PURSUE-RELEASE-03 Serial 34611ac2-b2d7-488e-b904-42857524366c

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# DECLASSIFIED

Authority:

NW 91526

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CLASSIFICATION CHANGE
To UNCLASSIFIED
By authority of EO 11652, 6-1-72
Changed by <signature> Date NOV 20 1973

201973

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

# CONFIDENTIAL (cont.)

## Paragraph

Page number

- 8.0 SYSTEMS OPERATION

| 8.1   | Platform                     | 1    |
|-|-|-|
| 8.2   | OAMS                         | .5   |
| 8.3   | RCS                          | 17   |
| 8.4   | Environmental Control System | 22   |
| 8.5   | Communications               | ..68 |
| 8.6   | Electrical System            | .82  |
| 8.7   | Computer                     | ..87 |
| 8.8   | Crew Station                 | .93  |
| 8.9   | Bio-Medicat                  | .134 |

- 9.0 OPERATIONAL CHECKS

| 9.1   | Apollo Landmark Identification (D-6)   | 144   |
|-|-|-|
| 9.2   | Apollo Yaw Orientation                 | 168   |
| 9.3   | One Attitude Thruster Failure Check    | 171   |
| 9.4   | Horizon Scanner Track Check            | 172   |
| 9.5   | Horizon Scanner Check                  | 173   |
| 9.6   | HF Transmission Reception Check        | 181   |
| 9.7   | Orbit Navigation Check                 | 182   |
| 9.8   | Relative Humidity Test                 | 185   |
| 9.9   | Zodiacal Light Check                   | 186   |

- 10.0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS

| 10.1   | Countdown      | 188   |
|-|-|-|
| 10.2   | Powered Flight | 188   |
| 10.3   | Orbital Flight | 191   |
| 10.4   | Reentry        | .213  |

# CONFIDENTIAL (cont.)

## 11.0 EXPERIMENTS

| 11.1   |                                                                                                           | .217                                                                                                      |
|-|-|-|
| 11.2   | Two-Color Earth-Limb Photography (MSC-10)<br />Synoptic Terrain and Weather Photography (S-5 and S-6).219 | Two-Color Earth-Limb Photography (MSC-10)<br />Synoptic Terrain and Weather Photography (S-5 and S-6).219 |
| 11.3   | Simple Navigation with the Sextant                                                                        | ...219                                                                                                    |
| 11.4   | Electrostatic Charge (MSC-1)                                                                              | ..229                                                                                                     |
| 11.5   | Proton-Electron Spectrometer and Tri-Axis Flus-Gate                                                       |                                                                                                           |
|        | Magnetometer (MSC-2 and MSC-3)                                                                            | .229                                                                                                      |
| 11.6   | Radiation (D-8)                                                                                           | .230                                                                                                      |
| 11.7   | Inflight Exerciser (M-3)                                                                                  | 230                                                                                                       |
| 11.8   | Inflight Phonocardiogram (M-4)                                                                            | ..232                                                                                                     |
| 11.9   | Extravehicular Activity                                                                                   | .232                                                                                                      |
| 11.10  | Miscellaneous                                                                                             | ..232                                                                                                     |

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| 12.0 PRE-MISSION PLANNING   | 12.0 PRE-MISSION PLANNING   | 12.0 PRE-MISSION PLANNING   |
|-|-|-|
| 12.1                        | Mission Plan (Trajectory)   | 234                         |
| 12.2                        | Flight Plan                 | .234                        |
| 12.3                        | Spacecraft Changes          | .239                        |
| 12.4                        | Mission Rules               | 240                         |
| 12.5                        | Experiments                 | .241                        |
| 12.6                        | Training Activities         | 245                         |

## 13.0 MISSION CONTROL

| 13.1   | GO/NO GO's          | 249   |
|-|-|-|
| 13.2   | PLA and CLA Updates | 249   |
| 13.3   | Consumables         | 249   |
| 13.4   | Flight Plan Changes | 250   |
| 13.5   | Systems             | 254   |

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

at TR . We wanted to have exactly the right rate in there so when we did our closed-loop reentry we wouldn' t have an error . As I said , I had the most accurate platform in the world with nothing to do with it. I think the displays were adequat e and the co n trols were adequat e. After the first couple of revs I really didn ' t have any confidence at all in the platform. I had done nothing to establish any confidence in it . I really didn't get the chance to get the thing alined, and I rea lly didn ' t have the view out the window to check it with. We were hurrying and scurring through there . We finally shut the thing down before I really got a chance to use itvery much . When we powered it up there on the third day and we saw that thing coming around there• -and cage properly, we compared the out-the -window attitudes and that old a ttitude reference was right there. That's when I got some confidence in the platform.

White

McDivitt

This is where we lost a couple of bets .

That's right. We lost a couple of beers on that platform. At retrofire I had a lot of confidence in the platform, but the first two and a half to

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three days I really didn't have anything with

which to establish any confidence. It was just an unknown.

White

Jim did the majority of the work in this area and I think his comments reflect my opinion also.

8.2 OAMS

McDivitt

On the pad we did the thruster check that we wanted to. We went around one whole cycle and got nothing. We went around another whole cycle and got nothing until we got to the la st one. We were going yaw left pitch-down, yaw right pitch-up, yaw left pitch-down, yaw right pitch up. When we got to that second pitch-up, I heard the thrusters fire for the first time . ·

White

McDivitt

You can hear them. It was very distinct. That's right. And then we went around and yawed left and they fired again. We waited 20 seconds and fired a yaw left again, and they fired again. These were the bottom manifold jets. We said, "Okay, we're ready to go.", and that was the end of it. So, it was a pretty straightforward check. The inflight checks--I got my operational checks on the OAMS systems while chasing the booster around. I had Direct, Pulse, and Rate Command in

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there as I chased itaround, and those were the

only modes I intended to use right then . Later on, I checked out the Reentry Rate Command and I checked the Rate Command before we thrusted . It did seem to be operating fine . Why don ' t you go through the next part , Eli?

White

All right. We're going to get into the source temperature and pressure, the regulated pressure, and the propellant quantity. Let's take the temperature first. The temperature of our OAMS was 75 degrees all the way down the line. The initial indications on the pressures were approxi- mately 2800 psi for the source and 320 psi for the regulated pressure.

McDivitt

The quantity gage operated all right except that, as I mentioned earlier, the thing seemed to wander up and down somewhere between 2 and 4 percent, depending upon where you were in the mission. You'd read it one time and it would be 60, and you'd read it a little while later and it would be 62, and you'd read it a little while later and it'd be back about 60. The greatest variation in that thing that ever occurred was when I went to sleep one time with it reading 60 and woke up and

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pointed toward the horizon scanner although we never got an unlock light. We wouldn't get an unlock light, but we'd get a bunch of maybe four or five thruster blips right there.

White

McDivitt

White

Particularly at sunrise.

It would hold . I thought the Ho rizon Scan-- It was definitely getting s ome s purious signals through but not enough to break itout all the way . I thought the Horizon S can Mode was an excel l ent attitude- hold mode.

McDivitt.

White

McDivitt

Did you notice the water boiler venting, Jim? Yes, I did. We kept yawing around to the left. I believe it was left. I did notice the fact that we were yawing, but not very much. We were yawing at rates that were extremely low and it just took a pulse every once in a while to handle the thing. As a matter of fact, when we were chasing the booster around a lot at the beginning, I never even noticed. It was when we were in the Pulse Con- trol Mode for a period of time, when we didn't do much thrusting in yaw, that I noticed we did start drifting off in yaw. So I did notice the water boiler venting.

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White

I didn't think you noticed it earlier when we

were working.

McDivitt

Well, I did notice it a little bit in that first orbit, but it wasn't distracting at all. It would just drift off a little bit and I'd whop it and it would be back. At SECO +30, I used the trans- lation thrusters to damp the booster-spacecraft rates. One of them was a little higher than the other, although they were both down in the order of a half of a degree/second. I did fire one thruster one time or possibly two times to damp the rate. I don't know if it was pitch or yaw. You know, you are working in spacecraft pitch and booster yaw and spacecraft yaw and booster pitch. I was getting my coordinate system transformed around in my mind, going from booster coordinate system to the spacecraft. I don't remember whether it was yaw or pitch, but I did thrust once or twice. By the way, I could hear those thrusters fire. At SECO +30 I said, "Thrusting," and I started thrusting. "Separate", and Ed. punched the SPACECRAFT SEPARATE. We were in Direct and I thrusted straight ahead for about 5 seconds. Then I went back into Rate Command. Separation was

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White That's rght. It got up to about 90. McDivitt 100, it was. We turned the cabin heat exchanger on for just a short time and it went right back on down to 80 degrees.

White

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

McDivitt

The humidity in the suit must have been pretty dry because my foot dried out. I didn't take any wet- bulb readings inside the suit. The CO2 stayed at zero all the time. It never did go up except when we'd go to 02 High Rate, when it would bound off the top peg and fall back down again. The comfort and suit controls were pretty reasonable. The demand regulator seemed to work all right. My umbilicals were short. My fingertip lights were lousy. Before launch I only had one that worked. On my right-hand glove one of the bulbs obviously didn't work. One of them did work. On my left- hand glove the switch on the batteries would only turn the lights on if it was in one exact position, which wasn't full throw in either direction. So I found out I had only one fingertip light that worked. However, during the flight I didn't use my fingertip lights except one time when I used

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them for a flashlight. I had my gloves off and I reached over and got my gloves and turned the fingertip lights on and shined the gloves on some- thing. I didn't use them a lot. I do want to comment on one thing, though, since we're talking about the suits here. I launched without the plug that goes in the blood pressure port in the suit. I don't feel we should launch these things with no plug to plug up the blood pressure port in the suit, especially when we're going EVA. I think that was a mistake. The only pressure points I had in the suit were in the helmet. Those were just above my ears where I tended to move my head back and forth within the helmet. I finally rubbed up all the hair so that it was going in the wrong direction. When you press against hair for a long time in the wrong direction it becomes very uncom- fortable. At about the end of 2 3/4 days I took my helmet off for a couple of hours, and it felt a lot better. The only problem is that when you have your helmet off there is no place to stow it. We had the foot wells full of gear, so when I had the helmet off I just let it float around on my lap, and over in Ed's lap. There wasn't any place to

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easier than I had thought I'd ever be able to. It turned out that I was able to get into that box easier while in orbit, by far, than--

McDivitt

It ' s a rubber covered box.

White

It's a rubber covered box on the right hand side.

I think that box does have the capability of stow ing refuse in it and stowi ng some things prior to l aunch in it, too .

White

McDivitt

Did you try that box during flight, Jim? Yes, I did. I didn't find it easy to get into. I thought the things we had stowed in it were real good things--items that we didn't need at all. in flight and possibly might not need-- I used all four defecation bags that I had on my side. I used them up during flight. In fact, you used one of them.

White

McDivitt

That ' s rig ht , we did have a bag of those defe ca ti on bags out. It just happened to be over on my side where you could get to it.

White

You were asleep. I had to get them or wake you up. I pres sure- checked rey s uit. I checked it at 8. 5 and it bled down several tenths of a psi . I was satisfied with the pr es sure-holding of rey suit.

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There was one thing though with the suit that I

wasn't too happy with. I was hot all the time in the suit. It got so that after a while I got used to the normal temperature as being warm. I could increase the temperature , which seemed rather strange to both Jim and me, by putting out zey gloves and closing zey faceplate . I could go to sleep . At that time zey temperature would go up considerably inside the suit. It seemed like I coul d stay in there only an hour or an hour and 15 minutes and rest before I had to either open up the faceplate or do something else. So, the temperature got uncomfortably warm in about an hour or an hour and fifteen minutes with the face plate closed, the sleeves on and the gloves on. The humidity in the suit, I thought , was quite dry. I had quite a tendency for zey lips to crack and nzy- nose to get very dry . In fact, I noticed zey nose was itching considerably. This was an indicator to me every time I would go to sleep . I would wake up with zey nose itching and feeling quite hot and uncomfortable. }zy- lips got to the point where I thought they were going to crack,

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and I was trying to be very careful and keep them from cracking and getting anymore uncomfortable than they were. Jim mentioned the CO2 sensors stayed on zero, which I was happy to see. I think one thing that I was fairly happy about was that the suit, as bulky as it was, wasn't depres- singly uncomfortable. I felt that I did have a pretty heavy suit on most of the time, and I was a little bit constrained in my mobility. The idea to have the detachable sleeves that I could take off after the EVA work was, I felt, a very good decision. I felt much more comfortable, and I had a much higher degree of mobility around with my arms in the spacecraft. It was not as tiring to move around as it had been when I was inside the heavy sleeves. So, I was quite happy to take them off. We took them off, I believe, shortly after my first sleep. I slept with them on the first time, and then we took them off. I think they were quite easy to take off. As a matter of fact, I think if you went EVA at a later time you could take those sleeves onboard, and if they were made just a little easier to slip on and off over the wrist, you could take

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bad as I had expected itwas going to be.

I have one more comment. I'd like to comment on the inner liner. We decided to go with the inner liner. in and I felt this was a good decision . The inside of the suit was comfortable , and I didn ' t get any pressure points . I think one reason why neither Jim nor I got any particular pressure points from the suit was that we had worn these suits a heck of a lot of time . I had over 50 hours on my flight suit. I don't know how many hours Jim had on his.

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McDivitt

Actually Ed had just finished talking about his inner liner. I'd like to comment about the inner liner too. I thought about it when he was talking about his. I think that was one of the really wise decisions to go with that inner liner. I felt that it offered a lot more comfort than wearing that rubber suit up against my body, or up against my underwear. I sort of felt that I was really quite comfortable in this suit. I didn't find my mobility limited by my inner liner at all, and I had made sure that it fit. I think that has a lot to do with it.

White

I worked the suit once for about a four-hour period with just the rubber inside. I did no- tice it sticking to me, and I didn't feel as com- fortable. After I got inside the suit with pres- sure on my body, the suit felt pretty darn good. I had the knees cut out of my suits. The knees are still too short. Having been in it for four days, I know the dimensions are wrong. The di- mension from my knee down to my foot is not long enough. It's not just the inner liner, but the

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link net in itself just isn't long enough.

McDivitt You wouldn ' t say you had a pressure point though? White No, it was just a constant pull on there all the time.

McDivitt Did it bother you very much during the flight?

White Yes, it bothered me a little bit.

McDivitt So you really did have sort of a pressure point

then?

White Yes,  to  some  extent  in  that  area .  I had had that

one  so  much  before.  It  had  been  so  extreme  in

some  cases  that  itreally didn't  bother  me  too

much  .

White Both of us should mention something about the

visors.

McDivitt I thought you ought to mention something about

your visor problem, your EVA visor or the other

one.

White Well, I have briefed the visor on the EVA pretty well. The one that I will mention now is the visor that I had on my regular helmet . I thought that the vision through it was quite good. I noticed no distortion at all through it, but I did immediately put a couple big scratches on it

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in the beginning when I was unstowing equipment .

I continued to scratch it throughout the mission . When I finished , the visor was considerably scratched up as you w ould pr obably notice if you looked at my suit. I don ' t know w hat there is to do about this other than to accept a scratchy visor .

McDivitt

If you've got the visors down in front of your face, you don't tend to scratch it up as much. I think it was really worn out because you started opening up your visor and leaving it up over your head a lot earlier than I did. At about the two and a half or three day mark, I looked at your visor and it was really a mess. I took the helmet off and cleaned the visor because it was dirty on the inside and the outside. I looked at my visor and had very few marks on it. I had a few little scratches, but very minor. Then I started putting my visor up more and more be- cause they wanted us to stay open. Because I'm a lot taller than you are, I really started beat- ing mine up. In the last day, I think I caught up with you and maybe even surpassed you in the

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amount of marks on it. I'll say another thing . I'm sure glad we didn ' t go in for those Lexan visors that they wanted us to fly with, cause the distortion wou l d have driven me batty in about the first six hours .

White

I think you must insist on perfect ly optically clear visors .

McDivitt

White

That's right. You've got to have good optics. I took my helmet off about three times, and I didn't leave it off very long.

McDivitt

I took mine off about two times . I took it off one time for an hour because my hair right above my ears was really bothering me. I didn ' t bother getting a light-weight headset out , and when any body called me , I had the thing sitting in my l ap and I could hear it. I took one of the •~ .~ and pulled it back and I hollered into the mike, Ha, ha!, till I could hear it. I said, "I've got my helmet off. Unless you've got something im- portant to tell me, don't bother me." Ha, ha! And he said, "Okay." It was one of those passes, you know, where you only talk to one guy for about an hour. Then I took it off one other time for about a half hour to rub my ears. I was quite

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comfortable with my helmet on for two days.

White

Do you want to know something that ' s kind of strange? I was more comfortable with my helmet on than off. In fact, I kind of got used to those pressure points on the top of my head with the helmet on. When I took the helmet off and moved my head around , I felt a little dizzy from not having these res traints. I didn ' t feel as comfort able as I did with my helmet on . The times I had my helmet off w ere when I was running D-9. I ran the D-9 Experiment several times with my helmet off so I'dhave better use of my sextant . I took it off one other time near the end when they indicated they would like to have every- thing off . I didn ' t feel particularly comforta ble with my helmet off any more. I got so us ed to having that thing on that I put it on so I could talk betterwith the stations. They were callin g me from time to time , and I thought it would be a little better. Before I forget, I think the portable headset is really a lousy design .

McDivitt

I  concur.

I think itought to be thrown out .

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down so the pressure wou l d remai n down below

960 . They initially told us to vent it to keep itat 930 to 960 . Then they told us to vent it on down to about 890. From then on, we vented it down in the neighborhood of between 890 and 93, depending upon who was asleep and who wasn't asleep . It sure seemed to be an unsatisfactory solution to two problems--one of the cabin hold ing at a higher pressure than they wanted it to on GT-3 and also the problem of the o system 2 venting outside of the pressure gage. In the oxygen system I think the solution to putting the venting down at 967 was a poor solution to the problem of having a poorly designed gage . I think the gage was agai n poorly designed and it should be designed to read about 1200 pounds. Re lief should be up in that area .

McDivitt

I f they really went ahead and jacked down the

relief pressure, to g et it on the gage, I think that is one heck of an approach to an engineer ing problem.

White

I think that's a gross thing to do and if they did that deliberately, I think they deserve a

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very black star for that one.

McDivitt They need their heads examined!

White I guess we beat that one around pretty well,

didn't we?

M cDivitt Yes~ The way that we were venting the cabin was by going to o High Rate and venting the 2 oxygen out through the cabin vent or going to cabin repress and using up the oxygen through the cabin and through the cabin vent valve that way.

White I was quite satisfied with the cabin temperature. It started out and got pretty hot at one time early in the flight and went up to 100 as you noted, and then it went back down into the 80's. I think it actually dropped into the 70's a time or two.

McDivitt That's right. It was in the 70's most of the

time.

White Right. McDivitt Let's get the data book. The dry bulb tempera- ture was 80%;B 80, the first time we tood it. Then it was 79, 79, 79. Then it was 75, 75, 75, and then they stayed between 75 and 77, I

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think, . the rest of the flight .

No,  here  it  is

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

White

I think our cabin temperature gage was reflect

ing a littlehigher temperature than these.

McDivitt No, let's see . It was down around 75. White Itwent down to 74 at one time, I remember. McDivitt Yes, I think 75 was a good average cabin temp erature for the whole flight.

White I thought this was a pretty satisfactory cabin temperature. The suit temperatures were also down. They stayed down from about 52 to 54 most of the·flight. I thought that was a pretty satisfactory temperature there. I believe that there was a difference in suit temperatures be tween Jim and me because I was continually hollering about being hot. I think that temp erature-wise Jim was relatively comfortable . McDivitt I was vecy comfortable, and as a matter of fact, when I went to sleep, I tended to get just a

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little bit cool , especially ifI had urinated

all  over  myself.

White

I don' t remember one time during the flight

during which I was cool in the suit. I think I was hot most of the time in the suit. I got used to i t after a while. The only time that it was not satisfactory, as far as I was con cerned, was when I was trying to sleep . The humidity data that we got doesn't go along with what everybody was expecting.

McDivitt

No, not by a l ong shot.

White

No, not at all. Our little gage seemed like it was working properly. We didn't have any visible moisture at any time at any place in the spacecraft. It seemed to be indicating down around 62 to 63 percent relative humidity which was a big surprise to myself. With this type of data, I began going open faceplate and open gloves fairly early in the flight, about a day or a day and a half, and continued in this manner just about throughout the flight. We used the wrist dams quite a bit of the time. But I had my faceplate open with my wrist dams

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on a great deal of time also. I think you had your faceplate closed a littlemore than I did . There at the end we were both going to an open-faceplate and open-gloves all the way .

McDivitt

Yes, we were especially going open-faceplate at the end just to see ifwe could jack up the humidity . I actually preferred to have my faceplate closed, as opposed to having it open. I went ahead and left itopen trying to get the humidity up . We never really did get it up over 60 perc ent. That seemed to be where itwas going to stay.

White

We were happy to see that the CO2 sensor gage stayed down low the whole flight. It would pop up any time we turned the 0 High 02 Rate on and go up to a pretty high reading, and then settle back down to zero. I didn't notice any particular discomfort versus day versus night.

McDivitt

No, as a matter of fact, I didn't either. We took some temperature readings on the cabin window frame and they varied by about 6 or 8, 10 degrees at the very most .

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White

Yes, I don' t think there was any discomfort

associated with the day-night cycle. We didn't use the cabin fan as we planned during the flight. We did neglect to turn iton initially during the preparation for retro. We noticed that we weren ' t cooling off in the cabin as much as we would have liked to . So, we turned the fan on and immediately the temperature dropped down about 10 degrees,if I remember right .

McDivitt

Yes, that cabin heat exchanger and that cabin

fan  really  do  the  job.

White

McDivitt

It  really  cooled  itoff.

White

Early in the flight when we got the tempera ture up to 100, we turned the fan on and the temperature went down to below 80 in about 20 minutes, or so. It really did the trick . The cabin pressure relief valve was venting just a hair abouve 5.4. We checked this out very many times. Every time we filled the cabin up with o High Rate, itvented,or if 2 we used the repress l•ever the cabin w ould vent .

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

We were getting--

McDivitt That was something I wondered about . You know , the thing is marked, and we were always instructed that when the thing got down below 38 percent we didn ' t need the heaters any more. We shut the heaters off at 42 percent . White Right .

McDivitt Obviously, the guy that told us to shut the heaters off at 40 percent knew what he was talking about because we never needed them again.

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

McDivitt Y es, but I think,though,that the pressure would have still built up even ifwe had the relief set at 1050 or so. Itwould have still built up .

White It might have built up and stabilized,

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

McDivitt

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

White
McDivitt

Sure it could.

But I sort of suspect that the--well, I don't know. It's different from this other problem where we were told that the thing didn't require heaters below 38 percent , and we found out that it really didn't require 'them below 42 percent .

White  We  turned  them  off  at  42  percent .
McDivitt Right  .

White

The secondary o system--I thought those performed 2 admirably . In_fact, they had more oxygen in them than I thought they could hold. Jim ' s was up to around 5500 pounds shortly after launch . It re mained up there and drizzled out about 100 pounds throughout the flight .

McDivitt Actually they increased by 100 psi each right after

launch.

White

Right at the first mode of flight . Then they drizzled back down and stayed at 5400, I think, right on down through the flight . The lowest

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mine got was about 5250 maybe.

McDivitt Did you notice by chance what they were at land-

ing?

White No, I didn't check them.

McDivitt Neither did I.

White That was the last thing I had on my mind, to tell the truth. I thought the quantity measuring was fine . It was a little questionable, that we might have overpressurized on your system, but I guess they had plenty of margin in that respect . The secondary o flow rates were satis f actory as far 2 as I was concerned.

McDivitt I think so . I was amazed that secondary o flow 2 was such that I really didn ' t get too hot in i t . White Yes, I was not as uncomfortable as I had been at other times.

McDivitt You know, after awhile· you hit yourself in the head so long that it finally stops hurting. White It ' s like that big heavy suit, after awhi le you begin to feel good. I know the average guy on the street probably wouldn't like the flow rate, but itdidn't seem to be too bad. It wasn ' t too objectionable.

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White I think we jumped into something else. We were in secondary 02 system and we weren't on flow rate. The only time we had the flow rate on that was during reentry. The flow rate there was sat- isfactory. The pressure obviously was satisfac- tory, but we didn't check it at the end. The control-- we put an extra detent on that control. I think the control was a positive one and we were able to keep it in the detents where we wanted it. I had no problem there. McDivitt Right, I think that the way it's rigged up now is excellent. We designed it. It had better be, ha, ha!

White Right. Okay, the CO2 partial pressure. The gage

has been discussed prior to this time. It stayed

down satisfactorily.

McDivitt Yes, it never got off zero.

White Okay, the coolant the radiator operation config-

uration--I don't have the times in front of me

right now that we went onto the radiator, but I

think it was about 40 minutes.

McDivitt 40 minutes.

White We went on the radiator about 40 minutes and we

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never had to come off it again .

We didn ' t get

any abnormal operation of the radiator at any time . One time they called up to me and mentioned some thing about the radiator and the coolant loop and I didn ' t get any clarification . I lost contact at that time , and I thought just maybe that I had a failure of some type in my primary cooling system. So just for caution sake I turned on the secondary coolant pump and waited tillI got con tact with them again. They asked me why I had the secondary pump on, and I said , "I thought maybe I had a problem in the primary system ." They asked me why I thought that and I said , "I thought they were tellingme something about it when I lost contact with them. I did it just to be sure." But that was the only time that I thought we even might have had a problem in it , and I turned it off . We used double coolant loop early in the mission,and after we turned the secondary system off we did not use it a.gain until the teentry . Prior to the reentry , we turned iton. That's right . That coolant system really worked. Okay , here is one at which we'll get at them--

McDivitt

White

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the  water  management  system.

I  think  you have

a few thousand words you'd like to say about launch. I think you actually already hit on most of them, anyhow .

McDivitt

Man, I sure do. The l'brmal mode , Drink Mode, and

Flush Mode . We got the water management thing kind of goofed up. Let's just take the drinking thing first. The drinking nozzle was attached to the management panel by a hose and the hose looked like it was made out of rotten rubber . The first time I tried to drink out of it , I stuck the thing into my mouth--

White

McDivitt

The first bad moment of the flight.

--I pushed the button in and no water came out ,

~d I almost had a heart attack. I said to Ed ,

"Ed, this is going to be the shortest four day

White

McDivitt

flight in history." Ha, ha! Jim said, "Guess what? The water doesn't work." Ha, ha! But you'd already had a drink out of it, though, hadn't you?

White No, I hadn't.

McDivitt Oh, hadn't you?

White You handed it to me.

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get it back in. I finally ended up actually using

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

White

The button definitely did get more friction in it

as  the  flight  progressed.

McDivitt

It seemed like it was all scored up and it kept getting worse and worse and worse as the flight went on. This could have been a major disaster too. If we had that gun squirting water inside the spacecraft, you'd have had water all over the place. I'll be the first to say that we made a real effort to keep the water out of the space- craft. We wanted to get four days out of the flight. I felt one of the major problems would be the humidity in the spacecraft. As it turned out, it wasn't a problem. We didn't know it right off the bat and we were really concerned about the water. The last thing I wanted to do was to have an open water nozzle running into the spacecraft. So I think that takes care of that. I think the whole water management panel ought to be clarified before we fly GT-5. We were arguing about what position the Waste Management Switch was going to be in during the countdown to launch. I think this is

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certainly not the time to be deciding what the heck the position these switches were going to be in. We were always briefed that this thing would be in OFF . We were going through the switch positions and they'd ask me to check in the count at.about T-45 minutes or so.

And I couldn ' t see that one.

White

McDivitt

You couldn ' t see that one and you asked me to look down at it. I saw the thing was in EVAPORATOR, so I question the STC. He checked around and they had a big flap about what position itwas supposed to be in. Pretty soon we got a call back and he said ifI could get unstrapped and reach the thing, I ought to turn it over to OVERBOARD. • We thought it should have been in OFF. They had it in EVAPOR ATOR so we finally decided we ought to go to OVER BOARD to keep the thing venting. I was already strapped in the spacecraft . I undid my shoulder harness and reached around in the spacecraft and flipped a littlevalve over to OVERBOARD where it should be and then got strapped. You sure they didn ' t have you put it OFF?

White

McDivitt

No, we went to OVERBOARD.

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that the four of us got it pretty well squared

away. Then just before launch we found out down at the Cape that because they had gotten those switches in the wrong position we pumped 32 pounds of water out of the adapter , used up all the pressurant for the water system, and pumped all the water into the lithium hydroxide canj.,3ter. If it hadn't been for one last minute check in the data, we would have lost the lithium hydrox ide canister full of water and nothing to drink with. So we would have had about an hour flight, ifwe had gone that long . I think that before we fly another flight we ought to have all the people at McDonnell and NASA, who are· respons - ible for this thing get it squared away and figure out just where the heck they want these switch posi tions.and get them there. If there are a lot of switch positions on that panel that aren't useful anymore, we should just go ahead and block them off. We decided between the four of us that there were--I don't even know what they call those switches--

White

Condensate Valve and Water Valve.

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McDivitt

--and the WaterValve should be put in NORMAL

NORMAL.and left there. That was ~xa.ctly what we did and we knew how to work the waste management valve. We didn't screw it up, but I ' m not sure that ifwith a little trying, we couldn't have . We never had to use the Evaporator Fill Mo de. The Flush Mode,or the waste·management portion of the thing,had a couple of different positions . In the normal OVERBOARD position and in using the Preheat and Flush switch over on the side , we managed to dump a large number of urine dumps through this. We dumped both our launch - day urine bags which were full. I probably urinated eight or ten times and you probably about five or six t i mes.

White

McDivitt

About five times.

About five times . So we had a lot of dumps through this thing. At 92 hours it stopped work ing . Ed had filled up the bellows pretty w ell just before this. I was the man in charge of dumping urines, it seemed like .

White The Urine Dumper!!!

McDivitt I was the only one who could reach the knobs and

switches. It generally went down in spurts.

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65

About halfway through the dump, it started slowing down. Then it just went in very slowly the last two or three inches. Then I urinated in the thing and had a bellows full of a mixture of air and urine. It started dumping. It looked like it went down about halfway and then it stopped. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it wasn't the air going out of it. It went very slowly for just a short time and then it stopped completely. Nothing else would go out of it. So, I turned off the Flush Switch and I went from OVERBOARD to EVAPORATOR, and it flushed through the evaporator. We had one more urine dump through the evaporator and this worked all right. Well, I'm sure glad that we had those two ways of work- ing it. All the way through the flight after I'd dumped the urine through this thing, I kept say- ing" Well, McDonnell finally designed this thing so it works after about 30 or 40 attempts and redesigns." But I guess I was over-optimistic be- cause it did drop out just before the flight. It finally got to work for 88 hours. We didn't use the Evaporator Film Mode. Okay, Ed, why don't

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you  take  over.  I  extended  my  wrath .
White  I  just  had  a  feeling  you wanted to  say  something
about  that,  Jim.  ~,  ha!
McDivitt  After  having  messed  around  with  that  thing  for
96  hours  trying  to  make  itwork.

White I think you expressed my feeling too. McDivitt Did I leave anything out? White No, no. I had the same feelings. I thought you might have had them a little stronger since you were the one who discovered the water gun was not working.

McDivitt I 'm really serious about that simple panel being able to screw up the whole flight. If we don ' t get that thing figured out we ought to stop fly ing space missions .

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

McDivitt That's right.

White

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

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67

relatively low•, and that the water problem is not

quite the problem we had it cracked up to be .

I'll make a comment on the sponge material on the side of the spacecraft at this point, since we're talking about humidity. I didn't think the sponge material was a very good idea to begin with but once it was in there and we flew with it, I think it was--

McDivitt

White

It was a real bad mistake! Ha, ha! No, I thought it was all right in there. The only thing wrong with it was what they had it treated with for fire-proofing. I thought that part of it was unpardonable. There is no excuse whatso- ever for having those ammonia vapors and the hy- drogen sulfate, or whatever those other things were that we had permeating around the spacecraft. We smelled bad enough, but it was no contest when it came to comparing ourselves with the spacecraft. It smelled worse.

McDivitt

White Ifthere was any moisture itgrabbed itall. I don't really think there w as any moisture for it to grab . McDivitt I don 1 t think so either , Ed. I kept feeling that

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thing and it was dry as could be .

White

There was no moisture that I could notice . 'lhe sponge stuff on the side wasn ' t objectionable to me but the odor that obviously came from it was very , very objectionable. The readings we obtained I thought, were easy to take. The stow age of the unit was not a problem. It was easily stowed in the spacecraft while we were using it.

## 8.5 Communications

White

Okay, I have a few comments on the communications which we ought to go on to. We'll take them in sequence.

McDivitt Okay, why don ' t you go along I'll express my com ments .

White

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

McDivitt No, Ed. I launched with all my volumes full up.. White Is that right? Anyhow in my interphone, I pro- gressively raised it as the flight went on. McDivitt Yes, I started off with mine almost all the way up. On the UHF it was absolutely all the way up,

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concerned about having to come down because we

didn't  have any radios  .

White

One thing that I'd like to say is, I would give

a good gold star to the controllers down there. I thought their voice procedures were excellent and their methods for giving us information were all good. I had no comment , whatsoever, other than I thought itwas all very good.

McDivitt

That's  right.

White

I had no objection. I thought there was no time in the flight in which we got a cluttered voice from anybody. Yes, I think that is pretty good. when you have that many people working the loop. I think so too.

McDivitt

White

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

McDivitt

Get ' em Ed, get 'em!

White Right . This is another thing that should be fixed before the next flight. I think we're going to end up being very, very sorry . We're going to end up losing valuable data from time to time . This will be due to no reason other than a voice tape recorder which is poO'r on all accounts.

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McDivitt

We've already lost some v ery val uabl e data from

this flight. We could have taped t he entir e EVA and brought those communications back down. As it was, we couldn ' t tape them because we had to put the thing in UHF so that we coul d transmit to the ground. We los t all of t he blessed stuff going to the ground anyway.

White

There are certain systems in here that I think are very poorly designed. I think this is about the poorest of them all. It's located in such a position that you can not see the opeation light when it is on. The light is in an area where you normally would put things. Things get put on top of it so that if you look down there, you can't see the light. The light is such a small insignificant thing when it comes on. Unless you consciously bend your head down and look down below your right elbow, you can not see whether the light is on or not. The switch is set so that you have to go in either RECORD, UHF, HF, or INTERCOM and you can not be in RECORD while you're on UHF or INTERCOM. This is a very unsatisfactory method of having a tape recorder. The tape recorder

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73

should be set up so that it can record conversa

tions on normal UHF , HF , and INTERCOM type oper a tions . As Jim pointed out, in our flight alone I think we lost sets of valuab l e information .

During launch we weren't able to tape anything onboard. We weren't able to tape the work during EVA. We could have taped some of the work during the rendezvous part of the flight. I don't be- lieve we taped it though. The way it's set up you wouldn't leave it on in that manner. We both had requirements to communicate over UHF. This was our normal mode of operation. If we have a tape recorder, it should have a separate switch. If there is an hour limitation on the tape, there should be a light that comes on and is easily visi- ble on the front somewhere.

McDivitt

White

That's right . It ought to go right on the VCC.

That's right . That 's really where the light be longs . I think that itwoul d be desirable and important to have a voice t ape of what ' s going on throughout the flight . I wouldn't have any ob jection to having a tape recorder with the capa bilityof recording more than the one hour at a

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time that we have now.

I'd like to see us record

ing a great deal of the flight . It'd be nice to have a switch to turn it off from time to time ifyou did want to discuss something that you didn ' t want to go on tape .

McDivitt

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

on tape . Ifwe flew a week-long flight, itwould take a week to go through the tape. You wouldn't want long periods of nothing on there . I think the way we wanted to operate it this time would have been all right, ifwe could have just opera ted it that way. There were certain periods where we put a tape on and ra.n it all the way through. Well, that was the tape that covered a certain experiment or something .

White

McDivitt

On our D-9 Experiment, we used it.

White

Yes , that's where we used a whole tape on it. Then there were periods that were questionable when you were sl eeping and I wasn I t doing anything, or I was sleeping and you weren't doing anything . Ifyou carried adequate tapes, and you had adequate warning when the thi ng went on and off, you would not have the same situation we had on the D-9

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t ha t they updated our t ime reference system and

had it inaccurately updated by a second .

McDivitt

Yes, I think there is a big fl ap about that .

White

I'd like to find out about that , too . The r eal time-transmitter , delayed-time transmitter, stand by transmitter--they seemed like they all worked pretty well . We had no use for the standby transmit ter and we used the real -time and delayed time tra nsmitter throughout t he flight. You don ' t have any comments on this, do you?

McDivitt

I've got  one  comment.

When we came over Guaymas

after our computer went out , and we'd already fouled the thing up , I know , they said they wanted us to come right -side-up for a critical tape dump . So I did , and I got a message from the ground say ing , "Put your Tape P layback to CONT I NUOUS." So I put the Tape Playback Switch to CONTINUOUS . Pretty soon they called up and said , "Do you have your TM switch to REAL- TIME and DELAYED-TIME?" I said, "No, I don't have. You 're going to have to put itdown there." They didn ' t bother telling me that t hey didn ' t have any command capability w hatsoever . I went ahead and put the Tape Play back to CONTINUOUS , which means that you 're dumping

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77

all that tape. If you don't have the real-time- delayed-time transmitters on, you're just dump- ing it into nothing. You're erasing. So we got some pretty inadequate communications there. They should have said, "We don't have any command capability. Will you please place your tape recorder and your TM switches so we can receive it?" We knew how to work the thing. It's just that the instructions we got conflicted with the normal procedures. Consequently we dumped all this tape that really was critical. I'm not sure how much of it they got on the ground. I'm not even sure if they ever got any of it on the ground,. because we got some not only inadequate but really erroneous instructions.

White

Okay , communications---we covered them in coordin ation with the ground a little earlier. I think that the flight controllers handled our flight in a very good manner. I think that when they had something to say, they said it , and when they knew that we wanted to talk to them, they'd talk to us. When they didn't have something to say, itwas ke pt in a good manner. I thought itwas a very profes-

sional show.
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78

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

White I thought the teamwork between the spacecraft

and the communicators on the ground was outstand-

ing.

McDivitt It was really good. White No adverse comment on anytime during the flight. McDivitt Shoot, if you wanted to talk to them they were more than happy to talk to you. A lot of times. they'd come on and say, "This is Guaymas. We have your TM solid. We don't have anything for you. If you have anything for us, we'll be standing by." And that would be it. They were really good, I thought. We've about covered procedures.

White Right, I think we've hit that too. Okay, the communication controls and switches --voice control center--I've always been pretty happy with that . McDivi tt One other thing I want to comment on is the voice control Center. Ifwe had carried that idiotic

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81

talk to him. I don't know where on the VCC you'd

mount it.

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

McDivitt That's right. T.hey need a simple way of disconnect ing the man from the c©mmunications center without disconnecting his--

White I'd say that this was a very unsatisfactory con- dition. When we finally went to get some rest, we disconnected the communications cord at the hel- met. I think this is an extremely unsatisfactory mode. If we should go pressurized at any time and have to pressurize our suits, we'd just lose communications between each other. This would be a very, very unsatisfactory situation. I believe that this should be corrected prior to the next flight. The Beacon Control, Adapter and Reentry-- no comment. Those were all right.

McDivitt Yes, that was excellent.

White The TM control transmitter and antenna--I don't

have any comments on them.

McDivitt No, they were pretty well designed, I thought.

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White

That's right. Okay, the electrical system--

8 .6 Electrical  System

White Okay, t he systems monitoring. I thought itwas satisfactory . We went through and monitored the systems every time for the GO/NO GO checks, and quit e a few times along the line in addition to this. So I thought the method of monitoring was satisfactory. I don't believe we really had any way of monitoring the electrical power remaining. McDiv itt Yes, that ' s a draw back, and we all know it,I guess .

White

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

McDivitt

Yes , I think this is a ground function. I don't think that we can realistically do itonboard the s pacecraft .

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

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85

When we powered down , we turned of.f the a . c.

power, t he QA.MS power, t he ACME": biag power, the rate gyros, the horizon scanner, the IMU, the computer, both FDI ' s , and the attitude indicator lights. We operated with as little in the way of cockpit lighting as we possibly could. It got less and less and less as the flight progressed. In earlier orbits we had al l the lights on in the cockpit- the over, the middle light , and the two side lights . Then £or the night time passes, as the flight progressed, we got around to using the red lights . We finally got around to making the night-side passes generally with one red light on or one white light on, as we got more confidence in the spacecraft. I think we save quite a bit o{ power that way. They were surprised that we were 160 amp-hours ahead , and I don ' t think that we got that way by accident.

White

I've got a comment to make on that. We were both watching the loadings and I could read them a little better over there. We started out operat- ing around 14, maybe a little better. The reading on the combined amp- hours slowly decreased down

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and near the end of the mission, we were down to

McDivitt

12 or 13 amp-hours on unpowered down configuration. That was as low as I saw itgo, down around 12 . Another thing that we did was that when we wer en't actually planning on transmitting on one of the radios, we were always putting the mode control switch to INTERCOM, which would then cut the trans mitter off the line. You could actually see the ammeter go down a littlebit. So I think that by really powering down the spacecraft and getting all the non-essential items off the line , we helped ourselves a lot. We got this 160 amp- hour cushion because we really worked at it, not because it just happened like that.

White

McDivitt

This takes a little diligence.

Yes, not because it was a miscalculation on the guys who were planning the flight, but just the fact that we really worked at keeping the lights off , keeping the radios off, and keeping those little bitty things down. You know, you only have to save two amps per hour . We ran on a single suit fan almost the entire flight, except when Ed was gettingwarm when he was sleeping we had to

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computer off. I turned the switches off and nothing happened. The comp light stayed on and I don't even think the malfunction light came on, did it? No, it didn't. So I said, "Well, that's interesting that the darn thing doesn't go off." So we flicked the IGS power off and back on quickly and told them on the ground that it didn't look like I could get the computer to go off and stay off.

White

I think you told them you thought you had a

failure  in  the  switch .

McDivitt

Yes, I told them it looded to me like I probably had a failure in the ON-OFF Switch or the ON- OFF switchiqsfunction. And they said okay. So I said, "What do you want me to do here?" I knew we could always t urn itoff by turning the IGS off, but I wasn ' t too keen on that , So they said, "Stand by. We're going to have the experts check it. " So we flew on out of communication with them. I think they talked to me over Bermuda too, but nothing of much importance. They said to stand by they were still checking it. Then we got ove.c Tananarive and I got this message to turn the

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switch to the ON position but to turn the a.c. power to ACME, which was going to power down the computer whether we wanted it to or not. It was a voice relay station but we weren't getting the voice relayed. We were just getting a message sent up from somebody on the ground. I'm quite sure we didn't have any controllers at Tananarive. I don't really know who was talking to me. Probably some COM TECH. So, not being able to discuss the thing with them and not knowing what the status of my total electrical power was at the time, I went ahead and turned them off. The comp light or the malfunction light came on and then it sort got dim and went out. Then I sort of figured that's the end of the ACPU. So we put the thing back on over Carnarvon and back off again and it wouldn't come on. It was dead, of course. So that's the life story of the computer. Then we played a lot of games afterward trying to make a dead man come back to life. I have nothing else on the computer. I sure wished I'd have had it though.

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8.8 Crew Station

McDivitt

Controls and displays-okay, I'll talk about that. The sequential Telelights all operated properly came on in the proper color, and punched off and everything. The event timer operated properly. The IVI operated properly. The flight director indicator operated properly. I would like to discuss the GLV fuel and oxidizer pressure gages here for a minute. We got about a $25 million vehicle, I think, that depends almost entirely on a launch. We've got an onboard manual detection system, or something like that. Malfunction detection system.

White

McDivitt

Malfunction  detection  system .

An  integral  part

of the malfunction detection system, are the fuel and oxidizer pressure gages for both the first and second stages. This is one of the abort criteria I On the scal e of these gages down below the glass is a beautiful, beantiful set of lines and numbers and hash marks ,tha.t are wrong. They updated the GLV information and found out that these things were in error by quite a bit. No~ to take and fix these gages would have taken a couple thousand bucks. I don't know exactly how much or how

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The rate ofaescent seemed to be all right. The accelerometer was okay. The switches and circuit breaker panels--! had no comment. We knocked a couple of switches and circuit breakers off dur ing the course of the flight. We always caught them and got them back on quickly , or maybe we didn't get them back on quickly. We got them back on quickly enough because nobody ever said much to us about it. They commented one time . Two times,I think ,they asked us ifwe turned some thing on or off.

White
McDivitt

I remember that. One was over on my side. Was one the A pump on the secondary loop or the B pump on the secondary loop, or did

White

McDivitt

you turn that on? No. I think one of them was up there, and I for- get how we got it on.

Maybe we just bumped it. Yes, there was another one over on your right-hand side and there were a couple of them in the center circuit breaker panel. One time I know I bumped one on the left- hand side circuit breaker panel. I thought it was the electronic timer. It was one right above

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that. I almost had a heart attack when I saw that thing go down because it would have messed up the whole time reference system. I thought the switches and circuit breaker panels were very good. I have no complaint about it. I think that's a well designed cockpit. The mirrors were fine and the swizzle stick was a real life. saver. I can't reach the circuit breakers and switches over on the right-hand side unless I use the swizzle stick. I had to do a lot of switching when Ed was sleeping. This swizzle stick was the real answer.

White

I've been always telling you to get some long arms. Ha, ha! I didn't use the swizzle stick. very much.

McDivitt Yes, but you don't have to reach over and get those switches all on the left-hand side . White I found the swizzle stick was quite useful for unstowing items out,of the center stowage box. McDivitt That ' s right .

White It was really good there. I used that every time

when I unstowed.

McDivitt It's a good piece of equipment. Okay, lighting-do you want to cover the lighting, Ed?

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White

Okay, I think that the lighting to me was sur prisingly good. I think that at one time there was a press to put two white lights on either side on the instrument panel. I think the lights on the instrument panel should remain just as they are. I think we used the red light much more than we used the white light. There was quite a bit of time when you had to do a lot of out-the window operation at night and you wanted to have some reference inside. The red light doesn't seem to destroy your night ~eference at all. So I think the instrument lights, the two on either side above the panel, are satisfactory . I also thought the de l etion of the red light in the cabin light and the substitution of a bright white light was certainly good. There were several times when I wanted to get a reading on something right away and I didn't want to fool around with dim lighting. I would switch on the big bright light and I was almost always able to get good readings. Now when the sun was really bright in you face, there was a period of time in which your eyes had to adjust to the instrument panel before you

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the propellants. We've got the ECS oxygen. We've got quantity gages for that.. We've got electrical power and we've got ways of measuring that from the ammeter. We've got food and we can always count that. But when we get down to water, which is just as critical as all these other things in flying long duration missions, there's not a single way in the world we can measure how much we've gotten or how much we've drunk. I think it's. imperative that we get some method of measuring this thing before we try to fly another long du- ration flight.

The whi te light on the little utility light was not satisfactory. We tried to look to see ifwe could find out what we had in the cabin bottle- Water tank .

White

McDivitt

White

And that wasn't satisfactory. I think we ought to have some type of a metering system which would enable us to actually determine the water that we've utilized and in some way know that we're getting it out of the adapter. I don't know. We need to look into the whole water metering system, which is non-existent, and see if can't get some kind of system.

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McDivitt

You lmow even ifwe can ' t get something that they

can pipe into the spacecraft, at the very least we ought to TM the pressura.ntpressure down to the ~ound and back up again , or something, and get , some sort of calibration curve-- White So that we'd lmow what we have remaining in the a. dapter.

McDivitt We could at least call the people down at the ground and say, "How much water do we have left?" White That ' s right. And I think we ought to be able to tellwhat our bottle has inside of it in the spacecraft.

McDivitt Yes, I think they're really two separate things. I think first of all you've got to know the total water that you've got left and the rate that it's going down. I think the second thing that Ed's pointing out is that we don't even have any way of telling what the water supply is in the spacecraft. The first clue that you get that you're out of water is you just run out of water. White The lighting on the water management panel I think is just about non-existent. You can see it in the daytime. If you know the position of the

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

McDivitt

One thing that I'd like to comment on here a litt le bit is that ~ amber light that I insisted that they put on the Preheat-Flus h switch over back of the water management panel . I felt it came in real handy. Two times during the course of the flight I left the Preheat switch on after I flushed it for short periods of time to make s ure we didn't have any ice left in the lines . I did iton every occas ion, but two times the thing that called my attention to the fact that I still had the thing on, was the fact I could see that orange light -amber light-shining up be tween the food box and the front of the spacecraft. I could tell that I had another light on in the back .

White

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

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a little marginal in some cases. I had no diffi- culty in reading the designations on the switch- breaker panels. I think they were lighted ade- quately also. I'm not going to say they're lighted well, because I don't think the lighting is real good in the spacecraft. The water management panel isn't lighted properly. I'm not sure we really have to have it lighted too well. The utility lights, I think, as they are now,are very close to being useless. It's like taking a match and trying to use it to find your way around. It doesn't provide enough light. From time to time I would have liked to have had a light which had a little stronger output of light available, so that I could--I several times wanted to look behind my seat for things at night and I'd like to look down into the area in the water management panel light.

McDivitt

White

Yes , I think probably the wattage on those bulbs

should go up an order of magnitude to make them effective.

You use it so seldom that it wouldn't be a big power use. You'd only use it when you needed it,

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that ' s keeping your hack-¼t's easy to mistake for your minute hand. The way the face is marked it ' s difficult to read the minutes out. The hours interfere with each other. The whole readability of the clock is unsatisfactory and the readability of the hands is unsatisfactory . SQ I think the clock is out in all counts as far as I ' m concerned. I kept watching Jim's clock over there and I think I could get a better Greenwich Mean Time off of his clock than I could on mine on my side of the instrument panel.

McDivitt

Hey, let me comment on mine. I thought the reada bility of t hat Accutron 24 -hour clock was excellent. The accuracy of itwas lousy . It lost four or or f ive seconds every day or more. I reset it about every 24 hours. My Omega wrist watch that I had set on GMT never lost a second ,except I forgot to wind it one day, and it ran down . It stopped. Ha, ha!

White

McDivitt

I was guilty of the same thing.

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

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readability. It didn ' t have any chronometer func

tion to itat all . It had strictly a second, minute , and hour hand on it. It told you GMI' and it didn't tell you anything else. It told you GMI' in a way you could read it. You could read out the minutes, you could read out th e hours, and you could read out the seconds. I really didn't have any trouble with it at all . It had a nice thin second hand which I find to ~e much more us eful than those great big blunt things with huge arrows on the end of them. I hat e to lose the chronometer feature on that right-hand side, but I do think that the readability of this thing ,as far as the GMI' is concerned, is so much superior to that other clock that it isn ' t even comparable.

White

I'm not s ure that the chronometer function on

that side is really too important .

McDivitt

White

• Don' t you?

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

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McDivitt

I guess what you end up with is two clocks that aren't any good. Either one of them aren't any good. You'd rather end up with one clock that was good.

White

Yes , the way it ' s combined together right now, it ' s really not too good. I hacked your OAMS burn on my watch. I work with two clocks on my left arm and it worked out real well fo r me. I had elapsed time on one and I had Greenwich Mean Time on the other . I used the elapsed timer as the one on which I made my hacks . So I feel we got adequate backup. Ifone poops out , you can use the other one to make your time on. So, I think we should have a good clock to keep track of the time in the spacecraft on the instrument panel . Now , I'd like to get back on the clocks again. I think that elapsed time is the only kind of time that we ought to have in the spacecraft . I think that we ought to have a good method of keeping track of elapsed time. I think probably a ten-hour clock that keeps track of each ten-hour incement that you pasa to a high degree of accu racy, is the kind of clock that we need. I don't

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know what we're going to do about wrist watches.

Maybe they 'lldesign us a ten- hour wrist watch that we can wear. I don't see any reason why they can't. They can design twelve-hour ones just as easily. We 'r e going to go to this in Apollo. We should face up to itand go ahead and spend the money to get ourselves a proper t imin g piece of equipment and get our ranges and stuff operating on elapsed time. In long flights this is the kind of thing that ' s going to be of interest. It was confusing to me, to tell you the truth, to operate on Greenwich Mean Time and elapsed time through- out the flight. I was constantly adding and sub tracting . They'd call us up Greenwich Mean Times and I'dwant to convert them to what I was using on my flight plan. I found this a gr eat incon venience.

McDivitt

I concur with what Ed said .

I  ran  the  whole

flight plan using elapsed time except for the times where they called a specific GMT time to perform a function. I did itoff of a twelve- hour face wrist watch. I added up all my twelve -hour incements and came to whatever I wanted. IfI

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had something like 83 hours and 15 minutes , I

had to figure out that that was six times around the clock and another 11 hours and another 15 minutes . Obviously,not the best way in the world to do it, but the only way that was practical from the standpoint of the flight plan .

White

Well, to tell you the truth , Jim, I feel strong enough about that elapsed time that I would be happy to go with that type of a system of timing, and just go ahead on elapsed t ime all the way and u se twelve-hour incements. They would call up your time and elapsed time and use your own clock to keep track of it. I felt itwas simple enough also to do it in this manner. But I feel that this is ini'erior to having a good elapsed timer and ten- hour digital incements.

McDivitt

White

McDivitt

I tell you I hate to see us get involved in some- thing where you've got a clock that's so difficult to read, where you've got to add up twelves and-- Now you're on the other side of the fence now! No, I think that we ought to do things like retro- fire time and that sort of thing in a standard time that you can use something like GMT.

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White Well, you really need-

- elapsed

time. Ifwe had elapsed time -- McDivitt Ifwe had a good elapsed timer onboard the space craft, I would say that there ' s no doubt about it. Elapsed time.

White I think we ought to start working on it right

now.

McDivitt Elapsed time is the way we should go . I don ' t t hink that with the timing systems we ' ve got available for the Gemini that we want to go to elapsed time for the whole mission .

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

McDivitt I know it. I agree. Before we lai.mched, we knew that we wanted to run it in elapsed time , and there wasn ' t any doub't about it.

White

I think maybe ifwe make the point strong enough maybe they ' l l get busy on it.

McDivitt You're right. We'll get going on it. White Okay, why don't you take the checklist cards, Jim? McDivitt The checklist cards. We had two complete sets of cards that were broken up into two groups. We

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had the launch, insertion, M:>de II and M)de III

aborts, EVA, the suit check and all the things that we were going to use in the first five orbits of the flight on one set of cards. We had another set of cards from Pre-Retro Checklist down to the post landing and emergency egress. The cards included all the plots that were needed to do all the retrofire and to make corrections to take care of all the non-nominal things that might happen to us during the retrofire . We also had in this group of cards a card that we used to con tain the final retro information such as with OAMS or without OAMS burns , time to reverse bank, and all the other things that we had. Itwas a format , something that cou1d be easily held in our hands and was actually used during the launch, during insertion, and during reentry . We actually had these cards out so we could check them off. I thought the only thing we would have out during these t wo critical busy periods of time were these two easy-to-hold , easy-to-operate,hand-held card checklists. The rest of the stuff was all stowed away.

White

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McDivitt

White

We got every checklist that was required to make the spacecraft run on these two sets of cards, which together were about 3/4 of an inch thick. I feel that we had a real workable solution to the problem. These things were the same size as those carried on GT-3. They were much more ex- panded than what GT-3 had. We had the whole how-to-operate the spacecraft routine on these cards.

McDivitt

The preparation and availability of them-- is this from a training standpoint . That i s later in the brief.

McDivitt

White

Well, anyway, we actually received our cards at about 8:00 the night before the launch.

That's the thing that I was hollering about the loudest not to have happen and it happened. I

McDivitt

understand why it happened, but--

We had so many changes in the flight plan and nobody was working on turning this stuff out. Our time was so filled with over-a ll training and the change in flight plan that we just didn ' t have time to go--, We did not have time to go through the checklist over and over . When we did

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that rings should be replaced with something that

doesn't come undone . My rings came undone sev eral times during the flight and luckily only one at a time came undone. It would have been a real mess if a:ny of these books would have come apar~ because itwould have destroyed numerical sequence. So , I think something other than rings ought to be used . .

"

McDivitt

I tell you one thing I found.--that size boo.k and that concept that we had, I think , was really good. That was just the right size.

White

McDivitt

It's just the right size. Their sheets are big enough where you can write a lot on them.

White

McDivitt

They're easy to handle.

They' re small enough so they're easy to handle . They' re easy to stow. They fit into the flight suit. When we launched, I had both flight sets of data cards in my right lower pocket and the big data book and my procedures book in my left-hand lower pocket. I had all the checklists right on my spacesuit ..

White

McDivitt

I had one procedure book and both my cards. And both your cards . So that between.the two of

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us we had all the data books right on the flight

White

sui~ which was just right where we wanted them. Another thing we did --we hand carried this equip ment down to the spacecraft to be sure itwas there on l aunch.

McDivitt

The maps , overlays, and star charts we should

lump all together along with all the other junk that we carried in the data case .

White

Let's start with the star charts. That's easy . I thought the star chart was satisfactory . I think you used the one with less stars on it than I had.

McDivitt

Yes.

White

I used my own one that J fly with all the time

and I was quite happy with it. I think t l.is is exactly what you need and I don't believe you need to overla~ two times around, but that wasn't for the chart .

McDivitt

Yes, and really the flight chart, the one that

was actually designed for the spacecraft,was de signed ,30 that this swiveling out the window dis play fit on it. It was a certain size to take care of that and had a lot of dead space out on the

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edges .

I would have rather seen the stars ex

panded more so that we could tell it. We used two polar plots of stars that were put out for the Apollo thing that we picked up on our training. We actuall y f l ew with one of the training things.

I took one out of my brief case.

White

Those weren't put out by Apollo. Those were put

out at Oll<r request .. Remember? We asked for a -- McDivitt Yes, but I thought they came from the Apollo office . White No, they came from our own FlightCrew S uppart . McDivitt I know we requested them, but I thought that's where they dug them up.

White No, they got them from--

McDivitt Okay.

White See, what they did is they added on all the Apollo navigation stars. They came from our own boys in FCSD.

McDivitt Those polar charts are really the cat ' s meow. White All those charts are pretty good. McDivitt So I thought the star charts sure gave us allthe information we n eeded. The maps and overlays-- I think we really ought to cover the maps and over lays by the experiments. The map with the sliding

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overlay of the orbits, I thought was a real good tool.

White Very easy, yes.

McDivitt Very easy to use and I am sure glad we came up

with that.

White

McDivitt

I think also carrying pre-plotted orbits on the 'maps was also useful and stayed pretty-- That's right. Right at the last second we decided to take four maps that were glued back to back so we had two sheets. They were on a sticky-back which made them reasonably thick and durable. One of them had no orbits on it, one had one to 22, another one had 22 to 44, and another one had 44 to 66. You could look through there and you could get a quick reference of where you were going to be at a certain time. The times did get off, but you were only off a little bit.

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White
McDivitt

You can keep track of how far you're off .

You knew about where you're going to be. As Ed says, as the time went on you could tell about where you're going to be just by knowing the cor- rection. It didn't change much. So, we found these to be pretty useful. We didn't really get. to start using them until the second day.

White I didn't know you had them in there. McDivitt We took them out, I guess, one time when you were sleeping just for the heck of it and, my gosh, they started working pretty well.

White

I used them almost exclusively once we got them out.

McDivitt
White

Yes  .

We had a l ot of other information onboard and I don't know whether we should go into a ll that stuff now?

McDivitt

Oh , yes , I took schematics of all the systems right out of the GOH. I didn ' t ever have to use them. ,but I thought itwas worthwhile having them along. Everybody was getting so screwed up on the water management panel and I too k my notes on the water management panel with me . I ha d a

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couple  of  drawings.

McDivitt

I had what happened when I put all those valves in a lot different positions. You know when you compare something like that digital computer with the water management panel you certainly think the computer would be more difficult to operate . But after the million conflicting descriptions we had on the water management panel,I think we all agree that it was the worst in the spacecraft.

8.8 Stowage
White
McDivitt
White

Well, I guess I was the chief stower and unstower. All I did was take the food out .

I thought the stowage in and out of the center stowage box was probably the easiest place to get in and out of . The boxes were easy to slide in and out and the stuff was easy to put in and out. I felt that the right -hand wing box was tough to get in and out of. Getting in to get the bags full of equipment took a littlebit of time. When I got to actually stowing the refuse back in the right 'hand box, itwas easy enough for me just to reach over my left shoulder and put the items in without even turning around . It was

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pretty easy to use as a trash can. The stowage

of the items of equipment in the footwell, to me , was not objectionable at all during launch and reentry. The ventilation module which was stowed on the left side of the right footwell was well out of my way during these times and offered no impairment to me whatsoever. Something that was a bit of a surprise to me was all t he equipment we had in there, that we were not able to jetti son after EVA , I knew we were in for a bit of a problem with so much equipment. I think the stow age of the miscellaneous pieces of equipment underneath your legs back up in the heel in back of the stirrup area is . pretty good s torage for almost all of the loose items during flight. Jim and I had the area just chucked full.

McDivitt

White

McDivitt

This was not any big su£prise. Remember how we were talking about how we were going to put all that stuff up?

We were going to put a big refuse bag in there .

We decided that the most likely place to put these big items would be back underneath the seat be cause we weren'tgoing to keep our legs back

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there.  We  never  did  get  them  back  there.
White  Ther e  was  no  possibility  to  put  them  back  there
once  we  filled  it  up.

McDivitt Yes, but even ifwe wanted to, I don't think there was any big desire to put them back there. White It would have been nice to stretch but that's just about all . That would have been from time to time.

McDivitt

That's  right  .

White I found that actually the thing that I appreciated the most was having a lower seat so I could actu ally stretch my legs out forward than actually behind and bending my knees.

McDiv itt Yes, I was more interested in straight"ening my legs out than bending them back more. White I couldn ' t have done that if they hadn ' t corrected that seat. I was able to get in and use the stow age in the refuse box on my side fairly easily . White This is the rubber covered box. Jim said his wasn ' t quite as easy to get into . I had to get into a certain position to get back there, but it sure surprised me. I thought itwould be just about useless.

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McDivitt

Well, I got things out of it. I got a defecation bag out one time and I got another little bag out.

I don't know what else I had back there.

White

The right hand box with the clamp l ock was easy to get in and out of . I stored things from time to time in there .

White

Yes, I found that the most useful storage area that I had was the right-hand littlevelcro cov ered container right down bymy right knee . I kept all the slides for the cameras and the mis cellaneous little pieces of equipment in it. I felt that was a very useful container.

McDivitt

White

McDivitt

White

Is that the one with the canvas cover on it? Yes, I really used that one.

McDivitt

Yes, that was pretty nice. The periscope container I didn't use much at all. I really didn't need to use it. I kept the blood pressure adapter in it throughout the whole flight.

The left-h8Jld aft food box actually had food in it. It was pretty difficult to get the first piece out . Itwas a long hard struggle, but I finally got one piece out. Once I got one piece out~the rest of itwas a real snap. They had the

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things  taped  together .

I left the door open the

whole flight after we once unstowed it. I would leave a meal floating out so that when I wanted to get a meal I would reach up and grab the meal that was floating loose. I would pu l l the tape out until I got a hold of the tape so I could force another meal out of the box. Then I would cut the first meal off and we'd eat it. I managed to get all the food out of the box ~ithout getting out of my seat. The left-hand side box had the film stowed in itand itwas easily accessible. I think the most useful stowage place that I had in the spacecraft was the littleVolkswagen-type bag that we had made up and bolted on the center pedestal.

White

McDivitt

Oh, that was a jewel. We kept our checklists, maps, data books, and procedure books in it. When we went to sleep and had a change of command and we wanted to get to one of the pieces of equipment that the other guy had, we almost invariably stuck it in that little pouch. I really think the most useful

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White We both have an interesting item on this. Well , I emptied mine out all the way , but I think you ente r ed with it full of trash .

McDivitt I reentered with that bag full of trash and it

didn't tear off.

White It was in pretty good shape.

McDivitt It was light-weight trash. Papers and things

like that.

White I have a comment on the other little trash bag , I never used it. McDivitt Neither did I . I would get them out and I did not even know where they were. Yes , I think it ' s just too small .

White Y es , it ' s just too small and I think that Volks wagen pouch can be improved upon. I think both right and left canvas storage bags we~e very adequate and should be continued . I think i t's satisfactory just the way it is. McDivitt They could make the -Velcro strips on ita little longer 8Jld the Velcro strips attached to the spacecraft a little longer so that it didn ' t have the big curls on the edge . It tended to c url in and make an opening . I n ever coul d get the thing

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closed.

8.8 Belts

White The belts worked satisfactorily.

McDivitt Yes, mine worked very good.

"

8.8 Harness

McDivitt Harness. Okay.

White The harness was satisfactory.

8.8 Life Vests

McDivitt Life vests. Very good.

White Very good.

McDivivitt I might comment on those life vests. I never

took my life vest off my restraint harness the

whole time. It wasn't in the way at all and I

was amazed that I didn't pop them. I always pop

them in the simulations.

White I was waiting for you to pop one. But I was sur-

prised with the ease I could take them off and

put them on weightless. There's just no compari-

son at all. That's an easy task.

8.8 Waste Disposal Syst em White I tho ught the defecat i on bags worked as w ell as anything we had. Ther e isn't anything you're going t o do to make itgo to the bottom of the

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bag when you use it.

I think you should be

familiar with how to close the bag . I only used one ba g and I think you were a two- bag man .

McDivitt

White

I was a two-bag man.

The stuff didn't float out of the bag or anything. I would permit the thing to remain open while I used the paper. I actually used the paper as kind of a charging mechanism to push the stuff on down in the bag. You know like loading the cannon. Then I sealed it up on top. There was a tendency for the fecal material to be up on the sticky part, which made the closing not quite as nice as I would like i to be, but I was able to close it up all right I broke two of the disinfectant bags and I cit the bags. There were two different kinds of disinfectants. One of them came in a bag inside a bag and the other just came in a bag. I was a little suspicious of that one, so I cut it first and I think you did that, too.

McDivitt

I did that to a couple of mine. I still think that those ba5 s break too hard. I hate to have to cut those things before I st ick them in there . I cu t one and the darned thing floated back out again and I didn't notice it. I had the bag just

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about sealed up when I noticed this thing float

ing around inthe spacecraft. I had to push itback down in there .

White

When I cut it, I got the stuff on me and a little

bit around . The two that I broke , that were contained inside the plastic bag, seemed to work all r i ght. On the whole I was satisfactorily pleased with the defecation bags. I felt also that the liquid was easy to work into it. I think that ' s a satisfactory system.

McDivitt

White

You really have that knack of kneeing. One thing, it is just like oleomargarine was -- Ha, ha!

McDivitt A little different in coloL Ha, ha! White One thing t hat I want to comment on was the toilet paper with the darn wax job. I did not think the toilet paper was satisfactory. Ithad a waxy back so that itwas like the back side of a Sears Roebuck Catalog.

McDivitt

White

That was not the side you were supposed to use. I know itbut the other side had such a small amount of absorbency . This is why you always used so darn much paper Jim McDivit~ Ha, ha!

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I found that the tissues that we car ried in the little containers were very satisfactory for the purpose . I think they can leave the paper out of those bags and provide us with adequate tissues. Whi l e we' re talking about these tissues , let ' s go into the container .

McDivitt

That's right. The container.

White

Yes, the container failed. Both of them failed in a similar manner. We had tissues just loose.

They were tucked in around the spacecraft .

McDivitt

The zippers that went around these tissue bag holders ripped out completely . Actually they just separated - almost immediately , as soon as we took them out of the bag .

White
McDivitt

And both in a similar manner right off the bat. So we had a bunch of tissues that were not con tained in anything.

White

I think the containers were ver:y good containers. The method of dispensing would be fine , but they al l fell out the side . That ' s the way I used mine for the rest of the time . I used those tissues for all kinds of things . I cleaned my window with them. I cleaned the camera lenses w ith them. I

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sal

cleaned my visor with them. I got my visor so full of salt spray. Remember when I got that salt spray all over them during the EVA and my visor was dirty? I cleaned everything all up. I substituted it for the toilet paper in the defecation bags. I think this is another thing I am certainly glad we requested. We started out by requesting lense tissues, and as it ended up this is what we got.

McDivitt

We wanted one little bag and ended up with two big

bags,and I think we could have used another one. I u sed every bit of mine . I think I could have used them more proper l y ifI had a good dispenser system. I ' d grab too many.

White

McDivitt

Those big towels w eren ' t too bad either .

They'  re

White

great for sopping up the urine and stuff. Yes , they were great urine mops. Ifwe had had a big spill of some kind t hat's what you'd w ant to use ,because you could use it, itwould dry out, and you could use it again.

8.9 Bio-Medical

McDivitt

We have already discussed this in great detail

with the docto r s so I think we can go over it briefly . The Medical Data Pass Type 1 w as not an inconvenience . It got the data down to the

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doctors quickly. I think it made them happy. It wasn't a big drag on us. Medical Data Pass Type 2 was only about half of the Type 1. It wasn't bad and the doctors got some use out of that. The food evaluation was discussed with the medics so we can just summarize.

White

I think we should put a big gold star on the food . I think itwas one of the most important parts of the mission.

McDivitt

White

That's right. It was really good. Both morale wise and just keeping your strength up.

McDivitt

White

It was a good picker-upper when you felt lousy . The chow tasted good. The thing I didn't like about it --I think it gave me a touch of the GI ' s . I think it tended to loosen you up a little bit. I think , now as I look back,I would prefer to have maybe two of the items in one of those plastic containers and two hard items .

McDivitt Gee , I thought t he way they were mixed up was prett y good.

White Sometimes though you'd have four rehydrat ed and nothing crunchy . One time I had one that w as all

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crunchies just about. It had one drink in it.

Every bag that I had, except one, that had any form of an orange drink in it, leaked.

White

Mine started leaking, too , as soon as you mentioned

it.

McDivitt I only had one other bag that leaked or maybe two other bags that leaked . I think that the rate of leakage was just i.macceptable. I think those bags are going to have to be fixed.

White

No toast.

McDivitt We didn't open up the toast. White Well, I ate that one thing of cinnamon toast . McDivitt I ate the cinnamon toast because you discovered that ithad a coating on it and it didn ' t crumble so much.

White I guess there was only the one cinnamon toast.

McDivitt Overall, I thought the food was good and there

wasn't too much of it.

White That peanut stuff also kind of crumbled.

McDivitt Yes.

White I think we ought to include more meats. I think

the bacon was outstanding.

McDivitt Oh, that bacon was absolutely great.

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White I could have had that everyday.

McDivitt Ed doesn't even like bacon.

White I could have had that kind of bacon. That was

kind of a smoked bacon.

McDivitt

It  really  was. good.

White When I ate it, I got to thinking that I don ' t understand why we don't have more meats in the smoked capacity .

McDivitt That's what I was thinking--smoked beef and smoked

barbecue.

White Yes, that's very good tasting, and it's salty. It makes you drink water, and drink water is what you should do. But I think we ought to look into. some of this. Another comment, too, is that Jim had thrown the sausage out prior to this time and the sausage that I got was a completely different breed of eat. It was in one of those water bags. McDivitt I never did get any shrimp. Boy, I bet it was in that last day's meal.

White The sausage was pretty good. There was one thing that I didn't eat, and that was one chicken bite because it coated my mouth. I actually ate two. or three of them.

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McDivitt The only thing I didn't eat was the bacon and egg

bites, either.

White
McDivitt

I think ifI had my druthers, I'dtake bacon. One of the bigges t problems on the whole flight was the lack of sleep . I don't really feel that I got more than six hours of good sleep or even six hours of medium sleep in the whole 100 hours we were up there.

White I think if I estimated my sleep time I might estimate more. I got that one five hours. That was good.

McDivitt Fil had one real good one ,and there wer e a couple of them where I didn' t wiggle around for about five hours,but never did I sleep more than two hours . White You weren 't soundly asleep.

McDivitt I just sat there and I rested. I had one one-hour period right there at the end that was pretty good sleep ,a.nd I had another good two-hour period . White That mike was one of the reasons we were getting poor rest.

McDivitt I think there were two reasons. One was the radio was feeding into our headsets all the time during the first half of the flight. The second half

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of the flight, we had the darned OAMS thrusters going so much--BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG! I was just too hot some of the time.

White
McDivitt
White

Yes.

Early in the flight the ammonia fumes kept me awake . The first time I tried to go to sleep they kept me awake .

McDivitt

I don't even know if they kept me awake.

White
McDivitt

I really noticed it then.

I think we really need a s leep period longer than the four-hour sl eep period. First of all we always fooled around and never really got the sleep that we wanted. Ifwe had gotten a four-hour sleep period everytime itwas scheduled, we would have been in great shape . I think we ought to schedule a longer one on the order of six hours . Ed and I talked about this earlier . What I suggested is that we schedule four six-hour sleep periods ,if there aren't a lot of experiments that have to be done together . Where two of these sleep periods come together, you can make that a dual awake time so that the people could be up. As a matter of fac~ you could modify it in such a way that ifyou

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wanted two people to be up at the same time you

could really have three periods during the day. You could take two of these six-hour sleep periods and really make them sacred so that nothing could touch them. Then you could just take those other two six hour sleep periods, and maybe chop periods off each end of the thing~in such a manner that you' d be able to get one good sleep period and some rest periods in between. I think during a six-hour sleep period you ought to plan to be in a drifting flight and not do any experiments. I really think there ought to be one long sleep period with no radios and no thrusters firing. Then you've got a real chance.

White

McDivitt

You might be able to put i t in Horizon Scan.

Well, even then it goes, THUMP, THUMP , THUMP , every once in a while, you know.

White

I think you could almost do this by ear. If it was bothering the guy, you shouldn't do it. In my opinion I think we're pretty close to the same thing. I had originally told Chuck I thought that the four-hour sleep period wasn't satisfactory. We should have one period of six hours of sleep,

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with another rest period scheduled in there some time of several hours . This would be satisfactory . I felt we were really productive when we were both up . I would like to see periods of time in the day where each of the guys are up at the same time , and doing actual experiments and work. When you are working together· like that, it seems you are complimenting each other,and I think you get more productive observations . Some of the experiments require two guys. D-6 is going to require two guys~ D-9 requires two guys , and to adequately do itto get the pictures we want,you just need two guys up .

McDivitt

Let me modify that position of mine even further. If you scheduled a six-three and then the other guy with a six-three that would leave you six hours up together everyday. I think that might be adequate.

White You should also al w ays try to schedule your eating periods so you aren, t" eating during this up time. You should schedule your eating when the other guy is sleeping . McDivitt Right.

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White

Go ahead and eat when you just get up and the other guy is asleep. Eat just before you go to sleep, and don ' t eat simultaneously. Eat while the other guy is sleeping. I think you should spend all the time, while you are up together, working on productive experimentation.

McDivitt

Yes. I think you should keep these two six-hour periods inviolate and then make the other ones really flexible where you could move those sleep ing periods around.

White Ifyou got tired you could go on and take four hours for sleeping. Ifyou needed it, you would go on and take longer. Ifyou only needed one or two hours, you could go ahead and take that. I didn't feel as strongly as you about being tired. You said I was tired.

McDivitt

White

You commented on it a number of times during the flight and also you looked like you were tired . Several times I missed a rest period. I think we got fouled up a couple of times on it. I did get tired before I took that five hour rest. I knew I was tired.

McDivitt

You had that one really good sleep right around

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White

This was identification and acquiring it and seeing how well the charts that you had equipped you to identify specifically the landmark in consideration. The first one I had was the junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile, and more specifically it was a little island in there, and it was the northernmost tip on the island. I realized as we came around that I was going to be in pretty good shape in this free drift to be able to see the targets. As we came around, I looked out in the general direction that I had been instructed from the ground, and the first thing that I noted was the major Nile coming down to the intersection. I was able to follow it pretty clearly down to the intersection as we got roughly 20 or 25 degrees from the vertical. I was able to pick up the little island in the junction of the White and Nile River, and I was able to follow it all the way through as we passed over. As we got to the 90 degree point overhead, it was quite easy to track with my eye. I wasn't actually tracking it. It was northeast

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of my track 92 miles, so it was really quite far away even when I was at the 90 degree point. I reported that I thought this was a very good landmark. It was very easy to see, and I felt if I had a higher power telescope I could have tracked it quite adequately. I classed this landmark as being satisfactory, and I classified the charts that I had used to identify it for me as being quite satisfactory. Incidentally, I believe that this, of all the landmarks we had, was probably the easiest one of them all to locate, being right out in the middle of the desert, pointed out by two rivers converging from a major river. It was a very good landmark.

McDivitt

White

Okay. You ran some more just Apollo land- marks. It wasn't really a tracking task problem. Didn't you run one off of Puerto Rico, too, or was this the only landmark that we really ran? This was the only real Apollo Landmark I ran.

I ran some D-6 Landmarks.

McDivitt

Okay. Fine. I think the next one that we ran was a border pass on El Paso. Or did you run on Tel-Aviv before that?

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for this kind of task. You need a contrast in color as you get from the White Sands to the surrounding desert. The best of all is a water- land interface or border. As we came across the United States, I think we picked up El Paso just as we were over it, but we weren't pointed down at the town. We were still pointed well out in advance. The only clue that we were over El Paso was that I could see the Gulf Coast. I knew that when I saw the Gulf Coast we were probably too far along to pick up El Paso. Rather than just scrub the run, we went ahead and made a run on a pair of sand spits with a channel between them in the vicinity of Corpus Christi. We picked up a target well in advance, and as I started trying to line up on the target, I found out that the gunsight had a light intensity and the gunsight was inadequate for a daytime tracking task; because as you pointed the sight down and had a background of clouds, you just absolutely could not see the sight. I didn't have any idea in the world where it was pointing. When you put it on the dark land, it seemed to be adequate, but I think we

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But later on we found that these same two types of information--the world map and the small WAC Chart--were adequate for other types of targets. The WAC Chart showed of course the range of mountains just west of El Paso and the White Sands and the Rio Grande River. We came across Southern California, and I could see the Salton Sea. I didn't track them, but I looked out the front and I could see the mountains of New Mexico and Arizona. And I saw a bunch of white places down below us, any one of which could have been the White Sands. If I could have really picked out the White Sands by themselves, and unfortunately they were off the WAC Chart that I had, I think the contact would have been good enough for me too pick up El Paso. As it was, the only features I had that would have been of great importance were the river, which was the Rio Grande River- and at that point was not very noteworthy--and the mountain range, which from the altitude of around 90 miles or more couldn't be picked up. I think that this type of a topographical or geographical feature, like a valley or a mountain, is not adequate

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9.2 Apollo Yaw Orientation

White

Okay, I 'll probably go into this a little bit, and

then we can go over the data on it. This was a fairly simple test. All we did was start at a zero zero reference and establish rates of 3 degrees/ second simultaneously in all axes. We had a sec ondary objective, to see when we established these rates and put them in three axes simultaneously if we got a scanner i gnor light. And I'll clear that one up realy quick . We put them in at two different times and neither time di d we get a scanner ignore light. We di d this at night the first time , didn't w e? T hat was re ally the only time we did it. Jus t the night one. That's right .

McDivitt

White

T hat's  right.

We did i t once at night .

I  estab

lished the rates in t hree axes and allowed them to bui ld up for about 30 seconds . Then , I told Jim to go ahead and take control of the spacecraft , and using visual references to move to a retrofire at titude .

McDivitt

I did this in Pulse Mode, I believe, because we were trying to save fuel. I think I did it in Direct, but I did not do it in Rate Command. I did it in Direct. The first thing I did was try to find the horizon so I would have some reference point to

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start from. This w as quite easy . I just had to wait for the spacecraft to move so that I could see the horizon in any position, and t hen I went for it. The yaw reference, though , wasn ' t present when I got to the horizon, so I ended up level on the horizon upside-down, but without a yaw reference. I pitched on down well below the horizon so that I could look down at the ground. Watching the clouds go by, or whatever was down below me, I could pick up the direction of my motion. So , I rolled around such that I was pointing down at the ground, probably 45 degrees plus or minus 20 degrees . I rolled aroumd until my head came up, and all I had to do then was pitch back to the horizon to get to the 30 degree nose-down attitude for retrofire. This took 2 minutes and 20 seconds . Now I did this trying to save fuel. I could have done it much quicker if fuel wasn' t a constraint. Also, I think I learned something fr om this in that I made a mistake by going first to the horizon. I should have pitched down until I was pointed straight down to the ground, picked up my yaw as quickly as I could in this

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three times the detail of the section cut out of a Mercator Chart, which I found very useful. By prop- erly folding a map, I think I would prefer to have a map of even higher detail with me. It didn't seem to me to be a drawback to have a large map in the cockpit, as long as you kept it golded down in the proper

McDivitt

manner. Do you have any comments on that? Well, I agree with Ed.. I thought that this was a relatively simple task. I felt it would have been much easier to do if we had the platform up so we could point the spacecraft down using inertial ref- erence and using the platform, but it wasn't diffi- cult to do it just visually. It only took a short time to plot up a couple of points and run back and determine your own ascending node.

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McDivitt No . I don't think so either. You know , the thing that did look brighter to me was that planet right over by the sun. When the sun set, that planet would really stand out .

White I noticed another thing on the planets, I didn't

notice--which one is in Leo now?

McDivitt I don't know.

White It ' s Mars. Mars is around Leo now, and it didn ' t look as orange. To me it looked roughly the same color as Venus did, and remember I remarked on that up there, which is a very interesting thing now . I presumed that the color should stay the same.

McDivitt I didn't notice any difference between it up there and here on the ground.

White Itdidn't have to me the characteristic orange color that ithas when I look at itfrom down here . It looks more like a regular old--

McDivitt A regular old star, huh?

White No, it looked like the planets, and remember I

remarked on that.

McDivitt I think you did, now that you mention it. White And we probably went on doing somethi. ng else and forgot about it. Let ' s talk about the air glow.

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McDivitt Why don' t I discuss t hat thing that I saw those two times at night.

White

McDivitt

Yes, I saw it too, so you weren't seeing things. This phenomenon occurred in the dark and I think it was near Australia, each time, but I'm not really sure. We've got it recorded on the voice tape, so we can go back to the voice tape and see where it was. They were just parallel running lines of lights radiating from the earth up toward us but at a distance away, and it sort of looked like a curtain. All of these lights rays seemed to be sort of parallel to each other. They looked a lot like the Aurora Borealis, except that they were down below us and they were coming up toward us. The first one we saw was considerably brighter than the second one and it was sort of wiggly. It probably had five or six curves in it, at least, and I thought it went like this a couple of times, and was bent up around like this.

White

McDivitt

How about in the air glow layer?

Was it in the air glow layer? No. I don't

think it was in the air glow layer. It looked

like it was down underneath -- it looked like it

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sun shining on them.

They picked the sun up.

White

McDivitt

White

They picked the sun up and reflected the rays. They reflected them just as bright as stars, I thought. Didn't they! Well, you know the thing that was most interesting to me was the time I called you and said the sky was full of stars, and you said it wasn't the sky. We were pointing down at the earth. That was my first exposure to having your window in the daylight and mine in the dark. At this time we had all the fuel particles from the fuel from the boosters spewing out all over, and my whole view out the win- dow was just completely full of these reflecting particles. They looked kind of like one of the star fields we had past off on us as star fields. It looked kind of like a star field, but it looked kind of unreal, too. That's exactly what it was. One of the prettiest things was when we had a urine dump at sunset, because we just had millions and millions and millions of these fireflies or particles outside. When you put them all out like that with the sun shining on them, as we'd mentioned earlier with the black background, it just looked marvelous. As a matter of fact, we took some movies of them,

McDivitt

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and I think we might have taken some stills,

but  I'm  not  sure .

White

McDivitt

I hope it came out.

Yes , it was r eal ly spectacular ! So we could just about make our own stars when we wanted to . Is that all on celestial?

White

McDivitt

That ' s all I can think of , Jim.

I couldn't see the zodiacal lights . I couldn't see the r~genschein and I could not see the burst of zodj acal lights that you get just as the sun sets. Go ahea d , Ed .

White

Okay. I saw one during the last few sunrises. I watched the sun very carefully. from the time it first started to come up till it finally popped up. I was looking all the time for that shoot of light that's supposed to come up just before the sun pops up. Well, I could never see that. All I could see was the glow as it came up and a very rapid rise as the sun did come up. There's something that I did see that was quite interesting to me. Several minutes before the sun came up there would be a shaft of light that would shoot up, and I watched it on two

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McDivitt

off to the side, and then it went out of my view. Okay. On retrofire there weren't any sightings to observe. Did you see anything outside, Ed? Did you see any flames or anything like that? No, I didn't.

White

McDivitt

I don't think there was much there. The retro pack jettison- -we didn't see it jettison, but shortly after that we had rolled upside down and we were flying in, and I saw the retro adapter floating around on the left side. It had turned around so that itwas small end-forward rather than blunt-end-forward. You could see the whip antenna sticking out the side, the four retrorockets, cross-beams, and the plumbing around the edges. It was quite a sight. It drifted out behind us until itgot out a couple or 300 feet. It started glowing a little on the leading edge. It started fading farther and farther behind us as we reentered. It finally went from a dull glow to a bright one, and finally you could see the leading edge of iteroding away. Finally, itvre.s just a ball of flame back there.

White

I thought that was quite a sight, too. It kind of set the modus for our reentry, of observing

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very interesting things all the way down ,

including  ourselves.

McDivitt

We didn't observe anything in particular that

White

happened at 400 000 feet. T he ionization· was where we really started picking up the fire. I think we kind of timed that w ithwhat you were talkingabout the retro adapter up there . You said , "Hey, look at it starting to burn.: 11 , and about that time we were starting to th row a sheath around us to .

McDivitt

That 's right. It looked like to me that it w ent from pink to orange and then went out to a reddish-orange, and then in the mids t of the reddish-orange you could see little tongues of green occasionally . It was quite pretty .

White

I think another thing about it too is that there wasn't as much of it as I thought there would be. I can 'tsay that I was disappointed in not seeing more fire, but when I first heard about John ·Glenn's reentry, I envisioned more fire coming out . In this case you might call it just a sheath.

McDivitt

That's  right.

There wasn' t a big blaze , by a

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I  could .

At this time I didn't !mow where the

sun was. We oscillated back and forth on the drogue probably as much as plus or minus 40 degrees. I never did see the drogue dereef. I couldn't see up to the top to see if itwas reefed or not .

McDivitt

I don't think there's much else about what we could see on the drogue. Can you think of anything?

White

I could see it up there whipping back and forth ,

and I was sure hoping that it was going to hold on and not pull the front end of the spacecraft off, the way we were oscillating.

McDivitt

At R and R-separate I saw parts of stuff out in front. My window was pretty well clouded over, and I couldn't see that well. I did see something separate, and I did see the chute start off. It went all the way up. At main chute deploy I saw it come out in a reefed condition, I checked the chute and I didn't see any panels missing. I checked the little circle in the middle in the parachute, and it seemed to be in fine shape. I was expecting that we had a good chute. It

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finally just dereefed and we had an excellent

chute. It popped out and came back in . About a quarter of italong the edge folded back in and then popped back out again and we had a beautiful chute. Do you have anything else on the main chute?

White

No. I couldn't see ituntil it started to de reef. From the dereef on, I could see the chute and was very happy to see it.

McDivitt

During our descent to landing I could see the Rand R can with both the drogue and the ~ilot chutes attached to it. ,floating off to one side. After we landed, I noticed that there was steam coming out of the RCS thrusters. This steam didn't last very long. I could see the sea dye marker in the water. I could see the parachute in the water .

White

I think you also ought to indicate that the windows steamed up quite a bit. I could see out a little better than you. You couldn't even see '50 •• feet out in front of you on your side.

McDivitt

No, I sure couldn't. • There was a hole down

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this particular light to come b~ck on.

White Did you ev8r flgure out why we needed to hand r ecord all these things-why we had to record them on the recorder--the times and all that jazz? McDiv itt No, we h~d to r ecord the angles some place and we h.ad to correlate it to a time .

White

Well, it says to prepare sextant and photo-event indicator for measurements. What do they mean

by  pho to-event indicator?

McDivitt

The pho to-event indicator was to get the exact time . Remember , when you w ere doing star to horizon measur~me~ts you had to have-- No , but this is just for the star. I don't understand the photo-cvant indicator. I think that just clobbers up our data.

White

McDivitt That's right. Yes, that wasn't applicable at all. It didn't make any difference what time it was at all.

White

In fact, when I made a second run on this while you were asleep one time, I didn't put the photo event indicator on.

McDivitt No, there wasn't any need to put the photo-event

indicator on this.

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- 11.4 Electrostatic Charge (MSC-1)

McDiv itt

I think what we could say here is that we turned

MSC-1 on and off when it said in the flight plan and when directed by the people on the ground.

11.5 Proton-Electron Spectrometer and Tri-Axis Flus-Gate Magnetometer (MSC-2 and MSC-3)

McDivitt We turned off MSC-2 and -3 according to real- time flight planning from the ground and when- ever the flight plan in the air called for it. White We had one time when I ran a double small-end- forward set of runs through the Anomaly. The first time, I felt that the heading had not been accurate enough for the small-end-forward requirement. We were doing it without the platform on the stars, and the first time through I wasn't satisfied with it. So, I called down to the ground and told them that I wasn't satisfied with the run and that I'd make a repeat run the next time. This I did, and I left the equipment on throughout both runs and for an hour after that. So, we effectively have two small-end runs through the South Atlantic Anomaly.

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surprise, and there were a few surprises in ours. I wouldn't say there was much we didn't know about, because we had gone over it pretty thoroughly. But all our experimental procedures and our books--we're partially to blame in some reepects also, because we were running the show and knew exactly what we wanted. But I concur very heartily with Jim's recommendation that we get these things made up at least two weeks ahead of time so that we can. use them in the simulator, and that we use the little hand-held checklist exclusively in the simulator that we are going to fly with if you could get them nailed fown that well ahead of time. That's what I would have liked to have done. That's what we didn't do, though.

McDivitt

Yes, I don't really see any excuse for dragging it out to the last day. If these things would have been eight hours later than they were, they wouldn't even have made the flight.

White

I think another thing, too, is that right now we've got a good set of books and checklist. I recommend heartily, unless the crew that comes behind us has some very strong diverse opinions, that they use something similar so that they can get somebody started making them early enough to be useful.

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McDivi tt  I  concur  wholeheartedly.
White  They  may  not  like  everything  about  them,  but  I  think
that  they  proved  their  value  with  us  in  our  flight.
I  sure  would  rather  use  something,and  use  itw el l,
than  use  something  that  may  be  a  little  bit  better
and  use  itpoorly.
McDivitt Okay. I think that covers the flight plan topic,
don't you?
White Yes sir.

12. 3 Spacecraft  Changes

McDivitt Here again we had some changes that were brought about by the change in flight plan, but I think we handled all of these adequate ly . I just don't think that we ought to use GT-4 as an example as to what should be done on a flight, as far as no change and things like that . I feel that ifwe don't have the equipment onboard the spacecraft checked out and ready for service by the time the spacecraft leaves St . Louis, they shouldn't fly on the flight. I ' ve felt like that since the time I got assigned to this flight, and I still feel that that's the way to do it, unless you have a major change for a worthwhile r eason .

White

I was sure wondering r ig ht to the very end if they

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were going to get these final changes in that were required for our flight. They sure waited a long time to put them in.

McDivitt

Yes, two or three days before the flight we still had a lot of things missing. In fact, when I got into the spacecraft, about the first thing I noticed was that the velcro wasn't around the 8-ball. About 30 minutes later, while we were lying there waiting for the launch, Ed looked up and pointed at the 8-ball at the place where the velcro was not.

White

Yes, there wasn't velcro in several places where I

had wanted it, and in several places where I had actually drawn in the lines where I wanted them to put the strips. Inst~ad, they put them 90 degrees to where I had the lines . I can ' t believe they would do something like that. I'm not really complaining. I think they did a pretty,good job .

McDivitt

White

Do you have anything else on spacecraft changes?

No.

12.4 Mission Rules

White I thought this was one of the smoother points.

McDivitt What? Mission rules?

White Mission rules.

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White

We had one area where we were a bit too ambitious,

and this was in the stars for the Air Force D-9. We reviewed this, also, so there was no lack of pl anning. It just turned out that using thes e stars in the sequence that we had for them, with the type of fuel constraints that we had imposed upon us, we just couldn't effectively run the ex periment without using a great deal of fuel.

McDivitt

Yes . And I think that this came about just because of a lack of lmowledge on every o ne's part , on just what we could handle in the spacecraft and the rates that the stars move through the skies .

White

McDivitt

T ha t was something that we learned on this flight.

I think so . I think that's part of the qualita tive da ta that we brought back for D-9, but I do feel that the pre-flight planning for D-6 was completely inadequate . Anything else on a:n.y of the other ex periments?

White

No, I think the other experiments were well briefed to us. We understood them quite well and I think the procedures were well taken care of.

McDivitt

That's  right .

Let me clarify one thing.

I t hink

t hat the technical aspect of D-6 was one of the best briefed of all the experiments. The DOD people

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who were responsible for ithad some of the most

detailed and thorough briefing guides and forms for us on the equipment, and we were more briefed on the equipment. Itwas just the procedures that were lacking.

White

Yes, I felt that I knew the equipment and its assembly end

usage on the D-6 backwards and forwards . Procedures for conducting the experiment were quite clear to me , but the only thing that we didn't have was a good method of passing up the targets and target acquisi tion once we got up there. Also, just handing me 243 targets was a pretty simple-minded approach in trying to solve this problem, I thought.

McDivitt

White

I don't think I have anything else on experiments. Nope.

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13.0 MISSION CONTROL

13.1 GO/NO GO's

McDivitt Okay. Mission Control. Mission Control is the

next major topic. It says describe and discuss.

updating on the status of the spacecraft on

the mission. GO and NO/GO's, I thought, went

pretty well. You have any comment on that?

White No. Sure didn't.

13.2 PLA and CLA Updates

McDivitt PLA' s and CLA updates, I thought, w ent extremely well. You have any other comments on that? White No . We used the form and they're easy to copy down. There ' s sure a lot of information they can get up in a short period of time.

13.3  Consumables

McDivitt The consumables, we had--
White I  got  some  comments on that .
McDivitt Okay.  Go  ahead .
White Okay, I thought  that  their  monitoring  of  our
electrical  system  w as  deficient .  I don ' t
believe  they  gave any indication of  w hat  our
electrical  consumption had been, up till  very
near  the  end  of  the  fl ig ht,  and  they  informed

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us that we were 130 or 150--

McDivitt 160, Ed.

White --amp-hours over, and I would've liked to know this at discrete times throughout the flight. McDivitt I think,really, this was our fault. I think we should've called down and asked them. When they did give it to us, they gave it to us because we did call down and ask them. White Yes, okay. Maybe that was, but I was look- ing for it more often than that. Maybe we could have this part of the GO/NO GO, and they could say you're on your electrical profile and your OAMS profile. This might be a part of it to be sure.

McDivitt Yes. That would be a good idea.

## 13.4 Flight Plan Changes

White Flight plan changes.

McDivitt Flight plan changes. Well, we had a few. I

think that in general they all came off where

they should. I don't really have any comment.

White We had one area in which they were deficient

with the MSC-10.

McDivitt I've already talked to Jerry about that. He

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the flight, and I think about it right now. And I thought about it during the flight. I think it's time to start a crusade. I think it's time to start a crusade on the elapsed time. Get us a clock. It's going to cost money, but I think we ought to get ourselves a good elapsed time clock inside the spacecraft. Get FOD to start going on elapsed time. And here's another funny sounding one, but I don ' t see why we couldn ' t do it--why we couldn't have a flight watch in ten-hour in crements. Let somebody build a ten-hour watch with a counter on ten hour increments . And then we'd have the timing system that we need on the spacecraft. What do you think of that? I know you and I have talked about this before but I think it's time--

McDivitt

Yes. We were forced to run our mission using both elapsed time and Greenwich Mean Time and it's almost an insurmountable problem.

White

I think it's really got our data all fouled up right now , too . I think we'l l unsnarl itall right, but, boy, ifwe could've been putting all our times into those tapes and on our data books in str~ight elapsed-time increments, and even

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when itgets into long time, you lmow, fourteen

day flights, you can still put in 430 and 20 seconds as well as you can the regular Greenwich Mean Time.

McDivitt

White

Yes.

I think that itwouldn't cost us any more to have Omega make us a ten-hour watch and fix these dials up on itso that we could keep track 9f good elapsed time.

McDivitt You've got to leave the minutes and seconds alone there . Well, let's not argue that here or even discuss it. I think what Ed says is right . We w ere forced to run the mission in both elapsed and Greenwich Time, and· r don ' t think that was the way to do it. I think we ought to really start after this elapsed time thing quickly and get on with it.

White Right. It's time to get on with this. I think it's time to make a crusade on it. I think everybody's ready for it.

McDivitt Yes.

White Except the few people that are fighting it,

and I think we can overcome them.

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13.5 Systems

McDivitt

Okay.

Mission  Control  System.

I  think  the

White

McDivitt

Mission Control on this flight was nothing short of excellent. We got all the information from the ground that we needed. We didn ' t get bothered by them unnecessarily, I don ' t believe . They were there when you needed them.

They w ere there when we needed t hem.

That  ' s

White

right . I have nothing but praise for the ground control on this flight. How about you, Ed? I did too, and I had the feeling up ther e that I had confidence in what they wer e doing down there and in the decisions that wer e being made. I felt that when I needed informatio n that the source was available down there and I could alw ays get it. That's a very good feeling .

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# 14.0 TRAINING

14.1 Gemini Mission Simulator

McDivitt

Okay. Over on Training now. The first topic is Gemini Mission Simulator and I think we touched lightly on this subject already. I think that it's an excellent trainer for pro- cedures, system knowledge, launch, orbit, retrofire, reentry, and crew stations. I think the big problem with it is that it takes too long to turn it around. I think that we're fool- ing around with it too much, committing it to supporting other functions besides flight crew training. The simulator at the Cape was sup- posed to have been turned around at roughly two weeks after GT-3's launch, and about six weeks after the launch it still wasn't doing it's job. When we went down there to start flying this completely checked-out simulator, we found that the launch phase worked, the orbit phase did not work, and the reentry phase did not work. After we got the orbit phase squared away, we found out that we kept losing reentry command system. We couldn't use Direct Control Mode in anything. We never did fly reentries. CONFIDENTIAL

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until shortly before the actual flight, at which

time I think I had four total reentries about a week before the flight. Ed said he only flew four reentries on the simulator at the Cape in total. I probably flew fifteen, I would guess . That ' s total , so I think that the Gemini Mission Simulator fell down completely in preparing us for this flight .

White

McDivitt

Well , not quite that bad, Jim.

Well. Okay . We did get a lot of training from it, but I think that the tum-around time is completely inadequate. It made the job for the flight crews a lot tougher than it should have been.

White

I don ' t know really wha t the problem is, but I

McDivitt

think the people down there are working hard , and when things were working right, the train ing was outstanding. But, gee , there 's just too much time when things weren't working right . That's right. I think that's a good point to make. People down at the Cape try very hard, and I don't think it 's their problem. The program for the Cape Simulator was done here .

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f ast.

As long as they weren 't there , they

couldn ' t update that simulator . Another th i ng that I'll,for the life of me, never understand is wher e in the world the food boxes were for that simulator down there. I think somebody should explai n just why it to ok about one month to locate a pair of food boxes and put them on the simulator down t here. It was the only way that we could actually work on the storage of the pieces of equipment for our flight, and we didn't get a chance to look at that until what I consider too short a period of time prior to launch .

McDivitt

Yes. It seemed like t hese food boxes were ordered

a year in advan ce , and they never showed up. It looked like there was a complete lack of follow- up on somebody' s part here . Then it turned out that they did find the food boxes but didn ' t release them to the C ape simulator quick enoug h. I came home here to Houston and found that we had a complete set of good food boxes in the Houston simulator; whereas,the one down at the C ape did not have any at all. This sort

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of goes along with putting the following

missions in front of the mission that ' s about r eady to go . One last comment that I w ould like to make on the simulator is that we made a mistake in building it so that itt-JOuld only tilt up 30 degrees . This lying on your back in a simulator is for the birds. You can sit up in it a lot longer than you can lie on you r back. Also, everything that you have to do when you 're lying on your back is about five times hard er than it is when you 're sittingup- nothing at all like zerc g. I feel strongly that we should look into some method of making this simulator go all the way up to a 90-degree point .

White

Here,  here!

One other thing on this simulator,

too, whil e we're thinking about it . I think , there 's no question in my mind, the most effective trainer we have is our mission simulator . I think it could be made about a thi rd more effective ifwe had a decent out-the-window horizon provided . We didn' t have anything that I ' d ca ll satisfactory available to us prior to

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McDivitt

14.2 LTV Simulation

McDivitt

flight.

I agree.

LTV Simulation. I think that on the two trips that we made to LTV to do the abort simulations we got as much for an hour of time spent as we did in any other part of our training. We were able to do a great number of runs in a very short period of time, and we got all our abort procedures down pat in just a very short period of time. I think that I can't say enough for this. I certainly will be glad when we get this type of a simulation at MSC so that we don't have to travel out of town to get this kind of training.

White

I hope t hey can get it so it w orks as w ell as

i t does up t her e ,down here , because one thing that impress ed me was that you could go up there and be able t o run 70 runs.

McDivitt That's right. In a day.

White And not sit around waiting for things to get

fixed all the time.

McDivitt I think on the one day we went up there, Ed

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White

and I together, in one day, had about 160 runs. Yes. Pretty close to that.

14.3 Centrifuge

McDivitt

White

Centrifuge. I think that the centrifuge contributed very little to our mission. I sort of feel that once you've been on the centrifuge and you've learned what the effect of g's are and how to counteract their effects, that there's not a great deal more to be gained. I didn't really feel that I got that much out of the centrifuge time. How about you, Ed? I think that your orientation in the centrifuge is very important. In other words, I think that it does give you a feeling for what the g's are going to be like and what the g's on the lift- off and reentry are. I don't believe there's any necessity for beating your head on a centri- fuge over and over, running it up there. I certainly wouldn't want to go run a series of runs just before the mission so I'd know how it's going to feel on launch, because I already know how it's going to feel on launch. The first time you run a few runs on a centrifuge, you

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know pretty well what it feels like. I t hink

that it ' s good in moderation, but I certainly don ' t think that you should over-train on it. It's not something that you need to train on every time for every flight.

14,4 Translation and Docking Trainer

McDivitt

Translation and Docking Trainer .

I  thought

that the T rans lation and Docking T rainer was an excellent trainer for the D-6 pass that we did, the Apollo Tracking Pass . I think that the simulation that we set up at Martin Denver was also an excellent tracking task f or this , and I sort of felt that we got the techniques from these two t ra iners that we needed to successfully perform this experiment.

White

I have a couple of comments on that .

I  felt  the

same way. Of course, we didn ' t have this trainer used too much for the docking phase, but I thought itwas quite good for the tracking aspects and also for thruster failure.

McDivitt

That ' s r ight .

It gave you a dynamic simulation

of a thruster failure and what you could do and what you could notice when you actually have a

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thruster that fai led . I used it quite a bit short ly before the flight to pract ice t he dock ing and the station -keeping that we never really got a chance to perform in flight. I felt that it was quite valuable for this .

White

Yes. I think that it's a very good simulation, too, of the actual way the spacecraft really moved.

Yes. I think it is too. I think it is too.

Anything else on Translation and Docking

Trainer?

No.

McDivitt

White

14.5 Planetarium

McDivitt

White

Planetarium. I think it's very valuable training. We used this one down here in Houston, and we used the Morehead Planetarium. There's not a bit of question in my mind which one you ought to use, and it's Morehead, because the display of the stars is about as close as you can get to the real stars out in the sky; whereas, in the one down in Houston the projection of the stars just doesn't have the quality to provide the

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information that you want to get.

I have one

McDivitt

other comment , though, as far as the stars are concerned. I think that probably we got as good trainingwith our stars during our night flights as we got during the planetarium work. I feel that's true too . You've got to go to those planetariums to see all the stars in the sky, but the night flying we did with our ttar chart was probably the thing that really imbedded the location of these stars in my mind. I kept looking at them night after night after night af ter night , and when we flew I was convinced t hat I could go up t here and find all those stars that I needed t o find . I think I had no trouble at all finding them.

White

Yes. We saw every one that was out at night. I think we saw them all. I think we can come back with good identification on them, and what- ever information they want us to tell about them,we can tell them.

McDivitt

That's  right.

And where we di dn't know the

exact name of a particular star in a constel lation,we could always tell which star itwas in

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the constellation and be able to find the name

of the star after we got back here to the ground. But I do think that the star trainingwe had was worth every minute of it.

White

Yes, I'd go back some more, too. I'd go back to the planetarium some more.

McDivitt

That's right . It's one of the things that you really have to keep at all the time, because you can never go out at night and look at al l the stars in the sky. You can only see a certain restricted area, and ittakes a lot of looking to see the whole sky. By the time you look long enough to see the whole sky,i t's six months since you've seen certain stars, unless you want to stayup all night.

White

Spacecraft orientation. I think the little devices they ginned up at the Morehead Planetar ium are real good in this respect . You can sit there and they can simulate your orbit. They can put you up in the barber chair and ;you look out and see approximate ly the number of stars you can s ee out the spacecraft, and I thought that's about what I could see out of the spacecraft. When I

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actually got up close to the w indow, when we

wer e up flying, I could see more stars , as I thought I could. I thought that the training we received was good.

McDivitt

Yes. No doubt about it, that was all time well spent.

14.6 Systems Briefings

McDivitt

Systems Briefings  ,

We actually had briefings on

every system in the spacecr af t , and there are quite a number of them. The schedule was such that we had a general briefing here at Manned Spacecraft Center on each and every one of these systems . I think we had a second briefing here at the Manned Spacecraft Center on certain systems like the ECS before we went to the altitude chamber. We had a number of briefings on the systems again up at McDonnell by McDonnell engineers in St , Loui s. We went dovm to the Cape, we had another general briefingby the McDonnell engineers at the Cape probably six weeks before the flight , and then about ten days before the flight we had a final systems briefingwhere they just discussed any changes

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that had been made since the previous briefing

and brought us up to date on some of the things that had occurred duri ng this spacecraft systems testing. I thought every one of these systems briefings was worthwhile, and I think without each and every one of them we would have been much worse off than we were. I think that if I had it to do all over again, I'd schedule them just exactly the same manner we did this time. One or two here at the Manned Spacecraft Center, then again up at the contractor, then a couple of them down at the Cape. Any comment on that? No . I iiked the manner in which they were presented , as a buildup of details as we went along ~ The final ones down at the Cape were just certainly not systems briefing, They were details of the system briefings .

White

14.7 Flight Experiments

McDivitt

Right,

Flight  Experiments .

Simulations .  We

didn ' t have to do any simulations on MSC-1, -2 , and -3, They were just throwing switches. The medical experiments , the Calcium Deposit Experi ment and the Bone Demineralization Experiment, required that we have a number of x-rays taken

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and we did indeed go make a couple of dry runs

and a couple of wet runs on the x-ray table to make sure that we could get it done quickly. I think this paid off. We never had any delay due to these x-rays . We certainly all knew how to use the exerciser . And the phonocardiogram needed no practice. S- 5 and S-6 did not r equir e any training here on the ground , because these were supposed to be photographs from orbit . That thing was impossible to simulate on the ground. The D-8 required no simulation , so it boiled down to D -6, D-1, and D-9 as the exper i ments that required simulation prior to flight. As we said earli er, we felt that the. T ranslation and Docking Trainer and the Martin Denver simu lation for the D- 6 experimentwAre very valuabl e. ·They gave us the techniques that we needed to perform this thing in space. Gemini Mission Simulator was invaluable , too, for everything- for experiments, operational checks and fo r the whole mission.

White

As far as any really D-9 work, though, with the

simulator , all we could go t hrough wer e kind of

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ting  it.

I thought this was very good.

We  had

another briefing on experiments in the flight plan review about six weeks before the flight, and we had another experiments review about ten days to two weeks before the flight . Again, I felt that each and every one of these was certainly time well spent. I think that, probably ,the first experiments briefing might have taken place a little sooner .

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any things that might not be understood too

well in the procedures . So this is where, I think, that t he people giving this information in D- 6 never were with it--as far as get t ing the information ready for us for it.

McDivitt

Very good. I concur completely.

White

In the future I think the experiments should be firmed up by six weeks prior to flight and the procedures should be well in hand at that time . They shouldn ' t drag on and be dragging on right on down to a few days before the launch , which is exactly w hat happened on D- 6.

McDivitt

Okay. Equipment. We had some of the equipment available to us as early as six or eight months before the flight. Other equipment kept dragging in until the very last day, just about. I don't believe that you can get the training equipment available to the crews too early. We found our- selves, in many cases, with the training equip- ment locked up out at the Cape for safe keeping-- so safe that we couldn't even get to it, and we didn't get a chance to use it the way we should have. I think only by a lot of noise making, I

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guess, were we able to ever break this stuff loose. Training equipment is just what it says-- it should be used for training and it shouldn't be kept under lock and key away from the crews. I had that same feeling down there, Jim. I think we both kind of got on this one. It seemed like they'd want to get all the training equipment all together and say, "Ha, ha. We've got it all together. We're all up to snuff. There's all of our training equipment. It's all in that locker over there." That's not the way it ought to be. The training equipment shouldn't be in that locker at all. It should all be out to the crew.

White

McDivitt

White

In t he hands of the crew.

And I think up in the crew quarters is where the training equipment belongs and down in the simulator. It should be out and being used . I think that one of the keynotes to our success in having a decent amount of photography taken on the flight was that we took the cameras that were available, whether they were flight type or the commercial types of cameras that we car-

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the testing.

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White

You know, itdoesn't seem to fit in here anywhere else, but I think maybe at this point we ought to indicate we attended every one of the management m eetings up there at McDonnell while our spacecraft was up there progressing along through the assembly line. I recommend that all crews in the future have representation at all those meetings.

McDivitt

That 's right. The most important meetings I've ever gone to in my life, at least since I've come here to the Manned Spacecraft Center , were those Gemini management meetings up at McDonnell . I can't express Pnough the · need for a represent~tive of the flight crews to be there at t}).e meetings.

14.9 Egress Training

McDivitt

Egress Training. I thought the briefings were excellent, the flotation tank work was excellent, the Gulf exercise was excellent, and the survival gear briefing was excellent. I can't say how glad I am that we've had this training when we plopped down out in the Atlantic Ocean and we were sitting there. Even though we were about to be rescued , I knew that even if they didn't rescue

~  EL&liffilBf!.tW~

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us right then , I f elt fully confident about being able to take care of mys elf out there in that wa ter.

White We were well prepared in this area.

14.10 Parachute Training

McDivitt P~rachut e t raining. I thought t hat the parachute training that we had was good. I thought that t he parachute training into the wa ter wit h pressure suits on was by far the bes t t hat we had. It was the most realistic and it was the kind of training that we would need during actual flight .

White And I recommend highly that all crews do this and they go in suits as close to the same kind of con dition that you ' re going to plop down in that water w ith, and go through the full inflation and not skimp on a thing.

McDivitt You get all tangled up in a parachute jus t the w ay you're going to get all tang led up in the parachute when--

White That's right . Inflate the life rafts and inflate the Mae Wests and inflate the whole works every time . And ifwe don ' t have enough life rafts

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to do it every time , see to it t hat we get it.

14.11 Launch Simulation

McDivitt

Okay. Launch Simulation. I think that the launch simulations were excellent. I think that was the first place that we really had a chance to work with the people who were going to be controlling us during the flight. I think we got a lot out of it, and I think they got a lot out of it. What we really had to do was learn, I guess, respect for each other, and I guess the only way we could do this was to see how each. of us was going to handle a situation that arose. I don't have any other comment on it except that I think that it was certainly worthwhile. I've got a comment. Not on that, but a thing that fits right in.

White

McDivitt

White

Shoot.

I think that the reentry simulations that we did

should be made a regular part of the preparations for flight. It's just as important to me as the launch simula tion. I t hink t here should be regular reentry simulation for the preparations prior to the fligh t in the same manner as the

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launch simulations. McDivitt I think so too. I think those reentry simula- tions we did that day were certainly worthwhile. We only had to do a few of them to learn the procedures for getting the information back and forth. We tried one one day, and it was so horrible that I'm certainly glad that something like that didn't happen during flight. But after we had done a couple of more it smoothed out, I had no doubt in my mind whatsoever that we were going to be able to pass the in- formation back and forth. White That's right. I felt that they were equally as important as the launch simulation.

14.12 Network Simulation

McDivitt

The Network Simulation. We didn't actually participate in the Network Simulations, and I don't think we missed a thing. I think, though, that something that was required was a discussion with the Network Controllers. We came back to Houston to tell them our points of view and explain to them the kind of information we wanted passed back and forth and the format of how we wanted this information given to us. I

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think that during the flight it certainl y

proved that itwas worthwhile, because that w as the way we got it, and we wer e able to get this information in a usable manner in a short time . We didn ' t have to go over and over and over. I don ' t have any other comment on that . F.d? No .

White

14.13 Zero-G Flight

McDivitt

White

The zero-g flights are the next topic. I sort of feel that the zero-g flights were one of our most valuable training tools, especially since we were going to do the extravehicular activity portion of the flight. Without this we wouldn't have had the confidence in ourselves in getting in and out of the spacecraft and opening and closing the hatch that was required, so that we probably wouldn't have even done it. Ed, do you have any other comments on that? Concerning the little bit of a hatch problem that we did have, I think that the work that I had done on the zero-g airplane sure prepared me well to meet the problem that we had. I recommend very highly that for any egress work, in which we're going in and out of the space-

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craft zero-g , that you get up there and work the

procedures out thoroughly between not only the guy getting in and out but between the two guys that are sitting in the seats. This is the way we flew it. We didn't go up there and fly just one go.y jumping in and out the batch. We went up there and flew wi t h the gu:y in both seats, whether the man in the left seat actually worked all the time or not. There were t imes when he had to help , and in our flight itpaid off, because there was a time when Jim had to help, and he knew exactly what the probl ems were and was able to give the help necessary .

McDivitt

Another thing that might have helped here was that I've been in and out of that right-hand hatch almost as many times as Ed had.

White So we knew just what the problems were.

McDivitt So we knew exactly what the problems were.

14.14 Flight Plan Training

McDivitt Next topic is Flight Plan Training. I think we had such a great number of changes in our flight plan that it's really not fair to discuss this in any great detail. The approach that we did take, as I mentioned earlier, was that we would

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have a good launch and first few orbits, a good

retro-preparation , and a good retro and reentry , with the center of the mission being taken care of by doing the experiment or doing the operation al check by itselfw ithout regard to what w ent before or what went after. I think this is the kind of training you really need on these long duration flights. Anything else there , Ed? No. I concur heartily. I think that practicing itpiecemeal is the only way you can do it .

White

McDivitt
White

You have any concluding comments? I think we've been ma.king conclusions all day long. I t hink to try to conclude them all , we'd never get them.

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