell

We did not really see much in the way of cities.
Australian

We saw the

cities at night , we could see the lights from

them.
Borman

We saw small towns along the coast of Mexico.

Lovell

Also South America.

I wonder what the difference in alti­

tude does to visibility of landmarks? I am sure that your
visibility is going t o really go down .

I think that is

what happened.
Borman

Maybe , although when we were in an orbit of 120 by 178 , I
could not tell the difference.

One difference of course ,

is we were in the darkness at 178 .

When we were r eally

looki ng we were around 120 to 140.

I never got the feeling

127

that I was going up hill or going down hill in the elliptical
orbit.
Lovell

I thought it was Ellington, and it

We saw one good airport.

turned out to be Houston International.
Borma.n

We also saw that one in South America very well.

I t stood

out loud and clear, that white runway on the Apollo landmark.
When we finally got over it there was a break in the clouds
and at the last minute we got a picture of it.
Lovell

Airports in general would stand out.

BOl!l!liBl1

Coastlines are the answer.
marks you have.

They are by far the beet land­

I do not think islands a.re too good for

landmarks unless they are relatively large; small islands
are tough to pick up.
Lovell

And they are usually covered by clouds.

Borman

Color contrast between land and water was very good, particularly along sandy beaches.

We had onboard some photographs

that were taken on GT-5 with the actual scene we were
viewing.

We were able to compare the color of these photo­

graphs.

We found it then to be very, very close.

One

strange phenomena is that greens don't come through.

The

very green jungles of Brazil and Africa appeared almost a
brownish-mustard color.

The predominant color is blue,

even at night time with a full moon.
Lovell

I thought the jungle even iooked blue, bluish-brown.

128

Borman

Perhaps , the colors were a little deeper i n the photographs
than were the landmarks but photographs are very adequate
presentat i on of colors .

I think probably any variance in

the photographs i s due to vari~nce i n sun angle .
Lovell

We understood the targets well enough, I don ' t see any
problem there at all .
on.

Borman

We didn't use the maps with gloves

You can hardly use anything with gloves on.

The best t hi ng you can do with gloves i s t ake t hem off
and stow t hem as soon as possi ble.

Lovell

The Apollo Landmark Book size was adequate.

Any smaller

s ize in maps gets to be too thick or too small , and you
really can't read them in detail.

I did like the big map of

the world broken up in four sections, because that gave us a
good approach to the targets.

We could use that much better

than we could the orbital plotboard.
Borman

Probably all you need is that big map cut up in four sections
and then a small scale map of the specif i c area.

We don' t

need the darn phot ographs.
Lovell

It's the thickest thing we had to stow.

Borman

Spacecraft control.

As far as tracking ground targets, you

could always achieve the rates in PULSE mode. Fuel was nominal,

PULSE was no diff iculty. We tried to take everything at a
90 degree angle. We had no problems wi th spacecraft control
to acquire and take pictures of the

Apollo

landmarks.

129
Borman

Certainly this factor of weather l eads me to believe that
the whole idea of na:vigating Apollo by a landmark needs t o
be reevaluated.

It seems to me that a much more desirable

feature woul d be a series of radar beacons placed throughout
the world, similar to the ones that are used by SAC, or some
type of e lectronic gadget not dependent upon cl ear weather.
You cannot choose the weather you want, and in our f ourtee.n
day mission, for about el even days we had lousy weather.
The number of primary targ~ts photographed.

How many did

you photograph?
Lovell

We have nine Apollo l andmarks logged in the Apollo land.mark
section:
Sequence 85 - clouds at nadir.
Sequence 137 - no luck, clouds overhead.
Sequence 94 - unable, because of c~0uds.

Took a point of

land nearby.
Sequence 58 - Cloudy.
Sequence 70 - Okay.
Sequence 85 - Just weather is the remark.
Sequence 108 - Clouds, resulting in poor picture .
Sequence 130 - Weather.
Sequence 97 - Weather.
Most of the l andmarks they gave us, that were down below
the 15 degrees north l a titude ended up with weather.

130

Borman

The number of primary targets photographed was 1.

Evalua­

tion of sequence 350B and 35IB, I maintain that the maps
are entirely adequate.

We evaluated them looking at the

Cairo area and the Dead Sea, and I see no reason for the
photographs.

Jim ha.a a different feeling about that.

9.2 Cabin Lighting Survey
Borman

We did not have.

We have already talked about the lighting,

glare, the dirty windows, and so forth.
I felt that this was a pain in the neck, and I would like to
make sure that somebody got some useful data out of that.
We went around the earth in the HORIZON SCAN mode once with
the HF transmitter on, and I wonder i f there i s anything at
all going to be learned from it.
Lovell

I am beginning to wonder whether the HF system is worth the
cost to put it into orbit.

Borman

You might be better off with another UHF set.

Lovell

That is right.

Go to something that is compatible, like

single side band.
Borman

HF was adequate when UHF was adequate .

.As far as any over­

the-horizon transmission with HF, there was not any.
Lovell

It was very, very poor.

131

Borman

The reception on HF during the fl i ght was very poor.

Lovell

Right.
10.0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS
10.1 Countdown

Borman

We did not have any visual s i ghtings.

No wasps, bees, bugs,

or anyth:iJlg in the spacecraft.
10.2 Powered f light
Borman

I did not look out at l i ft- off.

Lovell

I think we went throu,gh clouds , didn't we? We went through
an overcast.

FCSD rep

I t looked like Frank steered i t right through a hol e in the
overcast.

Lovell

Could anyone see us after we went through the overcast? Or
was that the end of i t?

FCSD rep

No, the hole was big enough so that you were in sight.

Lovell

Could you see staging?

FCSD rep

No, you dis&ppeared from sight before staging.

Borman

At BECO the spa.cecra.ft was enveloped. in a yellow flame. BECO
&nd sta.ging &re so cl ose that you cannot tell the difference.
Engine 2 ignition was very smooth, no noise, no bang.1.ng.
The horizon ca.me into view just like the simulator.

Ve-ry,

very adequate presentation. At SECO I did not notice a
thing, just & stop and a oessa.tion of noise.

I did not see

132

any flames, debris or anything.

Although you did at

Fairing Jettison and Spacecraft Separation.
Lovell

On Fairing Jettison, I saw debris fly, especially during
the turnaround.
l0.3

Borman

Orbital Flight

As for .man-made objects sighted , we took sightings of the
booster.

We had no difficulty in sighting the booster at

turnaround and in station keeping with it.

We maintained

the flashing light in sight throughout the firs t orbit, we
saw them on the second orbit, and the third orbit during
the night phase.
Lovell

But you could not tell distance by the flashing lights.

Borman

No.

As a matter of fact, I think it would be impossible

to tell distance at night unless you have some sort of
illutnination.
Lovell

Yes, if the lights are illuminating the vehicle, by spreading it over the vehicle, maybe you could tell.
tell the way they are now.

You cannot

We picked up Spacecraft 6 on

the final rendezvous phase, I guess at about five miles.
Is that right?

Borms.n

Right.

Again, this is entirely dependent upon where the

sun is.

Spacecraft 6 was able to see us a long time before

we could see them, because we were in a position where the sun

133

was reflecting off our adapter, and they were in a position
so that the sun was not reflecting off their adapter.

It

is a strange phenomenon, but it is entirely dependent upon
the sun.

Once we acquired Spacecraft 6, it certainly was

no problem of maintaining a visual on it.

It was no

different than it is on the ground in the daytime.
Lovell

I agree.

Borman

We sighted two satellites.

We saw the Minuteman reentry

at exactly the right time and exactly the right place.
It looked l i ke a meteorite.
Lovell

Very brilliant.

It broke up toward the end.

Borman

Very brilli ant, it broke up toward the end, and there were
several different pieces flying around.
the speed at which it went in.

I was surprised at

I was also surprised at the

control authority required to track it.

We did get on it

though before it broke up and went out.

I hope they got

good data on it.
Lovell

We saw, what we think, were two sat ellites moving.

Borman

Yes , we took IR readings on one of them. It was a de£inite
satellite in a polar orbit.

We took photographs of two

satellites in the polar orbits.

One of them was below us,

crossing from left to right, and the other one wa.s above
us, crossing left to right.

We picked them up first in the

handle of the

134

Big Dipper.

It was definitely a satellite, and ~e tracked it

on the IR and we used the recorder.

It will be interesting

to see if they got any data of it.

We were never close

enough

to see any satellites and to pick them out as far as

definite features.
Lovell

They were just points of light.

Borman

Just light points.

There certainly was not any problem

viewing the ground.

As we have already mentioned over the

radio, we were able to see the Astrodome.

The horizontal

markings, or the east west markings, on the S-8/D-1, pattern
stood out loud and clear when we acquired it.

It is very

akin to flying an a i rpl ane at high altitude.

Roads stood

out well, rivers stood out well, and beaches particularly
well.

Towns were a little more difficult to determine, but

when you had them you could easily see the l ayout and apparent size.

Also, the atmosphere made a vast difference.

If

there was any sort of haze or cloud, it definitely cut down
your vision.

When we finally got over the Himalayas in

daylight, it was easy to see why it was so clear.
lovell

Haze does affect sightings from space as well as it does from
airplanes.

It is very similar.

If the area is pretty hazy,

it is goi ng to decrease tr:e contrast of the ground, and
makes viewing ground objects very difficult.

Where you have

135

excellent viewing is where the ai:r is clear.
same way with airplanes.

It is the

But, I think you ha.ve a better

chance to look below than you do in an airplane.

There is

a better chance of seeing something, but you still have the
haze problem.
Borman

When we first got up a.nd had a f'ull Moon, we did not see
lDA1'cy' more

stars than you see on an ordin&ry flight at thirty

or forty thousand feet.

However, during the latter pa.rt of

the flight with a quarter Moon, we found that there were
more stars visible. We have a d:rawing here of the number of
stars we could see in the Pleiad.es, which b.&e been recorded.
Lovell

The big thing to remember here is the fact that the Moon has
a big effect on the number of stars you see and which ones
you can use for celestial navigation.

Borman

Right.

Lovell

If the M::>on is full, it is the predominant feature in the
sky, and s:n:y stars near the M?on at the time are washed out;
and they are very hard to use for sextant sightings.

Borman

Right.

Same way with the Milky Way.

It is not very appar­

ent when the M:>on is full.
Lovell

In reverse though, when the Moon is full the Earth is a very
good reference.

Borman

That's right.

It's a blue reference with white clouds, very

visible.

Cloud coverage, there was a lot of it.

The first

three days were relatively clear and from then on there
were lots and lots of clouds.

About the only area that was

consistently clear was the Sahara and the Red Sea a.rea.
The States were cloudy, as was Mexico, South America,
Southern Africa, and a great deal of t he ocean was cl oudy.

Lovell

The entire area of the Paci fic Ocean was cloudy.

Borman

Again we ca.n reiterate that i t would be pretty tough to
count on being able to observe specific landmarks at ari::t"
given time.

The horizons were interesting.

In the daytime

I never noticed much of a difference between the horizon.
We've drawn pictures of them with little notes beside them
that have been carried back, and which will be published.
We noticed the difference in the horizon end the air glow
l ayer between a f'ull Moon and a no Moon.

When we had a f'ull

Moon there was a definite Earth l~er, then almost a normal
blaclmess, and then a definite band of ai r glow.

When we

had no Moon or a quarter Moon, the area between the Earth
and the outer air glow wa.s more milky.
Lovell

That's right.

For sextant sightings the best thing to use,

during a full Moon, was the bottom part of the air glow or
the Earth's horizon, which was probably the upper air hori-

137

zon.

And with no Moon, the best sextant sighting spot to

use was the upper air glow, because it was the sharpest of
the two.

The area between the upper air glow area and the

earth's horizon was too milky during a no Moon to get a good
sharp contrast (you could see stars through it), but you
couldn't find out exactly where the horizon was.

So it

varied between full Moon and no Moon.
Borman

Very drastically too.

Also, your ability to pick out the

earth, and determine yaw from earth's passage wi t h no Moon,
wa.s

zilch. With the full Moon it wa.s just as good as it was

in the daylight.
Lovell

The fuon is very bright up there, very bright.

:Borman

Both atti tude a.nd translation thrusters firing were apparent.
The a.ft firing thrusters were not apparent.

But the- forward .

thrusters were apparent &t night and so were the translational , up, down, sideways.

The attitude t hrusters were

also apparent with puffs, sort of like subdued flashbulbs
appearing out to the side of the window.

They wer e just

little flashes of light in the ba ckground, and we couldn' t
determine &nything from them.
wvell

W
e couldnJt determine a.nything.

l3orma.n

But you could on Spacecra.ft 6.

wvell

On Spa cecraft 6 t he

thruster firings looked as though they

138

went out about forty feet against a dark background.

You

could see this light haze going out about forty feet.

It

wasn't a bell shaped pattern, as we thought it was going
to be, but it was like a garden hose, straight out.

At

a distance we could not see the bright flash of ignition

in the chamber itself.
going out.

All we could see was the haze

But as we got in closer, we could start

picking up the bright flash, ma.inly because of attitude I
suspect, as we were getting closer to see it.
effect on our spacecraft at all.

It had no

They actually fired

about twenty feet away with their forward firing thrusters
to us, and departed.
l3or:man

They got in back behind us in the adapter and fired their
forward firing thrusters and .made the curtain jiggle.

1

don I t know how far away they were when they did this.

1

hope they can tell us, and give you some idea of the effect
that these thrusters :might have on the EVA Mission.

It ' s

just like firing a rocket at night. I guess that's the way
we expected it to look. That is exactly what you are doing,
firing a rocket at night.

10.4 Reentry
Borman

We retrofired in the darkest, .most dis.m.al part of the night
slcy-, and we didn't see anything. We didn 't see
Separation.

Adapter

We didn't see My of the retros fire. We d.i dn't

s.ee Retro Pack&ge jettison.

At reentry we didn't have a

lighted horizon at 400,000 feet.

We didn 1 t have a lighted

horizon until we were below 400,000 feet.

This was not

particularly to my liking; although we picked it up about
330,000 feet.

After then, it was all right.

Lovell We saw ionization.
Borman Yes, we did.
Lovell The whole window started to be just a glow outside.
got into the ri?18S of this ionization layer.

Then it

It started out

to be just glowi?18.
Borman When we went subsonic it looked like there was a bunch of
steam and flame that engulfed the nose eection.

I think

this may have been when the spacecraft finally went subsonic,
right before drogue deploy.

You could see the spacecraft

oscillations, and you could reference them with the drogue,
which was relatively steady.
with the sky.

You could also reference them

You didn't have any stars or anything, but

you could just pick out the motions across the sky.
times it was pretty violent.

At

It would be intereeting to see

the magni~u.d.e of the oscillations and the rates.
Borman The drogue deploy was very evident.

We saw the drogue chute.

We saw the Rand R Can come off, and then I saw it following
us down in the parachute, off to one side. Main chute

140

deploy was very nice.
Lovell Ma.in chute deploy, vecy enjoyable to watch.
Borman During landing and recovecy we had the S2F in sight before
we ever hit the water.
11.0 EXPERIMENTS

11.1 Celestial, Space, and Terrestrial Radiometry (D-4/7)
Borman I think we have more valuable data on D-4/D-7 than all the
others put together.
Lovell

Right.

Borman Updating techniques and communications procedures were
excellent.

Evecything cal led up on D-4/D-7 was right on

the money, including the time and pointing locations for the
reentcy vehicle.
Lovell

They did an outstanding job of giving us the right
information onboard.

Borman We were perfectly trained in equipment setup and usage.
Jim didn't have a question about it.

I think there was

no problem at all.
Lovell We got evecything going.

I hope that we got some good data.

Borman Cooled Spectrometer checks were nominal.

141

I don't know what else to say, as far as we lmow, everythi ng was perfect, it's all logged, they have the records,
they have the TM.
Lovell

We saw the needle go down when we jettisoned the fairing
cover after the fifteen second timer delay, after we did
our separation maneuver.

I saw the cover go by when we

jettisoned.
Borman

Did you?

Lovell

It is r ight above the right hand window.

Borman

I did not s ee tha t .
problem at all.
worked.

The booster measurements were no

It was ju.st like the wa;y the simulator

It was just fine.

Very good.

making t he reticle measurements.

We had no problems

They were very close

to zero on both the IR and the spectrometer.
down procedures.
Lovell

No.

Power-

Did you have any?

Booster background measurements were no problem

at all.
Borman

Okay.

The Milky Way measurement without the cooled

sensor was performed exactly on t ime.
with the equipment.

We had no problems

No problems with any of this.

142

The Void was very easy t o pick out a~d to take the
readings.
time.
Borman

The Zodiacal ligh t test was deleted in real

We substituted Sirius for the Zodiacal light.

The star measurements were done with no problem.

Night

l and measurements are noted on the tape and in the log
book.

We did ~ave some problem with t hese because t he night

land was covered with clouds.

So we were trying t o skew the

spacecraft al ong and avoid clouds.

I'm afraid that we may

not have always miss ed the clouds.

The same situation

exis ted with t he night water measurem,~ nts.

We had very

good luck on the Pola.:~is .
We had good luck on the Polaris a~d good luck on the
booster.

We should h,i ve had pretty good luck on

Gemini 6.

We were abl e t o t rack it .

We had good

luck on the sled.
Lovell

We hope we had good luck on the sled.

Borman

They called us up from the ground and said they had
a thousand percent on t hat.

143

Lovell

You could track the Polaris launch in PULSE.

Borman

You could track everything in PULSE except the reentry
vehicle.

The reentry vehicle was pret ty fast and you

had to go t o DI:-tECT.
Lovell

I have to give credit to the pe rsonnel, the experimentor ,
Brent nall.

:Borman

He hust l ed and he did his work .
what we were doing.

Lovell

He made sure tha t we knew

It was well done.

This is the firs t mi ssile t hat was ever l aunched
from a submarine, their ORI, I guess.

To launch

at the exact ti.me so that we would be i n the exac t
position, I thought was an amazing piece of coordination
among all people involved.
:Borman

I just hope t hey got all the data.

144

Bormar1

We always had the ACQ off when we were transmitting.
The only possible problems that we could have had with
this expe=lment was when we lost our ~ape recorder.
could not put some of the data on tape.

We

We had to always

take the data over a receiving station.
Lovell

Or use the recorder .

Borman

Or use a recorder.

Lovell

One problem which we did ha.ve a.nd which I was not briefed
on was the fact that I inadvertently l eft the gear on one
time and it gave a nine second pulse on the main ammeter
system.

We could not figure out what this glitch was

coming in on the Main Bus.
Borman

This was right after we lost the thrus ters .

We thought

there might have been something in the ACME bias power
or something in the in,rerter that was breaking down and
putting out a glitch.

We called the ground to tell them

we found it and they said t hat i t was exactly what the
ground had thought it was.
Borman

Cloud illumination lightning; we got some good
lightning shots for them.
got.

Day land measurements, we

Ascension Calibration

was done

twice .

145
Lovell

Listen, that was do.ne twice?

Borman

Yea.

Lovell

Was this the NADIR t o 35 degrees West?

:Borman

Yes.

Lovell

Of course we never saw Ascension s o I di d not ...

:Borman

Yeah, we never saw Ascension but i t was the location of
t he area where we wanted t o find.

Lovell

I think we di d that once , or di d we do 19 once?

:Borma.n

Yes, i t i s t he same thing.
cloud measurements.

Cumul us clouds.

Star measurements, the onl y the thi ng

we got there was the l ightning.
We got that.

We got s ome

Cel estial measurement.

The stars, we did not get the Zodiacal l ight.

We got the stars, the mil kyway, the void.

23 Moon measure­

ments.

We got the Moon.

ments.

I do not think it is necessary for us to record i t off

We got a ll the missi l e measure­

our log book.
Lovell

We missed the Titan l aunch.

Borman

Yes, we di d not get the l iftoff because of clouds.

But

we picked t hem up when we picked up their contrai l s.

Lovell

Yes.

:Borman

We also thr ew i n an extra satellite.

It wi l l be

t o see if they got any data out of that.

The

i nteresting

146

Sun measurement was done.

That was a real interesting

one, because in order to get the Sun, we had to put
up t he polaroid lights , and wear sun glasses, and
then poi nt at it.
Lovell

Hot Earth Measurement s: we had that bi g fire in Nort h
Africa tha t was there all the time.
of opport unity.

That was a t arget

We got Hot Earth Measurements of

t hi s f i re in Nor t;h Africa.
Borman

The t ape record er was used properly.

Voice recorder

usage was adequa t;e.
Flight cont rol procedure: the only time we had to do anything
a t; all different was to go to DIRECT t o pickup t hat
reentry vehi cle .

The rest of the t ime it was a very

well organized, well bri efed, well t rained, a nd I
thought a well-run experi ment.
Lovell

That i s r i ght .

I thought i t was quite a bit of data

and work t o do in that experiment .
Borma n

As a matter of fac t , I t hink t he equipment on these
represented about 3½ million dol lars.

So it was a

pre tty hefty piece of equipment .
11. 2

Borman

Star Occulation Meaw,_e~e.~-t. _(~})

Now we go from the sublime to the ridiculous.
occulation measurement D-5.

The equipment

The star

147

never worked and we fooled around with it for hours trying
to ma.lee it work.

I a.m sure somebody is going to sit down­

stairs now and ground check it okay, but, it did not work.
Lovell

We did everything and we traded it back and forth to .make
sure that both of us saw the same results.

Borman

We had been briefed on this, we used it in the set up
at St. Louis where we had seen how it changed.
bad adequate briefings.

We had

We had accurate presentations

on it.
Lovell

Primarily you could not calibrate the equip.ment, the
reticle would not change fro.m red to green.

Borman

We made a couple of measurements where we just used the
calibration lmob at a certain setting and let it alone.
But this equipment was inoperative.

I thought it was a

little strange, too, when they called up and said, ''We
have just found out that this equipment is sensitive to RF
interference."

"Turn off all your transmitters and see if

this affects it."

I think we ought to know before

we go charging into the 3rd or 4th day of flight that
the equipment is sensitive to RF interference.

It see.ms

to me tba.t perhaps there was not a very good Qual.
test

done

on

this

piece of

gear.

I have

148

nothing else to say about the D-5 except the equipment
did not work.
Lovell

Well , star acquisition and identification, which has
nothing to do with the equipment, was outstanding with the
chart. Actually, I would like to put in a little pitch
here, for the sill!Ulator, because the visual part of the
simulator was a big help.

It gave us a good idea of what

we could expect in flight.

And the Planetarium's work was

very valuable in conjunction with the simulator.

I think

that we did not waste time with any of our star recosnition
stuf'f. They did come in handy.

As a :matter of fact, if you

really get to know that celestial sphere, you can really get
around without the earth.

11.3 Simple Navigation D-9
Borman

Jim used this test exclusively.

He was trained at Ames.

But we actually used the sextant down here before the flight
many times with the experimenters.

We used it in the

simu.lator.
Lovell

Let me give so.me comments on this sextant.
lot of co.mments on the tape.
alignment

There are a

Number one, the D-9 sextant

149
was fine , the stop watch was an excellent idea.

The

lighting on the sextant angle reading was too bright .
was a whi te bri ght light.

It

Everytime you read the sextant

out you lost your dark adaptation because we were looking
at this whi te light.

And al l it had to be,since

spacecraft is dark anyway
is red, or dimmer l i ght

the

if you are l ooking a t stars,

to read the angle

out .

The r eticle was f i n e during the f irst pa.rt of the flight,
and then f or some reason it became a doub le i mage .

I

found out that I never used the reticle during the full
M.oo.n or eve.n at hal f Moon

I

could

without having to light up the retic l e.

see the dark lines
One of t he big

things about the sextant, the mechanical aspects , was t he
fact that the l ight was not spli t 50- 50 between the upper
prism and the lower telescope.

It was a 20-80 split and

therefore one image woul d be bright and the other one dim.
This was fine if you went from the start of the horizon
where you would have a bright star a.nd a dim hori zon.
You had a contro l , but if you went from, say, two stars
to measure the angle between two stars to check the al i gnment of a sextant, (because the angl es are already known)
one star woul d be bright and the other star rea l dim
if you got them within a certain angl e of each other. But
as soon as you got that other dim star, then the bright

150

star, you could not tell when they were over l a pping.
Lovell

You had to have two stars of the same magnitude in lock .
So, I had practi ced and trained in the one with the
50- 50 split which I thought was a lot better than this
20-80 which we f i na l l y ended up with.

And this a lso is

true when you t ook star t o Moon limb shots because they
had it arr a~.ged that most of the light ca.me from the Moon.
Eighty percent of the light passage was from the Moon and
they had f il ters t o cut that down .
the sta r .

And 20 percent came from

Well , the fi lters were not dark enough for

the Moo.n, and as soon as you got those sta rs somewhere near
the limb they just faded out of view.

You coul d not see

it so you had a hard time getting star to Moon limb shots .
Lovell

We noticed one big thing i n navigation with the sextant.
Wi th a ful l Moon , you a ~e going t o have a hard time using
the sta rs under the Moon.

It just blanks out the light.

It

is j ust too bri ght , i t dims the stars and rui.n s your dark
adaptation.

On no Moo.n nights or quarter Moon nights, most

of the stars come out and the na.vigatio.n i s a lot better.
We found out a l so on full Moon nights as we said before , tha t
we'd use the bottom Earth's hori zon, whi ch i s probab l y an
upper air horizon and had the sharpest l i ne of i dentification
f or angl es.

151

Lovell

On no Moon nights, the whole a i r glow layer seemed to be
of the same consista.ncy.

And the sharpest part was t he

upper a ir glow l ayer where we could bring stars down to it.
Borman

Did you f ind it difficult at times to get the stars
acquir ed at the angle?

Lovell

Right.

We found out, due to the window design, tllat if

the stars were not lined vertically with one another, if
we were taking star to star shots or star to Moon shots ,
i t was hard to get the sextant lined up.

The best way to

hold the sextant was t he way it was developed originally,
just up a.nd down.

If you had to move it around here to

get a star over here,or horizontal

or angle shots,

you had to move the spacecraft around to get the window
in line, to get all the view.

Now we ooul d shoot angl es

up to about I think 45 degrees, if we had the right window
alignment and had bright enough stars.

But anything above

that and most of the time around 35 to 40 degrees, one of
the two, either the upper prism or t he l ower t elescope
woul d get in the way of t he rim of the window and get
lost to view .
Borman ·

Then we couldn't do anything with it .

I remember there were a couple of t imes when you picked
up the wrong star too.

Lovell

Yes.

152

Borman

Even though you know the star very wel l , using the system
of estimating the angl e i n ahea d of time, you l eave yours el f open to picking the wrong s t ars.

Lovell

Yes, one of the big things about t he sextant is you have
t o be sure you can identify the star when you are looking
inside t he sextant after you get the thing down because
you might get the wrong star.

That is why you should use

stars in sextant navigation that have identifying features
in the fie l d of vi ew of the sextant.

For instance Capella

was a very good one because it has the 3 littl e stars
around i t, I guess there were 2 stars, I forget .
Borman

Three stars .

Lovell

Three stars , but anyway you coul d tel l Capella when you
looked through the sextant!But,a star that was a l l out by
itself, even though it was bright,you really could not
tell whether tha t was a star or not

until you went out

and l ooked again,and tha t was sort of difficult .
Borman

We did not have any radar but I know darn wel l , if I was
out trying t o ef fect a rendezvous , I woul d much rather
have an operati.ng radar wi th range and range rate than I
would that s extant.

Love ll

Wel l the thi.ng i s:

there are a l ot of f ac tors that

affect t his thing:

window g l a re , the f act that we had to

t urn on white light everytime we got a reading, because

153

we had to read the digital clock to get an exact time
of the reading, the reflection from the Moon, all that
stuff complicates visual sightings.
Borman

Row about picking out a proper horizon? You even
had trouble doing that. What horizon were we going to use?

Lovell

That is right.

We don't know what horizon we are going

to use.
Borman

The horizon is dependent upon the Moon.

Lovell

So sextant sightings are going to be very difficult.

Borman

And the accuracy of this instrument, as advertised,
is phenomenal.

But the accuracy to what?

know what horizon we are measuring to.

If we do not

Did you mention the

fact that the green filter cuts out everything?
Lovell

Well that is right.

Yes, the green and blue filters , one

of the modes as a matter of fact , was to use the green
filter for the horizon.

Unfortunately you stick the green

filt er in there and then look for the horizon and it is
gone .
Borman

Everything is gone.

There is nothing.

All you see are

the stars up above, you do not see any horizon.
Lovell

So the filter idea was useless as far as the sextant goes.

Borman

Also the blue filter, you stayed dark adapted and then
tried the blue filt er in daylight as was requested.

154
Lovell

That was a little scientif ic experiment which we were
asked to do: to see if we could see the blue horizon
line, blue air glow in the daytime by keeping dark adapted
and using the blue fil ter.

Borman

The r esul ts were negative .

Lovell

That is right .

Borman

Anything else?

Lovell

I think we hit everything on the sextant.

Borman

We had no equipment malfunctions with the sextant other
t han t he f act that you got double vision.

Lovell

And t he sextant was not as bulky to opera te on t he spacecraft as it i s on l and.

It is a pretty bulky piece of

equipment, but it is not bad.
11.4

Visual Acuity and Astronaut Visibility and Vision
Test

Borman

(M-9)

Updating techniques and communications proceduresi

This was an

area that was outstanding. I t s eems redundant to comment about it
everytime, but is is true.

Equipment set up and usage for t he

vision test and the M-9 experiment, no problem. We tried t his
in the simulator and we tried it in flight and it was t he same.
Lovell

The photometer left a little bit to be desired.

Borman

Oh , I think we are talking not just about the tests

that

155

we did every morning.
'Borman

The vision test and the other one.

The M-9 vision test also caused no problem.

As a matter

of fact we did a little interesting experiment of our own.
We used the brace, the head brace and the bite board
everytime but once, and then we co.m.pared the results,
with and without using the head brace or bite boards, the
last day.

We noted this in the log book.

There was no

difference in the outco.m.e, so I have begun to wonder if it
is necesary.

One of the great points o:f interest, was trying

to observe this ground observation at Laredo a.nd we picked it
up 3 times, I believe.

Acquisition is very difficult, be­

cause of the poor terrain features.

I never did really

see the smoke pots, but we did see the dashes that they had
in the block.

We had a real good pass at it a.nd we had

it acquired excellently and I called off 3 numbers and they
are listed in the l og book, I think there was a 3-1-3 or a

1-3-1.
'Borm.a.n

I would be interested to know if I was right on a:ny of
these because you could see the:m.
to see the.m. on that one.
off.

Lovell

I should have been able

1-3-3, I gu.ese it was we called

No, 3-1-3 ground observation.

I had one pass where I saw it and by the time I got to
see the squares or the rectangles we were already by it

156
I guess from what I could see of the thing, I think
it was a 2-3-4, that was all I had of it.

Basicall y , we

had a picture from Gr-5.
Borman

We had pictures from G'11-5 with us in the cockpit to help
us acquire it .

Lovell

We could see the red ground with no strain at all .

We

knew where to look and it was just difficult to find.
Borman

You might mention that if they had gone to Yuma , if we
had not had to change our l aunch trajectory, it would
have been great.

You could pick out the area of the

Salton Sea there even from where we were, 3 or 4 hundred
miles south, it stood out l ike a s ore thumb .
Lovell

I do think though that for the amount of time that you
are over the target, the amount of squares

they were

expecting you to read are too much.
Borman

Yes.

Lovell

Because you just cannot read that much .

You have to

acquire it, examine it, and then by that time you are
going over it.
Borman

The window measurements.

We did this; it was called to do

it twice , but we did it three times because of the f act
that the tape recorder was shot a.nd they had to get real
time ™• They did not get good TM on o.n e pass, so we did it
again at an opportune time.

Unfortunately, the photometer

157

had not had a chance to warm up for 10 minutes.

We were at

such a low fuel state then that it was either then or never,
so we did it, and I hope they got the data.

Now this window

measurement business was always a l ittl e nebulous to me.

I

am not sure exactly what they were going to get out of it.
:But it seems like they a.re scratching.
Lovell

I do not understand the procedures too well.

I mean I went

th.rough the procedures, followed them exactly, but the photometer left me out to lunch.

We tried to get the dope, but

I do not see what they are going to get out of it.
Borman

We did not have mu.ch confidence in that.
the wa;y it was practiced.

We did it exactly

We did practice it in the simu.la.­

tor and it is recorded on voice tape.

They came ba.ck though

and said that TM did not make much sense to them, and I
think that is probably right.

Voice tape recorder usage,

by and la.rge this wa.s another experiment that was well handled, preflight a.nd during flight.

We admit that we spent

a l ot of time on this one 8Jld with all the visu.a.l a.cui ty
data they got a.head of time, and were briefed by the princi­

pa.l experimenters ma.ny, many times.

I thought that it was

handled a.s well as it could be handled.
tralia.

We were over Australia

The site in Aus­

158
in the daylight--of course the site was not manned because
of the few pa sses we'd have to have .

When we were over

Australia we didn't have attitude contro l .
Lovell

We might menti o.n one thing.

I think with the l ong flight

like we had , if we ha d the fuel we could have become more
skilled in observing the site and probably have gotten
better results .
Borman

No , we coul d not have on thi s o.ne , because after the 3rd day
the clouds were the factor the whol e t i me.

We had only

3 days to observe that , a.nd everything e l s e was c l oudy.
Lovell

Okay , it was cloudy, but I suspect that the more pa sses
over the thing, you woul d get better.

But we just did

not have the fuel and the weather was bad.

11, 5 Synoptic terrain ( S-5 ) and weather (s-6) photogra phy
Borman

Synoptic terra i n a.nd weather photography.
or significant subject matter.

On unusual

We ll , it turns out we did

not have any unusual or significant subject matter as f ar
as I know .

We t ook the s equences and we took a l ot of

it as genera l photography that was not even called up .
Most of the time , it had t o be done i n drifting flight.
We were sorry about this , but there was not the fuel
availabl e.

The two sequences that wer e called up (where

we were alloca ted the fue l from the ground) we t ook them .
hope they were well done.

We did get some

I

159
pictures over Brazil that have never been gotten before.
They were not called up.
shifted .f i l m.

We took them with the IR color

We go t s ome pictures of Mexi c o t hat

were not ca lled up.
Lovel l

We ·g ot a good sequence over North Africa.

Borman

We got s everal good sequences over North Africa..

Lovell

But I am sure tha.t they have been used before.

Borman

We a l so took a seque.nce a l ong

the southern coast from

New Orleans through Fl ori da using color shifted I R t o
eval uate t he f ilm more than anythi ng e l se.
comes in handy.

I hope this

We got some shots of the is l and chai ns

off Florida, to see if they can determine any effect from
the hurri cane that went through, Betsy.
Lovell

As a matter of f act, we got a strip s equence of Cuba too .

Borman

Al l these are target s of opportunity done without atti tude
control , but they were a ll targets that were listed before
f l ight.

We got the mouth of the Amazon, and I think that

i s the firs t time t hat has been photographed.
Now on the S-6 the weather photography we tried in
the l ast pa.ss to ta.ke a successive revo l ution picture of
weather devel opment.

Ve got one good shot over the

Andee. We a l so got some good shots of wave c l ouds over
the Andes

during the l atter part of the flight.

We

l ooked for hurricane or tropical storm Alice in the

160

Indian Ocean but we never did see it.
Lovell

We had an S- 6 weather to get that too, but we never did
see it.

Borman

Air to ground relay of data was good.

Voice recorder usage ,

this is one area where we are not r edundant.

If we had time

t o record all t he photographs we put in th8 log book and
not on the voice recorder in an effort to save tape.
Everyt hing tha t was done, though, was logged either S-5,
S- 6, or in general photography.

Now, another item that is

going to degrade this was the scum on your window.
Lovell

Yes.

The window is an area which we a re going to have

to work on.
Borman

As it got worse and worse, we shifted so that I was
taking t he pictures, but I had scum on my window also. The
major problem t hough, here was just l a ck of fue l .

We could

not orient t he spacecraft t o cont rol it t he way we wanted t o.
11.6

Protron El ectron Spectrometer , Tri-Axis Flux-Gate
Magnetometer.

Borman

We turned the switch on and l eft it on. I t hink we should
have reruns and reains of data, although unfortunately wit h the
t ape r ecorder being shot , I do not know what good it is go i ng
t o do.

Lovell

Well, they got real time telemetry over the station.

Borman

Right.

161

Lovell

After seeing GT-6 1 s film of our back area, the straps
hanging off our spacecraft looked like they were all
intertwining in that boom area.

It could probably foul up
I mean in a

that boom somewhat in future flights.

future flight if we still had t hat same problem it mi ght
There is a

foul up tha t boom and tear off tha t wire.

wire that goes out to the end of that thing.
Borman

All the experiments we talked about so far were well
presented before hand.

We knew exac t ly what we were

going to do, and the only reason we weren't able to
uo it was 1) weather, 2) lack of fuel, and 3) in the
case of the D- 5, the equipment broke down.

I think

we got a substantial amount of S- 5 and S-6 done.
As a matter of fact we got everything done that was
called up and we got a lot more done just in general
pho tography.
11.7
Borman

Optical Communications

(MSC-4)

Optical communications, MSC-4.
Okay, acquisition of the ground t arget.
been bet ter locked in on White Sands

I have never

in my l ife than

162
we were, when we went by there , and saw two blinks of the
laser.

We had the photograph in front of us marking where

the laser was located.

We saw Holoman , we saw White Sands

but we never did see the beam except the short flashes .
Lovell

The magnitude of this laser is a lot less than either Frank
or I suspected after our briefings by the experimenters a nd
by ac t ua lly

looking at one at Houston.

Obviously this

laser at Houston was a lot shorter and can be very much
magnified.
Borman

Tracking was no problem ~
We

acquired

one

t r ack it easily.

over Hawaii;

we

were

able

to

The pr oblem is a cquisition of the light .

Lovell

The light beam is a lot smaller point than we suspected.

Borman

And then again the big bugaboo in this whole experiment
was weather.

Ascension never got up, we never got ground

equipment at Ascension. We never got really good passes
at White Sands because we were a l ways about 300 mil es South .
And Hawaii was available to us on only 2 passes .

We

a cquired the laser on both passes, but were not able to
get the handheld laser on the beam on the ground .

Borman

Okay, how about the field of view?

Lovell

The field of view.

Well , let me t a lk a bout the equipment .

Basically the equipment was fine , except for the telescopes

No. 1) i t did not have as much l ight gathering as was
required for thi s particul ar equipment.
a l arger magni f i cati on.

It should have

2) It had a green f il t er over it

whi ch was s upposed to enhance picki ng up the beam , but
a l l it di d was f ade out everything .

You could not see

terrain features a.nd you needed to see · terrain features
t o find out where that beam was located .
Borman

Yes. to know where the beam was.

Love l l

You coul d l ook out a.nd .. ..we had photographs of the area
where the beam shoul d be coming from.

And we coul d acquire

i t by our naked eye by just looki.ng out and seeing i t.
But.as soon as you went to the telescope of the l aser,
everything faded out to this green co lor.

Unl ess you

just happened to pi ck up the beam you're l ost and I never
was ab l e to pick up the beam thru the t el esc ope .
filter was just too stro.n g .
view .

The

I much prefer to have a c lear

So I coul d pick out the terrain features . The

retic le of c ourse ....
Borman

Of course. we knew that was shot before we took off.

Lovell

We never had a good check of t his thi.n g t hought at night,
and I wish we had had a good night pass over something,
but we never did.

Because I fee l that we probab l y cou l d

have probabl y picked up the beam a l ot better at night.

164

Protective glasses.

To tell you the truth the one time

where I was really trying to get onto the Hawaii pass I
took them off.

I did not use them.

And they were in the

way, they were cumbersome and together with the telescope,
it was just too hard to find.
Borman

I used mine, but I did not put them on until right before
Jim was supposed to transmit .

Lovell

Of course, I had them, I had them on and I transmitted
and found out that I could not see anything so I just
pulled them off and started transmitting by going back...
because as I understand it the operator really does not need
them if he i s right next to it .

Borman

The big word on this one as far as the reticl e goes , w~
should go back to that
that green in there.
a lighted reticle.

Lovell

That is right .

is for the day time you do not want

At night time you are going to need
You cannot see the reticle at ni ght.

So you need a better acquisition device

on the laser, a better, bigger telescope with more light
gathering and clarity of the te.rrain of the target.

I

would imagine PULSE mode would be great for tracking the
thing.
Borman

Yes.

I tracked one at Hawaii very easily.

No problems.

The tracking is a nominal task, there is nothing to it.

165

But the other business of acquiri.n g,is very difficult , .
Particularly with the reticle set.

11.8
Borman

Landmark Contrast

We did one of these with the D- 5 photometer.

We knew it

was bad, but we put the calibration needle in the full "up"
position, told the experimenter that we were doin8 this
and took the data.

Nowt they will have to check it to

see how it worked.
Lovell

We did :just one,

Borman

We had an equipment malfunction.

Right .

about it anymore.

Spacecraft control was

no problem.

No sense talking

We accomplished all the meoha.nios of doing

it, but unfortunately the equipment we knew was mal funotioning before we did it.
Lovell

Right you are.

Right?

EOt~FIDEt~TIAL

166
11.9
Lovell

Cardiovascular reflex conditions (M-1)

Got that started at, I think it is 3 hours and 8 minutes,
or something like that .
At 2:39, I turned on the M-1 experiment.

Borman

Okay.

Procedures and operational problems.

We had the

hose coming all the way across your whole lap to get
into your right l eg when it should have been put in the
left leg.
Lovell

That is right .

Borman

Periods of operation.
for 14 days.
neck.

The thing was operating continuously

And I might point out it is a pain in the

Because of the clanking noise .

Even though it

seemed you would get used to it; many times just as we
were about to drop off to sleep that thing woul d clank,
and wake you up.

The only reason we did not turn it off

at sleep

CO~◄ FIDE~~TIAL .

167

period, was that we did not want to have the people say,
"Well, you did not run it the whole time so the experiment
was not valid." We left it on and put up with it in the
hope that we could get rid of it once and for all.
Lovell

Obviously, it did not work.

:Borman

So far as we know it did not make any dif£erence.

And

it did not seem to make any difference inflight or post
flight.
Lovell

It was a waste of time.
11.10 In-flight exerciser (M-3)

:Borman

It is a valuable piece of equipment.

We used it not only

for the crew status passes, we exercised with it 3 times
a day and I thought i t was vecy worthwhile.
simple pie ce of gear but it is a good device.
Lovell

It is a
Right?

Although, I imagine we can improve on exercise equipment
in the future spacecraft.

:Borman

Perhaps, the biggest deteriorati on that we noted in the
muscles was in our legs , and that exerciser was-I do not
know how you can improve on that much.
11.11

In- f l i ght phonocardiogram (M-4) and In-flight sleep

analysis (M-8)
Borman

Well, the equipment problems with M-8 were that the thi ng
is operationa lly incongruous.

You cannot have those

168

wires on your head and stringing down the back of your neck,
and not expect to catch them on something in a small spacecraft.

Now, we found that we couldn't keep the helmet on.

I kept it on for two days, but my head became extremely hot,
and I was uncomfortable.

So when I took it off

I

ripped all four of the leads off.

And I think that the

whole thing is extraneous a:nyway.

I felt after 14 days I

was perfectly capable to judge my own condition, and my own

I did not

awareness, and my own degree of alertness
need that

bunch of wires hanging on my head to tell me or

to tell somebody on the ground how awake or how asleep I
was.
Lovell

Inflight phonoca.rdiogram, I have no comments because it was
stuck on me at prelaunch, and it stayed on me during the
entire flight.

Borman

Well, did it bother you?

Lovell

No.

11.12

Bioassay body fluids (M-5) and calcium balance study (M-7)

Borman

Urine samplings bags, well, actually the bags were pretty
good.

Did you get any sensor problems?

We had one break around the head .

right a.nd stowage was fine.

Marking was all

I might point out that the

tracer accumulator we changed with no problem.

The mixing

bag was all right, but they left out the most important
thing here, the condom device that we used to

urinate into is unsatisfactory.

We ended up with urine

all over ourselves everytime we t ried t o use it.
was sort of happenstance .
get a leak .

It

If you lucked out, you didn't

But based on the experience that we had up

there, I would think that the we.y to go is

a simpl e

overboard device where you vent r ight to the atmosphere,
and urinate into a tub e•Esse.n tially the same thi.ng you
do in C-47,
Borman

We carried the flow meter a long and the Delta P across
the f low meter and the fi lter can be i ncorporated with
it.

I am sure this is enough to a l low you just to urinate

right into a relief tube right overboard.

I do not see any

reason to go through this stage where you have urine all
over yourself 4 or 5 times a day.

Lovell

A very unacceptabl e

device .

Do you agree?

Right.

I thi nk we can improve on the urine dump system

tremendously.
Borman

I think they ought to start looking into just a dump
right overboard.

You do not use a rubber condom or

anything.

Lovell

Because that things puts back pressure whi ch i s really sort
of dangerous I think , and besides that , it is uncomfortable.
And when you have ba ck pressure . ..

Borman

Yea h.

When you have a big enough receiver a nd you urinate

170

a stream into a vacuum, it is going to go right on over­

board.

I do not understand wby •••okay.

bags were fine.

The defecation

And we really used them this time.

The

I

defecation bags were really put to use in this flight.
think we used a total of 15 of them.
Lovell

Yes.

Borman

And they were fine.

I have no comments on those.

It seems

to be the best solution you can have to the situation.
Lovell

For this particular type spacecraft.

Borman

For this particular type ••• For the Gemini Spacecraft.

I

do not know what other approach you could have to them.
thought their marking was easily done.
never used that at all.

I

The finger hole I

One of the big assets, we might as

well put it in here, was the fact that the food that we ate
caused well formed bowels, so we did not have any loose
stools or any of that problem.

I never had any occasion to

use that finger device in there at all .

Any other comments?

Lovell

No.

Borman

The water intake, the W&ter counter number.
satisfactory.
unsatisfactory.

The gun was

The recording that goes with it is completely
I think the only way we should

171

consider using that gun again is to read down a daily
counter number, and let the people use that as a--we
•

ra.n into a regular nightmare.

Recording drinks used and

drinks .•••
Lovell

It was too much.

Borman

I think our water intake was adequate.

And again I do

not think this is something we need to be hounded
about from the ground.

A person seems to have enough

problems without being reminded that he is drinking enough
water; I do not see any reason at all to have this com~
plica.ted bookeeping system.
a problem.

The food intake was not

We recorded the food.

One thing we might

note, the food was pa.eked out of sequence.

So when we

got it out, we did not end up eating Day 1, meal A, B,
C, Meal 2, A, B, C, but we did always eat Meal A first,
Meal B the second meal of the de.y, and Meal C, the third
meal of the day.

Although, it might be day 1, meal A,

day 13, meal E, and day 6, meal C.
Lovell

Also, while we are talki.n g about food, we better talk
about the stowage of the food.

It was right up to the

maximum.
:Borman

That is right.

Lovell

And in fact it was a little bit overboard for 14 days.

172

Rather tightl y packed in.

We really had to work to get

it out.
Borman

But again, thi s is one of those things we were operating
right up to the maximum capab i l i ty of the spacecraft, and
I guess we ha d to expect that,

Borman

e.ven though we did get it

out.

So I would not say it was unacceptable.

11.13

Miscellaneous

Celesti a l and t erresti al observati ons, and significant
observati ons or a.nomoiies affecti ng other opera.tio.naJ
or experimental da.t a..

Lovell

Well , we got to see Mars just nea.r the sun by looking a.t
it just at sunset .

Borman

Mercury you mean.

Mercury.

We saw Mercury.

And we made

some other observations here for the sci entists.
Lovell

Zodiacal light came in loud and clear after we found out
how to look f or it.

Borman

Right.

Lovell

We could not s ee the Gegenshein though , we knew exactl y
where t o l ook .

Borman

Okay.

We also made several night passes counti ng meteor s .

One at 215 hours plus 23 minutes, 25 seconds ,

I

'llade

one night pass counting meteors for the entire 30 some
minutes .

And I saw.l meteor under Taurus and Pleia.des

and it was below us , and it was short and white.

The

173
next night pass, ending at 217 : 17 I counted discrete
flashes of lightening for the entire pass.
206 discrete occurrances o:" lightning.

the spacecraft level

I collnted

This was with

in HORIZON SCAN mode, looking out

one window with no yaw control.

Now, we also saw

individual meteors at different times in flight that are
recorded on the tape recorder .

But unfortunately we did

not see this great shower that was supposed to come out
of Gemini.
Lovell

I saw two in a period of about 10 minutes out of Gemini .

They headed below us, of course.
Borman

Alright, the meteors.

Another significant observation

that we made was a brilliant display of the Aurora.
Southern Aurora over Australia .

The

And we have some pictures

here.
Lovell

Sketches .

Borman

Sketches of what it looked like, and we will

cover this

in the scientific debriefing .
Lovell

And we measured the time it took for s tars to occult to
the air glow layer, and for Venus to go through.

Borman

I think this would be best to discuss when we talk to the
scientists.

Lovell

I think so.

Borman

Do you have anything else that was significant?

As far

174
as operati onal experimental data?

Lovell

No.

Borman

We al ready mentioned the fact about the a ir glow changing
with the Moon.

Oh, I tell you one thing that is significant

and we l ooked for it time and time again.

This was the com­

plete inability to observe stars in daylight.
Lovell

Oh, yes.

Borman

I hope we put that one to bed, because we tried and tried
and tried.

We strained, we squinted, we l ooked at all

angles.
Lovell

Looked at all the angles.

Borman

Looked at a l l the angles, and we were never once abl e to
observe a star in daytime.

Now you can observe just at

sunrise and just at sunset, but never in the daytime.
Lovell

When that sun comes up those stars go.

Borman

That is right.

And you get a black horizon--I mean a black

sky above a blue horizon.

I do not know what the reason for

this is, but I will vouch for the fact that you can't see
it.
Lovell

Right.

175
12.1

12 . 0 PREMISSI0N PL.ANNING
Mission Plan (Tra,jectory)

Lovell

Well , of course, it va ries here , this is the last.

Borman

It changed.

We had o.n e all wired and writte.n up £'or a. 72

degree launch azi muth and this changed with the addition
of the GT- 6 mission.

But I thought the people were very

f lexible, and adapt ed rapi dly to the change.
Lovell

Well, ~e are talking about the mis sion plan , and they
a:re talking about the trajectory alone.

There is no

doubt about it t hat our mission , as origina lly set up
for our fuel , was adequate. But ,when we introduced GT-6
and the rendezvous mission, the a.mount of experimental
work

which we had to do also

was not reduced at all .

This compromised the results of our experimental work by
having to use the fuel for the rendezvous .

Although ,

I think the rendezvous was i mportant , or t hat it was
higher

priority, I would like to have it put on the

record, that the resul ts we gathered from the rest of the
flight were not as good as could be expected, because of
the fact that we just did not have the fuel.
Borman

110 pounds of gas went down the drain, too.

Lovell

Yes.

12 . 2

Flight Plan

Borman

I thought the people did a great job there .

176
Lovell

There is no doubt about it. The only way you can plan
a mission of this length of time is real time flight
planning.

Call up the data you want for the day, it is

a regular work day schedule.

Call up what you want, and

we will put it down and we will work at it;

we will run

it off that night.
12.3
Borman

Spacecraft Changes

I do not know of one major change in the spacecraft that
we wanted that we did not get.
about everything.

GPO was very cooperative

Of course, the big thing that we

wanted, that we got after a hassel, was the ability to
operate suits off.

We planned this from the beginning

with our first stowage review, and we finally made it by
going the route of getting the suits that we could take
off.

And I think this contributed much to the satisfactory

completion of the mission.

Don't you?

I have got

personal notes here that were made during the flight.
Every other page it says suits off was the only way to
go, "I do not know how I stayed in the suit for six
days," and so on.

The suit I am sure has done more to

increase the bugaboo of physical deterioration in spaceflight than a:n:y other single item.

Fa.r more than zero g.

177

12.4

Mission Rules

Borman

They are routine now.

Lovell

The only thing I can say about mission rules is the fact

We have no r ea l arguments.

that they can be changed by the Flight Director to suit
the situatio.n.

There is enough flexibility in them

that allows the mission rules to meet the problem at
hand.
Borman

Although, we did not have any problems that required us
to change them.

Lovell

No, we did .not.

12.5

Experiments

Borman

The only experiment that I thought was not well presented
pre-miss ion was the laser.

That was a sort of half

baked preparation for quite a while, and at the last they
brought the equipment down to Hou.ston and it came out
pretty good.

178

Lovell

When we were first introduced to the equipment back at the
stowage review up at St. Louis, we didn't lmow enough about
the experiment to really analyze the equipment, to find out
whether it would be adequate or not.

Borman

That is right.

We should have. picked up the reticle light­

ing on that.
Lovell

Because we did not pick up the reticle lighting and we did
not pick up the green filter.

Borman

No.

The green filter looked all right when we used it on

the ground.

It is just the fact that we were not able to

observe .from .far enough a~ to pick it up.
Lovell

That is right.

Borman

The lighting contrast ... • ..

Lovell

Also, experiments to the M-1 experiment was sort of a last
minute glitch.

Borman

Yes.

Lovell

We had a lot of compromise.

Not compromise but a lot of

failures.
Borman

Putting the M-1 into the ECS system you mean.

Lovell

AlthoulJh, I will have to admit that the whole thing worked
out fine.

The mechanics of the M-1 experiment did l ast

14 ~sand was absolutely no problem as far as operation of
spacecraft or the ECS system.

179

Borman

Right .

Lovell

It did complicate the pre-miss ion planning.

Borman

Every other experiment I thought was well presented.

The

experiments division, with Dick Moke helpi ng out did a good
job.

I WP~ very , very satisfied in other words, with the

whole bus iness .

13.0 MISSION CON1ROL
Borman

Describe and discuss updating on the sta tus of spacecraft and
mission.

Borman

Once a day opera tion, where we r ead out certain parameters in
the spacecraft , reported th~m to the ground, and they have a
GO or NO GO for the r-ext area.

13.2 P1A and CLA _llE.dates
Borman

They were extrem~ly easy to handle .
of about 6 or 9,

They came up in blocks

No problem , s i nce we dec i ded to use a

rol ling reentry in the event of contingency landing.
Lovell

We had very little writing t o do .

Borman

Very little writing.

And I might add, based on that reentry,

i f I had to do it agai n, that is exactly what I ' d want : a
rolling reentry, i f I did not have a l oad in that computer.
Because I think it is very difficult to look out the window
and observe a horizon during a reentry .

At least it was

during ours; especially duri ng a night reentry .

180

13.3 Consumables
Borman

My goodness, we had 30 per cent o2 l eft when we jettisoned
the adapter.

30 some per cent~ o2 and about 40 per cent

hydrogen.

The OAMS were a l ittle di fferent situation.

~

We cut that off at about 2 per cent.

I was a l ittle dis­

turbed on the real-time f l ight planning in the l&et couple
of d.!cys when t hey were sending up for more experiments than
they knew we had f'uel to do .
out.
pilot.

.And telling us to sift them

This sor t of puts the onus of not doing it on the

I guess in the l ong run i t is the best W8:3' to do it,

but they would call up and sa_y-, "well, here is a whole lot
of updates that you can do i.f you have t he f'uel."

Well,

they knew darn well, we didn't have the f'ue l .
Lovell

That is right.

Borman

In ma.ny cases it turned out to be weathered a:nywa.y.

Lovell

And we had been briefed that there was a rather large error
in the quantity- Nadout on the quantity gauge, and .fortun­

ately .for us it l ooked like it was in our favor.
Borman

We also had the Vol kswagon tank which helped out.

So we

knew e:r:a.ctl y where we were then.
Lovell

But we should, in future flights, make sure that the spa.oecra.ft has enough f'uel for adequate BEF alignment, and for
at least a coup l e of revolutions with enough reserve to m.a.ke

181

sure that in case something goes wrong with the thruster,
they could utilize more fuel to keep that alignment.
:Borman

Right.
way.

Well , as it worked out, we came out all right, anyBecause we just said we were not going to do anymore

if we got to 5 per cent to 6 per cent.

Tb.en they came back

and said that one time, I said, "Well, we're at 6 per cent,"
and they said, "we thought you would go ahead and go to 5
per cent."

And this is an awful nebulous thinking.

Lovell

Besides the gauge is hard to read to that accuracy .

Borman

Th.a.t is r ight.

Okey-.

We have already discussed, I think,

the consumables on the fuel cells and the batteries.

We

turned off the squib batteries, about the 10th~.

The

fuel cell consumables were never a problem.
Lovell

Main battery voltage was never reall y hi gh, I thought.

I

have been led to believe that 22.5 volts was sort of a
minimum voltage for a battery.

They were up about 23 or

22 .8 in the early part of the flight, and they were down to
about 22.6, I guess, towards the end of the flight.
13.4 Flight pl an changes
Borman

If there was a flight plan change, the only one that I know
of, that we were not aware of, was the one of updati ng our
perigee in the first burn.
it to 102.

We thought we were going to burn

It came out we burned it to 120 and I'd like to

182

know whether this was programmed, or whether we just burned
too long.

Other tb&n that the .flight plan went very well.

13.5 Systems
Borman

One of the items tha.t I objected to a littl e bit in the
flight, and it was the natural tendency with people on the
g:roundJ was the tendency, when we had a. littl e systems malf'unction, to exp l ore it to the greatest depths without regard to the r est of the mission.

For instance, when we had

the failed thrusters and we were ve-ry, very low on i'u.el,
they wanted me to put & 3 second direct burst th:rough the
tb:rustersJ so they could get TM on what was happening.
Well, this is fine, except when you do this, you are introducing the problem of the thrusters sticking, and losing all
your i'u.el there.

Or at least you are !!quirting out 3 sec­

onds of valuable .fuel, which is a heck of & big chu.nlc in
DIRECT• .And if. you were to induce ignition or even with
three seconds of just venting fuel through the thruster you
pick up a great ra.te, and then you have to ston so you
would use a tremendous amount of fuel this~-

I wills~

when I refused to do it, though, they acceded, so it was
all right.

.Another thing I didn I t like, wa.s this idea of

blowing the OAMS squib.

Remember?

"This isn I t in the

flight pla.n"-"if you feel like doing i t, I want you to blow

183

the OAMS squib just to see if you can hear it."

At this

stage of the game we were depending upon the OAMS fuel for
realignL"lg the platform.

I thought that by then we were in

a stage of the mission that we were operation&l rather than
interested in blowing something to see if we cou.1.d hear it.
Lovell

Especia lly for a night a lignment .

Borman

Right .

And I agree with you a thousand times it would not

make any difference, but on the thousand and first time, it
might have made a difference if we lost our OAMS, and I
could not see any reason to do it J so we did not do it.
Another item, that I did not like , came up as far as flight
plan changes go .

The request that was put in as part of the

flight plan, and never was in the flight plan.

That was to

get a blood pressure over Guaymas after retrofire.

As it

turns out, we tried to do this , but we could not find the
horizon and so we did not do it.

I woul d strongly, as a

matter of fact, I would not even consider it.

After retro­

fire, as far as I am concerned , the blood pressures, and
a ll the other non-opera tional equipment can go by the wayside .
Lovell

Right .

Borman

Right

Lovell

Yeah , actually the retrofire time , the triple orbits before

then the important thing is to get on the ground.

184

retrofire, when you are getting rea.dy for reentry, should
be exclus i vely devoted to that.

We should be doing nothing

el ae.
Borman

Right.
13.6 E:z;Perim&nts real-time updates

Borman

Experiments real -time upda.tes,

was done fai rly well.

a.11 we can a~ is that it

185

14.0 TRAINING
14.1
Lovell

Gemini Mission Simulator

Since there were three crews that had been through
these simul ators quite extensively, and only one that
required any more knowledge or any more

oper ation of

it , we decided to use the simulator at Houston as a
systems trainer.

Most of our basic t raining in the

early phases of Gemi ni 7 was done on systems.

We

used the Houston trainer to gain knowledge of the systems ..
Towards the end we also used it for launch and reeentry
training.
Borman

We made no effort to keep it up to stowage configuration.

Lovell

We made no effort to keep the Gemini Miss ion
.Simulator at Hous ton in any kind of a GT-7 stowage
configuration.

We just merely used the flying

portions of it to get acquai nted with systems
and procedures.
t rainer .

It was a procedures and systems

186

Borman

We got a lot of good reentries.

Lovel l

Well, that ' s procedures.

We got a lot of good reentries,

and we got a lot of good lift-offs with the trainer.
One thing that helped us out quite a bit on procedures
was the visual displays.
Borman

For stowage we kept the wooden mock- up in Houston up
to our configuration.
seen it before .

It came up better than I 've ever

We did several exercises on the Gemini

Crew Station Mock-up . We used that as di stinct from the
simulator for stowage.
Lovell

The stowage mock-up was also used for ex:periments,
to copy down updates, to put together equipment,
to find out what electrical leads went where, and
to practice using equipment ins ide the spacecraft.
That wey we didn't have to tie up the valuable Gemini
Mission Simulator, that had a lot of electronics
attached to it , with tra ining that required
only a s i mulation

of space

and envi r onment .

We acquired a pretty good knowledge of the systems
with the s i mulator.

187

There 's one area of procedures and systems tra ining which
can be improved, and that is t he use of more correct
procedures between ground and simulat or.

A lot of time s

we got into the simulator to do a reentry or launch,
and we didn't get the parameters which you normally get
from Mlssion Control .

There have been five manned l aunches ,

with t apes on all of them , where the communica tions bet ween
the grouno. an:l th,~ spacecraft are well documented .
ought t o incorporate t hose in training.

We

So you could

copy down update s, you could get the 0 ,8, you could get
systems failures and how the ground handles them , and
things of this n~tu.re.

I think we could simulate them

a lot better now, especia lly in Houston.
Borman

I think Lynn Taegart was doi ng t hat.

Lovell

Lynn was attempting to follow that procedure,

We

requested th1t they get some tape s from MGC from
G1-5 1 s l aunch , but by the time we left there, they
hadn't yet arri ved.
Borman

Launch was very rea lis tic ,

I don't think that we flew a simula t or
p~ogram in it and it really
d ifference.

with our roll

didn ' t make any

I guess what we are sayi ng about the

188

Houston s imulator is that we don' t have to keep
it right up to the final confi guration. · It's a
basic tra iner.
Borman

It helps a lot to get in there and get the work done,
rather t han not be able to get in it because it is
being modi fied to bring it up to the latest configuration.

As long as the math f low is proper, and the

basic parts are t here, you can almost leave it the
same for every launch.
Lovell

It should be updated as far as basic syst ems.
had the fuel cell panel put in ours;

We

we wouldn' t want

batteries, because of a lot of syst ems training on
fuel cells .

That is important .

We don't have to

have every little item like on the Cape simulator for
initial simulator t raini ng.
Borman

I was very pleased with the Cape s i mulat or.

We've had

very good work out of it, and it was right up to
the l atest s towage configuration.

I believe we were

only shot down on the simulator once.

It wasn' t

working perfectly every time we got in it , but at
least we got val uable training out of i t .

189

Lovell

Right.

One area that does need improving is the coordination

between the s imulators, the Cape and Houston.
Borman

You're t alking about SIM Nl!i"'TS when we ran wi th Houston,
which was almost a total waste of time, on our part .

Borman

That's right.

Lovell

We wasted an awful lot of time just waiting around, because
there wasn' t the coordination between the two.

Borman

It was not the coordination , it was just the interface.

Lovell

That's what I mean, the interface.
connected properly.

They weren't

We did get a lot of bum dopeJ

it wasn' t the lack of training, it was the lack of
proper training.
Lovell

Station keeping with the booster occurred down here
at the Cape only.

I thought that was fairly real istic

when it was working.
Borman

I thought it helped aome.

I thought it helped a lot.

190

Lovell

Retrofires procedure-wise was very good.

The

horizon, visual display, really is a big item.
It made all the difference in the world between
what we had before with no display and what we have
now.

As far as training goes, that is a very big item.

The Houston Simulator ought to have a visual display
as soon as possible.

Retrofire reentries were all as

programmed.
Borman

We had visual at RoustonJ we just did not have the
targets.

Lovell

We had the stare at night.

We had the stars, but we had the occluding disc,
and we did not have the horizon.

Borman

Reentry on the Mission Simulator was good, a very
close approximation to what we flew in the spacecraft.
I think that was very valuable.

On GT-4, we had

only flown about two or three reentries.

We had

to go up to St. Louis to fly these.
Lovell

GT-3 and GT-4 were both that way.

Essentially what

we are saying about the Gemini Mission Simulator at
Houston is that it is the basic trainer for systems an:l
procedures.

The one at the Cape is a fine mock-up for the

final flight plan simulator. We go right through

191

the numbers in the flight plan, and the SIM-NETS with
the entire network.

14.2 DCPS ( Launch abort s imulator)
Borman

We used it and it was very effective.

It never worked

closed loop as well as i t was supposed to.
We did not have any visual with it, but nevertheless
the runs that we got there I thought were invaluableJ
we certainly could not do without them. The noise
and the sensations seemed as close as you could get
to them without running on centrifuge.

It was a good

program, the tapes were good.
Lovell

I think it is a very necessa.r y simulator.

It was not

working completely like we wanted it to work, but it
was just being put into operation when we were at
Houston.

We did not have much of an opportunity to

use it.

14.3 MAC Engineering Simulator
Borman

We ran a whole week at MAC, two days on reentries and
three days on station keeping, and that was a very
worthwhile week.

It was concentrated effort, and the

station keeping simulation was as close to what we saw

192

a.a you could possibly get.

It was just fantastic .

really well done , and the reentries were also.
a real good feel for the reentriea.

I t was

We got

We had the people fro.m

FOD and the people fro.m FCSD up there at the time.

we

understood not only the procedures f or flying the
reentries, but the wlJSr 's, the how's, the l imitations
of the systems.
Lovell

Well, that's where we dug out the procedures a ctually
for the reentry technique.

:Borman

That's right.

That's where we developed the procedure

of following the roll needle up to 3 G's .

That was

probably as good a week in training as we bad the whole
time.

14.4 Translation and Docking Trainer
Lovell

In the little work that I did, it
representative

of

the actual

is

case ,

if not

more

I

sensitive.
:Borman

It's more sensitive.

It is a more simple t ask to

dock in space that it i s in the Translation and Docking
Trainer .

Lovell

As

long as it is .more co:mplioated there is

no problem.

I

I
I
I
I

193

Borman

I was really surprised at that.

14.5 Planetarium
Lovell

The Planetarium is one which I have to admit I degraded
for the last trip.

I said I didn't want to go and we

weren't going to go.

Then we decided we'd better go,

and I think right now it was well worth it.

The last

trip to the Planetarium was the best one.
Borman

We got more dope on the actual orbit.

We

had settled

on our flight path, and they displayed it, and it was
amazingly accurate.
Lovell

We worked out our initial burn at the Planetarium,
the

stars we were going to burn on for

adjust burn.

our perigee

I took a cha.rt along that I ma.de up at

the Planetarium to use for the zero, seven, and fourteen days in t he celestial
out

fine.

you have

to

the azimuth
launch on,

When

you go

do.

You

have to

that

you

are

and

run

It

there,

worked
that's

what

take

going

take all the charts that

going to have;
of .mission.

sphere.

to

you

through that

are

type

To go there and just learn all the stars
I

might be okay for

basic training like we did several

194

years ago.
mission,

After you get assigned to a specific
you

better

start learning the stars

you need to use for certain burns and things of this
nature.

That's a good place to do it.

I thought

pe~haps, since we had the visual display, tba.t we could
eliminate

the Planetarium because the visual

display had more real feel for it,

and it does .

However, the visual displays in the simulators don't
carry the .m agnitude of the stars that you can actually
see.

Borman

And they are not flexible enough.

Lovell

Tba.t 1s right.

Borman

You can't change them.

Lovell

So the Planetarium. was helpful .

Borman

Spacecraft orientation.

They are not flexible .

As Jim said, we studied the

burns and .ma.de the first
The

Planetarium

Remember,

was

you were

two
very

all set

burns

on the

stars.

helpful

for this.

to

Corvus

find

and then Spica and we had it all lined up before we
ever launched.

14.6 Systems Briefings
Borman

We

had. one

hundred and

and thirty .m inutes

twenty - six hours

of systems

briefing'S and

195

it's all well documented and scheduled.

Another

thing that was very helpful to us was Mike
:Brzezinski, the way he scheduled all the systems
briefings and all the trai ning.
around with any of i t.
like clockwork.
fine

We didn't fool

It was set up well, and went

I think this was one of the real

points of our training.

Mike came down to the

Cape a week early and the whole schedule was set up
a week before we got here, and with very little
change after that.

He did an outstanding job,

and as far as I am concerned, that's the only way
to run it.
Lovell

'lhat's right.

There's no sense running .around doing

it yourself when we have a nice, well run .organizat ion that can do t\his work for us.
:Borman

As far as any figures or numbers on the time spent
i n the different phases of training, they are all
availabl e.

I f anybody wants them we have the

fina.l report, and we have a weekly report.
:Borman

It was very helpful to us to just have to deal with
one person, rather than dealing with the Planetarium
people, the people at MAC, the people at the Cape.
The only thing we did at all was contact Mike.

We

196

never contacted anyone else.

We didn't go direct

to anybody.
Borman

We might mention that the systems briefings were
really of two types.

We had preliminary systems

briefings by our FCSD people at Houston.

At Mc­

Donnell, du.ring the SD1S flights and altitude chamber
tests we filled in the dead time with systems
bri efings from the people at McDonnell.
was a good way to go also.

This

For instance, while one

crew was flying the MAC Rendezvous Simulator
practicing station-keeping, the other crew was
getting systems briefing.
time.
Borman

So, we didn't have any dead

It worked out well.

The station-keeping , on the booster was more
difficult than it was on GT-6, primarily because
the booster was venting, and tumbling and translating.

Also because of the fact that we really

didn't have a lot of time.

We were having to use

fuel in order to get set up before night, for the
separat~on burn.

However, once we got it squared

away, there was no difficulty at all staying
with the booster at a distance, I'd estimate from
about sixty to one hundred and fifty feet. During

197

the booster station keeping we did observe the
ablati ve skirt on the engine.

At one time it

appeared that there were two poi nts right at the
edge of the skirt that might have been rolled in.

It

looked like maybe there were two approximately twelve
inch sections that might have been rolled in.
may have been shadows cast off the booster.

It
By

and large, I would say that the engine looked
very well.
Lovell

To me the engine looked brand new.
cast to it.

Borman

It had a gold

It looked perfectly good to me.

I did not notice any venting out o~ the roll nozzle,
which is unusual.

We thought the venting came out

of the relief for the PSV valve on the side of
the booster.

We just discussed this with the

Martin people.
this.

They were a little surprised to hear

The venting we saw came out ninety degrees

to the longitudinal axis of the booster.
Lovell

It looked like it came out r i ght at the edge of the
tank.

Borman

And this is the Pressure Sequencing Valve drain.
And the next one is, "If so, what was its

condition?"

It looked great.

Yes,

"Did you get pictures?"

198

we got pictures with a 16 mm.

We

did not get

pictures with the Hassleblad because we could not
unstow the Hassleblad at this time.
14.7

Borman

Flight Experiments

Simulations:

The one we used most frequently

was the

for the D-4/D-7 tracking,

Gl'1[S'""'

Lovell

We also used it for the sextant.

Borman

Although it wasn't a good utilization, we used it
for t~e D-5.

Lovell

Just for procedures.

Most of our experiment

simulation was done in the mock-up.

The wooden

mock-up.
Borman

Translation and Docking Tr ainer.

We used the

Translation and Docking Trainer for some tracking
training with the laser .
hoped it would be.

It was not all I had

Nevertheless it did give

us training and convinced us it would be no
problem in tracking with the laser.

This was

borne out by the flight that the mai n problem would
be acquiring it.

We picked up the fact in the

docking trainer that the reticle is not visible

199

The 'l1ranslation and Ilocking Tra±ne~ • was

at night .

helpful in station keeping.

We didn ' t r eally do

any training at McDonnell for the experiments .
Lovell

We did mostly the station keeping and the reentry at
McDonnell .

Borman

And you went to Ames.

Lovell

Just for the sextant.

The sextant briefing at Ames I

thought could have been done at Houston . I got more
information out of Bob

~ilva on the roof of the

Cape here , than I did really out of Ames .

The two

I

simulators I used out there really didn't help me out
at all .

I think the simulator and a star field in

the Gemini simulator plus work outside on the roof
would be more valuable than Ames, which I passed on
to Wally and Tom.
Borman

We had many briefings ..•

Total t i me spent on experi­

ments i s two hundred hours and thirty minutes.

A

great deal of that time was briefing. I felt , that
by the time we took off, we knew not only the procedures for every experiment, we knew the hows ,
the whys, and the wherefores .

I thought we were

200

adequately t r a ined on every experiment . If I could
comme.n t o.n the one experi ment that I thought was
handled i n a sort of , I won't say haphazard, but a t
l east a r a ther free style, was the l aser .
get rea l pr oper tra i ning on that,

We didn ' t

I

I didn't get t o

look at the l a ser unti l l ater in the game ,

The ground

I

equipment a t Ascensi on never did come up , and I think
that if we a r e really going t o make thi s l aser work,

I

we are going t o have t o put more emphasi s on the people

I

who a re runni ng i t,

It seems t o me that here we need

s ome special procedure for training experiments.

It

seems t o me that we went to some pl aces where Mike
was stuck wi th the pos i tion of trying t o scrounge people
and equipment or the individual exper iment ers were stuck
wi th it .

I
I

It seems l i ke ma.ybe Lilly should have been

abl e t o work wi th some section in our or ganization to
get t he t r a i ni ng tha t we wanted and get i t set up .

The

way it i s now, for trai ning on experiments, you a lmost
ha ve t o depend o.n i ndi vi dual exper i menters and a lot
of t he t ime they don't unders tand a t all the pr oblems of
opera ting a s pac ecraft.

Did you have that fee l ing ever ,

Mike?
FCSD Rep

I
I

Just wi th the MSC-4,

We did have a pr oblem getti ng

I
I

201

the equipment.

All the other equipment seemed to come

in well.
Borman

Yes, but we always depend upon the experimenters for
the training.

You lmow, like on the sextant.

Maybe

this is the way you have to continue to go.
FCSD Rep

This is the way the program is set up, for the experimenters to actually do the briefing.

Borman

Yeah, and then the hardware training.
it did work.

That is the way

That' s probably the best way.

S-8/D-13, we went to the trainer.

The

I guess what we

are really saying is that we should emphasize to the
experimenter that they have a responsibility for
providing training and for providing training hardware.
Lovell

That is the big thing.

The experimenters, or the

experiments group, has to provide the training to get
adequate results from their experiment.

Otherwise

they are not going to get adequate results.
J3orma.n

That is right.

Lovell

And t he training equipment and the training periods have
to come early enough in the program so that we work out
any problems that evolve.

For instance, a classic

example was the laser when we ran into the reticle
problem.

We did not find out until too late in t he game

7
202

to cha nge anythi ng,

We coul d not put a lighted r et i c le

on the l aser .
:Borman

In a ll f a i rness , we ought t o poi nt out about t h e l aser
t oo , that i t was severely handi capped when we changed t he
l aunch a zimuth.

Because i ni t i ally they had not planned

t o work anywhere except at Whi t e Sands .

Then with t he

change in l aunch a zimuth , Whi te Sands went down t he tube
pre tty well , then they ha d t o scrounge around a nd try
t o get t o Hawai i and Ascension.
The exper i ment equi pment, by and l arge , I thought was
r eadily ava i l able on this f light .

Thanks mainly t o Lou

All en and the pr es s ure he put on the people.

T raining

equipment was pr etty well availabl e , early in t he game .
14 , 8

Borma.n

Spa cecraft sys t ems

tests

We covered a lot fewer of the spa cecraft systeins

tes t s

than previous spa cecraft had, bas ed on our experience
on Spa cecr aft 4.

Let me see exactl y wha t i t wa s .

Spacecr aft test s , 169 hours and thi r t y minutes for t he
Prime Crew, and 193 hours and 30 mi nut es for the Backup
Crew.

I do not thi.nk there i s any reason to cover t hi ngs

203

like Systems Assurance and so on in St. Louie.
waste of time .

It is a

At St. Louis you should plan on covering

the SIM flights , the Altitude Chamber and the Horizontal
SEDR.

And, down at the Cape , I thought even though we

cut out six days of testing and we did not have a Wet Mock ,

•

I saw absolutely no impediment at all to our launch training.
I do not think that any of it is necessary.

I do not think

we cut out one necessary thing.
Lovell

I think that you could use your t ime more wi sely in simulator training , in recovery training , and in training you
are really going to use than in study of some of the systems assurance tests where you spend hours in the spacecraft
just throwing switches.

You reach a point there where

you are not learning any more.
Borman

I think you should follow, at St. Louis , the SIM f light ,
the Altitude Chamber, and the Horizontal SEDR.

And down

here at the Cape , we want to do the SIM flight, the Joint
Combined Systems test , the EIIV test , and finally of
course , the SIM flight and Stowage Review .
Lovell

That is somethi ng which we put in, and I think ought to be
included in all._. the stowage is one thing that changes
constantly right after launch, and it ought to be put i n
just before launch.

A week or so before launch to make

sure everything is correct .

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14,9 Egress training
Borman

Briefing, Gulf Exercise, and Survival Gear.
off well,

All went

We had it done on Spacecraft 4, so we only

went off in Static Article 5.
Pl ate No, 201

We did not use the Boiler

and it worked out fine.

We had the

helicopter pickup.
Lovell

I think the helicopter pickup was well worth it though,
because i t was exactly what you do on recovery.
Might as well do it in practice.

Borman

And that is strange how that got thrown in there .
That one time on Spacecraft 4, we just thought, well,
it would be nice to come back by helicopter, rather
than back by ship.

And it worked out to be very

valuable as a matter of fact.

I think that is good

training.

I think that you should have the Gulf

exercise.

No question in my mind that you should

have that,
Lovell

That· is about the most realistic type training you
can possibly get.

Borman

We were well trained in the use of survival gear.
Of course, I think that it is a very good idea.

We

had it laid out here in the crew quarters all the time
we were down here, and we stopped in and took a. look at it ..

205

We were thoroughly briefed on the ejection seat by NASA
people.

I thought we were well prepared for that.

14.10 Parachute Training
•

Lovell

I think that all the parachute training that is required
is launch off the island for a water landing.

I think

that is all the Parachute

because

training you need,

that is .most likely where you are going to la.nd.

You are

going to land on la.nd during an abort, so there would be
all kinds of people to help you or you are not going to
make it e:nyway.
booster.

Guess you would be too close to the

I think the water landing training is very

important, especially when you are using new equipment
like our new sui ts .

If we had the 4C suits again for this

flight, I think that, since we had rotated so early from
Gemini 4, that we could have eliminated that and not have
any real probletll!I .
Borman

I think that all t he t raining should be conducted with
training suits on.

It does not :make much sense to go out

there in a swimming euit o
And we .might mention that we had one suit out there for

206

our traini ng .

We switched in and out of a singl e sui t ,

wet , or not wet , and got it a ll completed by one o ' clock .
14.11 Launch s i mula tions

•

14.1 2 Reentry simulations

14. 13 Simul ated network simula t ions
14. 14 Network simul ations
Borman

Launch s imul a t ions, Reentry simula tions , and Simulated
Network Si mul a tions, and Network Simulations, a t the Cape
down here , f or us, were a total waste of time .

We have

a l ready mentioned this earlier, but because of the f act
that the simulator was not playing with the Mcc, r would
.not say the l aunch simul ations were a t otal waste of
time.

We did get some l aunches, but I am afr a i d that the

time spent was not profi table .

207

Lovell

We wasted an awful lot of time on that.
they would not be profitable.

It is not that

I think that is really where

you get the good tra.ining because you get•••

•

Borman

I am not going to recolDlllend eliminating it.

I would

recommend fixing it so that it pl&ys properly.
Lovell

That is right.

Because you get the actual operating with

the people that a.re going to be conducting the flight, get
the communication procedures down, get the whole bit.

Un­

fortunately the whole bit was not working.
Borman

Tha.t is right.

I think this is recognized by a.11 sides.

I

understand that Gemini 6 was much better a.fter we left.
14.15 Flight plan tra.i.ning

I really do not think you would c.all that tra.ining.

It is

sort of procedures that you go through, and I hope that the
people that come behind rea.lize how big a hand they can have
in ma.king the flight plan and how early they should get into
the business, because there a.re so many people with their
own little inputs.

If the orew does not get in early and

keep things under control, you will end up with a.n impossible

•

situation•

208

Fortunately, I think, that the people that you have to
work with now, Bill Tindall, and Barney Evans, are pretty
good.

One of the first things I would recommend to anyone

to do, is to start talking to the Mission Planning people
as soon as they get assigned to a flight.
keep their fingers on the flight plan.

From then on,

I think that is

reflected in the amount of time we spent on ours.

133

hours was spent i n that training just on preparing and
reviewing the flight plan.

I think it paid off because

we ended up with one that was reasonable and one that we
coul d work wi th.

I would not call it training though , as

it was sort of doing flight planning.

15.0 CONCLUDI NG COMMENTS
Borman

What else do you have to say James?

Lovell

We are back home, that proves the mission was a success.

Borman

There is one thing that I have to say I think the system
we have set up here in FCSD now to handle these flights ,
this task force organizat i on, is outstanding.

I was very

well pl eased with the support we got from everybody.
Lovel l

I do not think we could have done it ourselves and having
gone through i t before when we did not

have the

•

209

organization set up this way , it sure made a difference .
Borman

•

And every part of the Center came through .

It was very

effective at the stowage mockups and the Des ign Rev iew to
have Kenny Kleinknecht or Chuck Matthews right there and

to make a desicion and then it stuck .

That was very ,

very helpful from the very beginning there .

The first

day we went to that stowage review up there , we had
the basic concept solved and we had the ECP's in to
get the stowage the way we wanted it.
helpful .

It was very

I do not think there was one thing that we

really wanted in the spacecraft that GPO did not provide .
Love ll

Everybody was very cooperative , I thought .

Borman

But that was another it em that I strongly recommend the
crews to do. , .. is attend Management Meetings ... particularly
while the space craft is in St . Louis .

You will find

a lot of decisions are made and you can get in there and
get your voice in.

The people listen to you as long

as you are not unreasonable , and you will end up making
an awful lot of money in a very short time if you will
get to the decision making.

210

i s keep a c lose tab on wha t goes on at the CCB.
Bilodeau is the best point of co.n t a.c t t her e .
i nformed .

Jim

He kept us

For instanc e, l e t us say we wanted another

stowage bag i n the right fo otwell .

•

Rather than j ust

going t hrough the ba ck door and tryi ng to get Ca r l Stone
t o make up a bag, we i mmediatel y submi tted a requi r ement
t o the CCB.

We f ound tha t t ime t o r eact on this thi ng

was amaz i ngl y short.

You coul d get one i n on a Thursday

a.nd it woul d be acted on by Monday.

Then, after you had

thi s c l earance t hr ough the CCB, things went smoothl y.
I guess what I a.m sayi ng is the system works a nd just
pl ow in and us e it . That is i t.

..

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