DECLASSIFIED
GT-4 FLIGHT CREW DEBRIEFING TRANSCRIPT
PART II
Prepared By
Spacecraft Operations Branch 
Flight Crew Support Division 
June 18, 1965
This material contains information affecting the 
national defense of the United States within the 
meaning of the Espionage Laws, Title 18. U. S. C. 
Section 795 and 794, the transmission or revela­
tion of which in any manner to an unauthorized 
person is prohibited by law.
Group 4s Downgrade at 5 year intervals 
Declassified after 12 years
N OTICE: This d ocum ent m ay b e exem pt from  
pub lic d isclosure und er the Freed om of Infor­
m ation Act (5 U.S.C. 552). Requests for its re­
lease to persons outsid e the U. S. G overnm ent 
should b e hand led  und er the provisions of 
N ASA Policy Directive 13 82.2.


PREFACE
This preliminary transcript was made from voice tape -recordings 
of the GT-4 flight crew debriefing conducted aboard the recovery ship, 
the USS Wasp, on June 9, 1965, and concluded at the Manned Spacecraft 
Center on June 12, 1965.
Although all the material contained in this transcript has been 
edited, the urgent need for the preliminary transcript by mission 
analysis personnel precluded a thorough editorial review prior to its 
publication. Errors in this transcript will be corrected as soon as 
possible and an official transcript will be published at a later date.
This document contains a transcript of the second part of the 
total debriefing. A preliminary transcript of the first part was 
published on June 16, 1965, and it contains the crew’s description 
of the mission from an operational standpoint.


TABLE OF CONTENTS
Paragraph Page number
8 .0 SYSTEMS OPERATION
8,1 Platform ...................     ..1
8.2 CAMS .................................................... 5
8.J 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
11 .0 EXPERIMENTS
11.1 Two-Color Earth-Limb Photography (MSC-10) ....... ....*..217
11.2 Synoptic Terrain and Weather Photography (S-5 and S-6),219
11.3 Simple Navigation with 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 (U-8) ...........  250
11.7 Inflight Exerciser (M-3) . ...............  230
11.8 Inflight Phonocardiogram (M-4) ........................ 232
11.9 Extravehicular Activity......... .....................232
11.10 Miscellaneous ......................................... 232


12 .0 PRE-MISSION MANNING
12.1 Mission Plan ('Trajectory) — ................  234
12.2 Flight Plan .......................................... 2$4
12.J Spacecraft Changes ................................ 259
12.4 Mission Rules ......      ......240
12.5 Experiments ...........................................241
12.6 Training Activities........................  245
1J.0 MISSION CONTROL
15.1 GO/NO GO’S ............................................ 249
13.2 PIA and CIA Updates ...................................249
13.3 Consumables ................      249
13.4 Flight Plan Changes .......,.,..,,,................. ,.250
13.5 Systems ...................    254
14.0 TRAINING
14.1 Gemini Mission Simulator .............................255
14*2 LTV Simulation .....................  260
14.3 Centrifuge .......................................... 261
14.4 Translation and Docking Trainer ......................262
14.5 Planetarium ......................................... .263
14.6 Systems Briefings .................................... 266
14.7 Flight Experiments ...................................267
14-8 Spacecraft Systems Test... ..................  275
14.9 Egress Training............  274
14.10 Parachute Training...................  275
14.11 Launch Simulation...........  276
14.12 Network Simulation....... . ..... .....277
14.13 Zero "G" Flight ..............................   276
14.14 Flight Plan Training........  279
■^wtetwi—


8.0 SYSTEMS OPERATION
8.1 Platform
McDivitt Actually, the first portion of any alinement is 
to cage the thing. The case of caging the thing 
is much more important than the alinement itself. 
In the daytime I felt that I could cage the plat­
form to a reference with an error plus or minus 
about J or 4 degrees in all axes. Did you think 
we could do that well?
White Only in the daytime.
McDivitt The yaw was a little problem. It took longer 
to get it, but if you kept after it for awhile, 
I felt that you could get down to just a few 
degrees.
White Within a couple of degrees. •
McDivitt The big thing is that you have to stop your yaw 
rates, and then sit there and look outside for 
awhile and see which way you're going, straight 
ahead or sideways. If you are going sideways 
you rotate around for awhile and stop the rate 
and then look out again. Right? I felt you could 
get the thing caged quite well. We didn't do it
BEE at all, did we? We never did cage in BEE.


2
White I'm not sure.
McDivitt The caging of the thing with small-end-forward in 
the daytime was relatively easy. At night I don't 
think it would he quite that simple. I think what 
you would have to do at night time is to point 
the spacecraft down at the ground pretty much so 
you can see the track across the ground. I could 
see which way the land was moving under me. I 
felt—although I never did this—that if I could 
do that and then roll around to where I had no 
hank angle, and face in my yaw direction, either 
small-end or blunt-end-forward, stop the roll there 
and pitch up to the horizon I could cage there 
within plus or minus 10 degrees for sure. It was 
much less accurate at night, I felt, than in the 
daytime.
White You aren’t kidding! We both felt that on those 
dark nights when you really couldn't see anything 
on the ground, pure star reference for yaw was 
pretty rough.
McDivitt Pure star reference for yaw was almost impossible 
to use. That was the only place where that thing 
we decided not to take with us—the view of the 
stars through the window—might have been of some 
W NriDC NTIA t


W MFIDEMT1X L » 5
use to us. We knew the stars along our track hut 
you couldn't see enough of them. The quickest 
way to get the yaw reference was to look down at 
the ground. Once we got the platform caged, aline- 
ment was quite simple. All you had to do was just 
hold the needles at zero and the platform alined 
itself. Of course you had to have the scanners 
on. The modes—the SEF and the BEF were identically 
the same except the spacecraft is pointing in 
different directions. You tended to null the 
needles by using pulses and just hold the needles 
very close to null and the platform alined itself 
through the horizon scanners. Orbit Rate was a 
satisfactory mode, I thought. As a matter of fact, 
it was very good.
White I liked that Orbit Rate,
MeDiviit Yes, because we finally had a reference where we 
didn't have to look out and see the ground. It's 
like having the old altitude indicator back in an 
airplane. The only thing was, we had the wrong 
orbit rate in the spacecraft because it was set 
for an orbit rate that was to take care of, I 
think, a 60 nautical mile circular orbit. This 
was to take care of the short period of time between
frawiDIiLITIAir


4
going to Orbit Rate at T-5 and firing the retros 
at TR, We wanted to have exactly the right rate 
in there so when we did our closed-loop reentry 
we wouldn't have an error. As I said, I had the 
most accurate platform in the world with nothing 
to do with it. I think the displays were adequate 
and the controls were adequate. After 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 
really didn't have the view out the window to check 
it with. We were hurrying and scurring through 
there. We finally shut the thing down before I 
really got a chance to use it very much. When we 
powered it up there on the third day and we saw 
that thing coming around there -and cage properly, 
we compared the out-the-window attitudes and that 
old attitude reference was right there. That's 
when I got some confidence in the platform.
White This is where we lost a couple of bets.
McDivitt That's right. 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


8.2 OAMS
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.
around. I had Direct, Pulse, and Rate Command in
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 last 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 You can hear them. It was very distinct.
McDivitt 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


6
there as I chased, it around, and those were the 
only modes I intended to use right then. Later 
on, I checked out the Reentry Rate Command and I 
checked the Rate Command "before we thrusted. It 
did seem to be operating fine. Why don't you go 
through the next part, Ed?
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 CAMS 
was 75 degrees all the way down the line. The 
initial indications on the pressures were approxi­
mately 2800 psi for the source and J20 psi for the 
regulated pressure.
EcLivitt 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 
reW FIDENTIAi?*


of the gage when, it kept staying there at J? to 60
eW W IDENTIAL > 7
it was reading %. Another hour or two after that 
it had climbed slowly back up to 60 again. I 
had a long time to look at it in the same position. 
When we ended the chasing-around at the end of the 
first hour, we were down to 70 percent indicated 
and we never got below 50 percent in four days.
White I'll tell you, the position it seemed to stay 
for days and days was 59 to 60 percent. We fired 
in Pulse Mode for a long time with the gage at 
that position, and all of a sudden that one time 
it dropped down to about 55 percent.
McPivitt But then it came back up to 60.
White I guess it did, didn't it? The temperatures all 
stayed fairly constant. If I recall right, they 
dropped down to around 70 degrees. It seemed to 
me they continually decreased throughout the 
flight. I noticed this particularly in the RCS, 
but I guess we’ll get to that later. The propellait 
quantity though, I think we mentioned earlier, 
ended up on our gaging at about 5 percent at the 
end. We got a little bit of ground information on 
the CAMS propellant. I felt a little suspicious


fied that our CAMS was staying pretty constant.
8 £jO NriDENTIAL
percent for so long.
McDivitt We were pretty miserly with that CAMS fuel. We 
set out to save the fuel and we sure did it.
White I think that in future missions, if they permit 
the crew to use the Pulse Mode in a saving-manner 
they could do a lot more with the mission—if you 
could use Pulse Mode instead of just free-drifting 
around. In other words, line yourself up so you 
can make some decent observations.
McDivitt Shoot! We were in Horizon Scan Mode when we got 
the last data, and I don't think we used any more 
fuel than we were when we were in free drift.
White That's right. We certainly got more out of the 
orbit than we did when we were just drifting free.
McDivitt I'll tell you one record that we ought to hold. 
We've looked at the earth from more different 
angles than anybody else in the world. Well, 
maybe not. I guess the Russians did, but we sure 
got a lot of different views of that earth as we 
rotated around.
White I think the ground information that they called up 
on the status of our CAMS wasn't as much as they 
could have called up to us, but I'm really satis-


~W hiiiL)Ll IHAL w ’
McDivitt So did I. The way I felt was that I knew that we 
had to be as miserly with the fuel as we possibly 
could, so we got as much out of as little fuel as 
possible. There wasn’t going to be anything to 
change that velocity. We just went along and I 
really didn't care how they were plotting that fuel 
on the ground. I knew that we were starting to 
get ahead of the schedule, because I was plotting 
it roughly onboard the spacecraft. I could see we 
were up above the line that we needed to remain 
above to handle our CAMS retrofire.
White Actually, we followed the profile rather closely.
We leveled off there at first, and then when we 
started using it, we went right down the profile.
McDivitt We were a little below the line and we just held 
the same fuel level until we walked out across it 
and got up on top of it Then, we went on down 
above it.
White I think the controls and the switches were all 
satisfactory.
McDivitt I think so too. The attitude controller worked 
fine and dandy. We didn't have any trouble with 
it. The stick forces weren’t too high. We didn't 
get a chance to use it in any other mode besides 
^dNfi& em _


10
Pulse. It seemed to work all right in Pulse. I 
don't really have any comments to make on the atti­
tude controller.
White As a matter of fact, I didn't us® any Rate Command.
McDivitt Didn't you really?
White We didn't use the Rate Command. I got to use 
Direct a couple of times. I used Pulse a lot. 
Everytime you'd go to sleep, I'd really have a ball'
McDivitt I could tell that by the wiggling.
White No. That was really groat—flying that spacecraft.
McDivitt 'That's right, and I think Pulse is the mode. You 
can do a lot with it. With a little bit of planning 
you oould get to the attitude—if you start out 5 
or 6 minutes ahead of time. That's what we were 
doing. At 10 minutes before I was supposed to be 
at a certain attitude I'd start, and one or two 
little pulses and you'd—hoop, hoop, hoop, boop— 
the bad. thing was if you were in an attitude where 
you couldn't see the horizon and didn't know where 
you were. You would give it a couple of pulses 
and nothing would happen, and you'd have to give 
it a couple of more pulses. It'd take a long time 
sometimes before you would get to where you could 
see. As a matter of fact, if at 5 minutes before
t?PMFIDENTlM


^grNFIDENTIAt! 11
we were supposed to he at a certain attitude we 
weren't approaching it, I'd start pulsing a little 
harder.
White You'd hear a aeries of about five quick pulses.
McDivitt It was a very economical control mode.
The maneuver controller worked the way it was 
supposed to.
White What about the deadband? Did you think the dead­
bands and breakouts were all satisfactory?
McDivitt Yes, just like the one we used in the simulator. 
You've got a lot of slop in it when you're making 
gross maneuvers because you're not fixing your 
elbow and manipulating around that point. You're 
fixing your shoulder and your whole arm, end 
it's just like shoveling coal—you've got about 
that much finesse to it. I don't think there's 
much you can say about it. The controls weren't 
too gross and they weren't too minor. The whole 
thing was adequate. We did have an inflight mal­
function, or irregularity. We were in Horizon 
Scanner Mode one time and Ed wanted to yaw around. 
He started to yaw and the thing rolled. The 
Horizon Scanner Mode fired the roll thrusters to 
level it back off—
GftW IDLNB At- .


12 e^nDiNnAT^
White I couldn’t get the yaw. We had a circuit breaker 
off.
McDivitt Finally, after you did that a couple of times I 
looked up and saw we had knocked a circuit breaker 
off. That was one thing that we didn't cover in 
EVA that I should have mentioned. Ed was a real 
hazard to the switch positions in that he was all 
over with his feet, arms, and hands —.
illite I don’t think I threw any though. Did I? Come 
on now. You're not guilty until you’re convicted.
McDivitt I don't know. You kept putting your foot on the
HF Reentry Antenna Switch and stepping on it.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
McDivitt As for the attitude control modes—I mentioned 
the Rate Command in GAMS seemed to be tighter than 
the Rate Command in RCS, although they use the 
same electronics, the same gyros, and the whole 
thing. It might have just been my imagination, 
but I felt that the Rate Command system in RCS was 
a lot looser than it was in CAMS. The Reentry 
Rate Command operated just the way it should. It 
had a 4 degree deadband, and handled the spacecraft 
very well during reentry. Direct had a lot more 
authority than I thought it would, but it was 
^O NriDC NTIA*


6®NFIDENTIAt 13
pretty straightforward. I think Pulse was the 
best mode on the spacecraft for the orbit phase. 
We were able to save all kinds of fuel, it worked 
fine, and it was just about what the doctor ordered. 
We didn't use the Horizon Scan Mode during about 
the first three days of flight, except for the second 
orbit when I think I was in Horizon Scan so that I 
could have the freedom to help Ed prepare for his 
EVA. The last day we used the Horizon Scan Mode, 
and I found it to be an excellent mode. There was 
only one case when it broke lock and didn't recover. 
Wasn't that it, Ed?
White You've got it in the book.
McDivitt We've got in the book and we'll check on that. 
The Horizon Scan Mode worked essentially for 24 
hours without any problem -and I think it's an 
excellent control mode. It seemed to be very 
economical on fuel. We were doing a lot of 
yawing around and right at sunrise and sunset it 
seemed to get a little nervous, especially if we 
had the horizon scanner pointed within about plus 
or minus 45 degrees of the sun. The moon didn't 
seem to affect it at all. I noticed that, occa-
sionally, we would get some thruster blips with the sun
^ahiriDLMTLMgr


14
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
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
Particularly at sunrise.
It would hold. I thought the Horizon Scan— 
It was definitely getting some spurious signals 
through but not enough to break it out all the way. 
I thought the Horizon Scan Mode was an excellent 
attitude-hold mode.
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, hut 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.


<O MFIDENTIAt-
White I didn't think you noticed it earlier when we 
were working.
McDivitt Well, I did notice it a little hit 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 + JO, 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 + JO 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 
•C O NFIDENT IAU


16 ■SeNFIDENTDMr
just smooth—we didn’t come off with a rotational 
rate.
White I think one of the things you might comment on, Jim,
is that you fired most of those thrusters during 
that initial time.
McDivitt I'm sure I fired the upward-firing thrusters a 
number of times. That isn't any more difficult 
to control than the other one. Actually you can 
fire these thrusters whether you are in Hate 
Command, Direct or even in Pulse. When you fire 
them, you get a rate and you just damp the rate 
out with the attitude controller. When you are 
firing the translation thrusters, the things that 
you really hear are not the translation thrusters, 
but the attitude thrusters. Those translation 
thrusters are really tough to hear, but the atti­
tude thrusters are very easy to hear, I doh't 
understand why. They must be mounted differently 
because their location isn't that much different. 
I think I fired the aft-firing thrusters a couple 
of times and they didn't make any more noise than 
the forward-firing thrusters, that I could tell. 
The up and down and left and right ones were just 
as easy to fire as the other ones. Our CAMS retro
C O NFIDENTIA L


-kow tow . 17
was 127 feet/second which, incidently, happened
to come out exactly 2 minutes and 40 seconds. I 
suspect that we selected OAMS retrofire on the basis 
of time, rather than on the basis of AV.
White Very convenient, wasn't it?
McDivitt Very convenient. It was obvious there is no more 
difficulty in timing 2 minutes 40 seconds during 
our OAMS retrofire than it is during any other 
thing. We had no trouble with it. I was convinced 
that when we got through with it, that was really 
the proper conversion factor between AV and AT. 
We had exactly 127 feet/second, and we sure had 
the time nailed down.
8.5 ROS
McDivitt The operational checks that we did on the ROS 
occurred at about TR minus an hour. When I checked 
the system out it seemed like I had a lot less 
authority and a lot sloppier Rate Command than I 
had in OAMS. The operational check consisted of 
pitching up and down, yawing left and right, 
rolling lef+ and right on each ring in Rate Command 
and Direct. Direct worked as I expected it to. 
In Rate Command, however, as I pitched up and down 
I noticed that my top left yaw thruster was doing


10 ^NFIDO TTrAt
a lot of firing, too. I started out checking the 
Rate Command, so I thought I might possibly have 
one bad pitch thruster that was causing a rolling 
moment that was being counteracted by the yaw-roll 
jets. When I did it in Direct, however, it wasn't 
doing that. It wasn't rolling either, so I felt 
that it must just be a very tight deadband that 
was trying to hold us in there. So, the operational 
checks were all right. The only thing we had to 
monitor on the system was the temperature and the 
pressure of the propellant. It seemed to hold 
pretty well.
that way pretty well until about ths 65th hour, when
White I have some comments on that. I kept a running
log of them as we went along. The temperature
started out at 75 degrees and 5000 pounds. It held
the temperature gradually went down. The temperature 
decreased to a point where we started getting the 
RCS heater lights that we noted earlier. We got 
about eight series of RCS heater lights. It took 
about 5 minutes to extinguish the light. It was 
the A-ring,then the B-ring, and then the A-ring. 
It seemed to alternate each time back and forth and 
it came on for about 15 to 20 minute periods of 
eO NFIDENTIAt


jSO NFIDENftAh 19
time. It started, right after a night cycle. It 
seemed, rather natural to me that there wasn11 
really something wrong, but that we actually had. 
a cold RCS thing out there and it did need some 
heat. After heat was applied it did appear to go 
away. I decided to go ahead and set up a slow roll 
rate in the daytime, and I kept that roll rate in 
for several orbits. Whether this actually helped 
to get the light off or not, I don’t know. We 
didn’t get anymore lights after this time, I think 
there ought to be one other comment on the RCS, 
and that is the temperatures and the pressures 
stayed up pretty well except when we actuated the 
system. The pressures then went down further than 
we had expected them to go. They went down to 
24OO to 2500 psi. This was a little lower than I 
expected to see.
McDivitt I think the pressures in the RCS A and B dropped 
by about 100 pounds throughout the four-day period. 
They were slightly over J000 pounds and they got 
down to slightly under J000.
White The lowest temperatures I noted were in the neigh­
borhood of about 65 to 64 degrees. They started 
out at 75 degrees.
^QMFIDENTIAfa


20
McDivitt Let me ask you a question?
White Yes.
MoDivitt When you turned on the ROS heaters, did you turn 
on the heaters on both rings, or did you turn on 
the RCS Heater Switch and then turn off the circuit 
breaker on the other ring?
White I turned the heaters on and then I checked to see 
which ring it was that was actually heating up by 
using the circuit breakers. The first time I went 
ahead and left them on and then the other ring 
came on. I felt that one of them was about as 
cold as the other, so I left the heaters on both 
rings throughout the heating cycles.
MoDivitt Good.
White They were in perfect sequence—A and B, A and B, 
and about 15 minutes apart. The regularity was 
surprising. The temperatures at the time when 
these lights came on were indicating about 65 or 
64 degrees and it seemed like it would come up a 
little bit, and then come right back down and pop 
back on again. I felt it was not an actual 
temperature problem.
MoDivitt I used Rate Command, Reentry Rate Command and Pulse
control modes. I didn't use Direct. They all
C eNHDEI-W M


C O NFIDENTIAL - 21
operated as I thought they should. I've already 
mentioned I thought Rate Command was a little 
sloppier in RCS than it was in CAMS. It certainly 
did a fine job of holding the retro attitude during 
retrofire. Retrofire attitude control was excellent. 
We didn't deviate more than about a degree from 
the attitude we were supposed to hold, and I had 
plenty of authority there. From my standpoint 
it couldn't have been any better. I was really 
happy about it. I used the Reentry Rate Command 
with roll rate gyro off, so that I had essentially 
Direct in roll and Reentry Rate Command in pitch 
and yaw axes. It had the typical 4 degree deadband 
that it was supposed to have. It did do rate damping 
as it was supposed to. It performed just the way 
it should. Ed, you want to cover that heater-lights 
thing again? I think you've already got that thing 
pretty much in detail.
White I have the precise times at which the lights came 
on. It started at about the 64th or 65th elapsed 
time hour. At 06:47, the first light, in the A-ring, 
came on. At 08: 2J the A-ring light came on again. 
That was the last time. During that period of time 
the A and the B-rings cycled on and off inter- 
€©HHB B stB j£to»


22 •ftpr'inDEMTIAL*
mittently.
McDivitt During descent, we turned the power off to see if 
the drogue chute was unstable. It wasn't. We 
turned the power back on and the propellant valves 
off and burned up all of the fuel in the manifolds. 
We had no fumes after impact.
8.4 Environmental Control System
McDivitt I thought the suit mobility was as good in the 
spacecraft as it is anywhere else. I think these 
suits are pretty good suits. I didn't find any 
trouble with them whatsoever in the spacecraft 
that I wasn’t already aware of. The pressure held 
up good. I did a pressure check on the suit. It 
bled down about 0.2 or 0.3 psi in about JO seconds, 
which really wasn't too bad. The temperature was 
always good. It ran between about 50 and 55 
degrees diring the entire flight except when we 
really worked hard. I don't think it ever got up 
over 60. Do you, Ed?
White No.
McDivitt We had reasonably good temperature control.
White The cabin temperature got up pretty high one time 
and then it came back down.
McDivitt Yes, on about the first orbit.


C O NFIDENTIAL ^ 23
White That’s r ght. It got up to about 90.
McDivitt 100, it was. We turned the cabin heat exchanger 
on for just a short time and it went right back on 
down to 80 degrees.
White It stayed in the area of 82 to 8j 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 00^ stayed at 
zero all the time. It never did go up except when 
we'd go to 0^ High Rate, when it would bound off 
the top peg and fall back down again. The comfort 
and suit controls were pretty reasonable. The 0„ 
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, 
viiich 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 
aeHriDC NTIAL C


24
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 5/4 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


25
White
put it. The micro-meteroid blanket that I had 
strapped under my right leg wasn't a detriment. 
As a matter of fact since we had no place to stow 
it, I just left it strapped to my leg until reentry. 
Then, I felt that if we had to get out in the -water 
I didn't want to have any straps hanging off me 
that I didn't need. So, I took it off and threw 
it on the floor along with Ed's sleeves. I don't 
have anymore comments on my suit.
I wore the EVA suit. I think the mobility of the 
suit was about what I had expected. Actually, I 
think the mobility in some respects was a little 
better, and in some respects it was a little less 
than I had expected. I wasn't able to get into the 
right-hand aft food box as well as I had thought 
I was going to be able to in zero g. In fact, the 
position that I had figured out to use, which was 
leaning forward and reaching in backwards with my 
left arm, didn't work out well at all. I had to 
actually turn around 90 degrees in the seat and 
reach in with my right arm. This worked out all 
right. I was able to get hold of things in the 
box. The surprise that I got though, was that I
could get into the right-hand aft refuse box much


26 qeNriDUMTiAL
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 stowing some things prior to 
launch in it, too.
White Did you try that box during flight, Jim?
McDivitt Yes, I did. I didn't find it easy to get into.
I thought the things we had stowed in it were 
real good things—items that we didn't need at all 
in flight and possibly might not need—
White I used all four defecation bags that I had on ray 
side. I used them up during flight. In fact, you 
used one of them.
McDivitt That's right, we did have a bag of those defeca­
tion 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 pressure-checked my suit. I checked it at 8.5 
and it bled down several tenths of a psi. I was 
satisfied with the pressure-holding of my suit.
epMriDrNTi u


27
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 
my gloves and closing my faceplate. I could go 
to sleep. At that time my temperature would go 
up considerably inside the suit. It seemed like 
I could 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 my lips to crack 
and my nose to get very dry. In fact, I noticed 
my nose was itching considerably. This was an 
indicator to me every time I would go to sleep. 
I would wake up with my nose itching and feeling 
quite hot and uncomfortable. T^y lips got to the 
point where I thought they were going to crack.
^QNFIDC NTIAt-rm


28 GO NIiDC NTIAl
and I was trying to be very careful and keep them 
from cracking and getting anymore uncomfortable 
than they were. Jim mentioned the CO^ 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 5VA 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 ths 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


29
them on and off in flight if you wanted to.
McDevitt I don’t know. I’d hesitate to recommend putting 
them on in flight. It might get pretty tricky* 
I think if you put them on in flight, you'd want 
to put them over all the harness, rather than 
■under the harness.
White That's exactly what I was going to say. I think 
if you took the life preservers off, you could 
actually make the sleeves big enough so that you 
could slip them on and velcro them across the 
back over the harness. This might be for the 
type of operation of throwing equipment in and 
out. I think in the future, though, a suit as 
heavy as this might not be required. The controls 
and the switches in the suit, I felt, were satis­
factory. There wasn’t anything that I couldn’t 
get at in the spacecraft. It was easier under 
weightless conditions for me to operate certain 
controls. In fact, I think I was able to get 
down and unscrew the bellows in the gun hose as 
well and maybe a little easier than you could, 
Jim. At least initially, I was able to get down 
there. Of course you weren't really particularly 
trying to do it at that time.


50 QpNriDC MTrAL .
McDivitt I suspect I probably could have gotten down there 
as easy or easier than you if I had really gotten 
around to trying.
White I don't remember, but, anyhow, I was surprised 
with the ease which I had in getting down.
McDivitt We were trying to dump the pressure in the bellow 
before we went EVA with it.
White Right. The demand regulator was satisfactory. Pty 
umbilicaljl thought, was very easy to use and 
disconnect. I was quite happy to have the micro­
dot in there. One comment on the micro-dot—the
first time we exercised the micro-dots on our 
suit, they were pretty hard to operate. Mine got 
progressively easier to use each time I used it. 
The fingertip lights that I had were better than 
Jim's. I had lights with Lexan tops on them.
All my lights worked, and I felt that their
operation was quite satisfactory. We had decided
to put my lights between the first and second 
joints for several reasons. We thought the EVA
gloves would be easier to don and there*d be less
tendency to break them. I think, though, the
position of the lights was still a little too far
forward if it was intended to put them back between
m^w


31
the first and second joints, because the lights 
were resting right on top of my first joint. I 
think if I had worn my gloves anymore, I would 
have gotten a very sore first knuckle. If you 
are going to move them back, I think they should 
definitely be moved back behind the first knuckle.
McDivitt Where were they getting you, Ed? 
White Right on the top of the knuckle. 
McDivitt You think they ought to be back? 
White If they are going to be anywhere, they ought to be 
back here, and I’m not too sure that is necessary. 
In fact, I think the best place is behind the 
fingertip and in front of the first joint.
McDivitt But, with the plastic covers over the gloves.
White With the plastic cover on the glove, and I think 
we’ve got the right position for the lights. I 
don’t think they should be back behind the first 
knuckle. I think they should be in front of that 
first knuckle and behind the fingertip. That's a 
good place for them. That's where we’ve been using 
them in the past. I think the Lexan cover 
on the light bulb is a darn good idea.
McDivitt Yes, I think so. too. Shoot! I checked my lights 
before launch and found out that I already had one 
aO W IDENTIAL •


32 C O NFIDENTIAL
White
of them out on my right hand. I wasn't too happy 
about it,
I was a little disappointed, I think the only 
discrepancy I found in my suit was that I had no 
blood pressure plug either. A point that I was 
pretty happy with was that I had no pressure points 
from my suit at all on my body. I had one set of 
pressure points from my helmet pressing down on the 
front forward part of my head. I knew why this 
was. I'd had Joe Schmitt adjust my cables so that 
I could pull my helmet down to a maximum amount 
for the EVA work. I felt that I just bought this 
discomfort by having my cables adjusted in this 
manner. It was pretty uncomfortable though. I 
checked out the use of the emergency bottles on 
the EVA equipment and they worked as they were 
supposed to. I was able to regulate the flow. 
Incidently, before I went out the reading on the 
EVA bottles was full-scale, 5400 pounds. I was 
happy to see that. All in all, I was quite happy 
with the suit. I think it was a very well designed 
suit and it met the requirements that were levied 
upon it. It was a heavy suit and a big suit to
wear for four days, but I felt the suit wasn't as


SC HEID ENTIAL 35
bad. as I had. expected it was 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.
-^& N H& EN RAfe»


34
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


-tSBFIDEN TiM . 35
link net in itself just isn't long enough.
McDivitt You wouldn't say you had a pressure point though?
White No, it was just a constant pull on there all the 
time.
McDivitt Did it bother you very much during the flight?
White Yes, it bothered me a little bit.
McDivi■ So you really did have sort of a pressure point 
then?
Wh_te Yes, to some extent in that area, I had had that 
one so much before. It had been so extreme in 
some cases that it really didn't bother me too 
much.
White Both of us should mention something about the 
visors.
McDivitt I thought you ought to mention something about 
your visor problem , your EVA visor or the other 
one.
White Well, I have briefed the visor on the EVA pretty 
well. The one that I will mention now is the 
visor that I had on my regular helmet. I thought 
that the vision through it was quite good. I 
noticed no distortion at all through it, but I 
did immediately put a couple big scratches on it


♦
3 6
in the beginning when I was unstowing equipment.
I continued to scratch it throughout the mission. 
When I finished, the visor was considerably 
scratched up as you would probably notice if 
you looked at my suit. I don't know what there is 
to do about this other than to accept a scratchy 
visor.
McDivitt If you've got the visors down in front of your 
face, you don't tend to scratch it up as much.
I think it was really worn out because you 
started opening up your visor and leaving it up 
over your head a lot earlier than I did. At about 
the two and a half or three day mark, I looked at 
your visor and it was really a mess. I took the 
helmet off and cleaned the visor because it was 
dirty on the inside and the outside. I looked at 
my visor and had very few marks on it. I had a 
few 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


White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
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 would have driven me batty in about 
the first six hours.
I think you must insist on perfectly optically 
clear visors.
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.
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 
lap 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


McDivitt I concur. I think it ought io be thrown out.
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 restraints. I didn't feel as 
comfortable as I did with my helmet on. The times 
I had my helmet off were when I was running D—9 • 
I ran the D-9 Experiment several times with my 
helmet off so I'd have better use of my sextant. 
I took it off one other time near the end when 
they indicated they would like to have every­
thing off. I didn't feel particularly comforta­
ble with my helmet off any more. I got so used 
to having that thing on that I put it on so I 
could talk better with the stations. They were 
calling me from time to time, and I thought it 
would be a little better. Before I forget, I 
think the portable headset is really a lousy 
design.


«wB  v
White I've seen the ones they've got in the MCC and 
they're good plain old headsets. I don't see 
any reason why we can't get one that stays on 
your head and stays in your ear. You put this 
thing on and it pops off about two minutes later. 
It's not built to stay on my size head and I 
noticed it didn't stay on Jim's very well either. 
I think the portable headset idea is a good 
idea, but we ought to have a good headset for 
it. Okay. As we mentioned earlier the cabin 
pressure relieved at about 5-5 and held that 
way during launch. It went back down to 4-9 
or 4-8 and this is where it stayed for the re­
mainder of the mission. I think that they prob­
ably overshot their zeal to correct the cabin 
pressure that John and Gus had had on GT-5 and 
put ours down so that it was actually relieving 
lower and sealing lower than it would have been 
desirable. I was expecting it to seal up around 
5.5 or 5-7 like it was advertised.
MoDivitt I checked my suit gage against the cabin pres­
sure gage and my suit gage read higher than 
the cabin pressure gage by about .5 of a pound.


40
White Yes, mine was right on it though.
McDivitt I know. You checked your suit gage against 
the cabin pressure and yours read just about on 
it, didn't it? Was it a tenth of a pound higher 
or was it right on it?
White Right on.
McDivitt Okay. So mine was reading a little higher, 
indicating to me that possibly the cabin pres­
sure was higher. But since Ed's read with it, 
I don't know where we were.
White Well, the pressure at which it relieved at went 
right into the problem of the temperature-pres­
sure relief in the cryogenic oxygen system so 
that those two problems kind of lashed together. 
The venting in the 0^ system was set at around 
970.
McDivitt 967, I think the poop sheet said.
White Well, it was about 9^7 or 970. We had the pos­
sibility of losing oxygen in a steady manner 
out of the spacecraft if we let the pressure 
rise up above—well, the ground felt 9^0, and 
I concurred with that figure. So throughout 
the flight we had to keep venting our 0^ system


41
down so the pressure would remain down below 
960. They initially told us to vent it to keep 
it at 950 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 
95, 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-5 and also the problem of the 0? system 
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 again poorly designed and 
it should be designed to read about 1200 pounds. 
Relief should be up in that area.
McDivitt If they really went ahead and jacked down the 
relief pressure, to get it on the gage, I think 
that is one heck of an approach to an engineer­
ing problem.
White I think that's a gross thing to do and if they 
did that deliberately, I think they deserve a
eO NriDLNTIAt


42 ftO HriDmit^
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?
McDivitt Yes. The way that we were venting the cabin 
was by going to 0? High Rate and venting the 
oxygen out through the cabin vent or going to 
cabin repress and using up the oxygen through 
the cabin and through the cabin vent valve 
that way.
White I was quite satisfied with the cabin temperature.
It started out and got pretty hot at one time 
early in the flight and went up to 100 as you ’ 
noted,and then it went back down into the 80's.
I think it actually dropped into the 70's a time 
or two.
McDivitt That's right. It was in the 70's most of the 
time.
White Right.
McDivitt Let's get the data book. The dry bulb tempera­
ture was 80; 80, the first time we tood it.
Then it was 79, 79, 79• Then it was 75, 75, 
75, and then they stayed between 75 and 77,1
GfiHTO ^


C O NriDENTIAt- 43
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 hunch of 70's to 73’s and a couple of 76's. 
So I guess that 75 was the average temperature 
throughout the whole flight.
White I think our cahin temperature gage was reflect­
ing a little higher temperature than these.
McDivitt No, let's see. It was down around 75*
White It went 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 very comfortable, and as a matter of fact, 
when I went to sleep, I tended to get just a


44 -eet'iriDC NTIAL
little bit cool, especially if I had. urinated, 
all over myself.
White I don’t remember one time during the flight 
during which I was cool in the suit. I think 
I was hot most of the time in the suit. I got 
used to it 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 long 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 6$ 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 1
(j6MFID[:MHA±f


^eW IDC NTIAL 45
8, 10 degrees at the very most.
on a great deal of time also. I think you had 
your faceplate closed a little more than I 
did. There at the end we were both going to an 
open-faceplate and open-gloves all the way.
McDivitt Yes, we were especially going open-faceplate 
at the end just to see if we could jack up 
the humidity. I actually preferred to have 
my faceplate closed, as opposed to having it open. 
I went ahead and left it open trying to get 
the humidity up. We never really did get it 
up over 60 percent. That seemed to be where 
it was going to stay.
White We were happy to see that the CO^ sensor 
gage stayed down low the whole flight. It 
would pop up any time we turned the 0^ High 
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


4 6 ^^^M K3 gK
White Yes, I don’t think there was any discomfort 
associated with the day-night cycle. We didn’t 
use the cabin fan as we planned during the 
flight. We did neglect to turn it on initially 
during the preparation for retro. We noticed 
that we weren't cooling off in the cabin as 
much as we would have liked to. So, we turned 
the fan on and immediately the temperature 
dropped down about 10 degrees,if I remember 
right.
McDivitt Yes, that cabin heat exchanger and that cabin 
fan really do the job.
White It really cooled it off.
McDivitt Early in the flight when we got the 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.
White 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 0Q High Eate, it vented,or if 
we used the repress lever the cabin would 
vent.


^IDC NTIAt 47
McDivitt Here we had. an environmental control system 
that was supposed, to protect us. We found 
out that the darn thing was overpressurizing. 
The first couple of times, to keep the EGS 0^ 
bottle from venting, we vented the cabin it­
self. I found myself sitting in there vent­
ing this thing with my gloves off and my face 
plate open. It began to dawn on me that the 
pressure went down inside the cabin at a tre­
mendous rate. If this thing ever stuck open 
and I had my gloves off and my faceplate open, 
I would be a dead man. So we made it a proce­
dure to suit up when we were going to dump 
this thing. This meant that every four hours 
we had to put our gloves on and put our face­
plates down and lock them and get all suited 
up just in case this vent valve didn’t reseat. 
Frankly, as much of an inconvenience as it 
turned out to be, I think that was a wise 
maneuver. I would never suggest that anyone 
vent that cabin again without being fully suit­
ed. I think there is such a risk involved
that you would be fool-hearty to do it. For


48
White
that reason I think that we ought to make an 
effort to get the EOS 0„ tank vent and the 
EOS Og tank pressure gage compatible and at 
a lot higher pressure than they are. This 
suiting up and unsuiting every four hours is 
for the birds.
White I thoroughly agree with you, Jim. There are 
two things I want to know. I want to know if 
they deliberately lowered the venting pressure 
for the 02 system down to 96? to solve the 
problem on GT-3. I would also like to know 
if they deliberately lowered the cabin venting 
down to 5.4- I'd like to know the answer to 
those two questions. I think the combination 
of those two situations make what I feel is an 
unsatisfactory situation in our flight. It 
occupied far more time—
McDivitt That’s right, we were screwing around with 
that ECS 0^. That’s something we never had 
touched. It was a gage that we should have 
monitored, instead of a thing that we manipu­
lated all the time.
Right. Okay, the cabin pressure regulator.


gO NFIDrNTIAt“ 4?
I didn't have any comment on that.
McDivitt Neither did I. It seemed to be doing a good 
job.
White I felt the cabin vent valve was set lower 
than I had thought it was going to be. I 
thought it was supposed to be set up around 
5.7. I’d like to know if it was changed in­
tentionally.
McDivitt The manual vent valve worked fine. When we 
wanted to vent the cabin, it vented.
White The cabin repressurization valve worked fine.
I was very happy to see how well it worked 
also with my chest pack. Any comment on that?
McDivitt No, I don't think so. I don't think the cabin 
repressurized or overpressurized when we were 
trying to vent it. Since you were repres­
surizing it and venting it at the same time, 
I think the vent valve actually overcame the 
repressurization, which is a good thing if 
you're trying to vent it, and it is not a good 
thing if you're trying to keep it from venting 
Going back a little farther to my other state­
ment, in case that vent valve sticks open


50
and you are not suited, I don’t think you're 
going to have time to get suited. It takes 
me too long to put those gloves on.
White Okay, the cabin air inlet valve worked fine.
We vented the cabin with it when we went EVA.
It apparently worked all right when we used 
it down on the water. I have no further com­
ment on that.
McDivitt Neither do I. It seemed to work fine.
White The cabin air recirculation valve worked as 
it was supposed to.
McDivitt As advertised.
White Okay, that primary C system gets another 
black star. I think this is the area that I 
want to know the answer to, for sure. I want 
to know whether that was deliberately set 
down into the range of the gage to solve the 
complaint on Gemini J. I think that if this 
was the case, this is a prime example of poor 
engineering. As far as monitoring the system 
though, as long as their reading was down be­
low 960 the system worked pretty well. I 
felt fairly confident that the pressure was—
»^STO NriDEMTIM


e^NflDEMTIAL- 51
McDivitt That’s right. The way that the thing was set 
up, we could sure monitor it because we knew 
it was going to vent without being on the 
gage • I think they compromised the whole 
system so we could monitor it.
White As a matter of fact, we monitored it very 
thoroughly and spent about 100 times as much 
time on this system as we should have. John 
Young's been complaining about this point, 
and I think that it’s a very poor thing. They 
ought to dig up the money and put a gage in 
there that will do the job. Very strong 
point. The quantity measuring system,! thought, 
was all right.
McDivitt I thought it was pretty good. I thought it 
was excellent as a matter of fact. It was a 
very readable gage . It had tremendous scale 
on it, but, shoot, you could read the thing to 
a percent. I don’t know why it was any more 
readable than the other ones, but I thought it 
was pretty good.
White The flow rates—I don’t have any particular 
comment on that. I thought the flow rate on
& eNFIDENTIAL>


52 GeMflDIINTIAL
that repress valve into my suit was satisfactory 
to keep me in a pressurized state and keep me 
ventilated enough under normal operations. 
Under tough operations though, the flow rate’s 
too low and you really heat up.
McDivitt Yes, I think since it was an open loop system, 
you had to keep from dumping all the oxygen 
overboard, and had to go high enough to keep 
it from dying from the heat. I think it was 
a compromise system.
White I thought it was well set up. I have no com­
plaints there. Primary 0c temperature—I didn’t 
have any comment on that.
McDivitt No, neither did I.
White The manual heater—I think that you used the 
manual heater twice during EVA.
McDivitt Twice during EVA for about five to six minutes 
each time. It responded all right, but it didn't 
go overboard. It got the temperature right back 
up there, and I shut the thing off again.
■SO NFIDEHHAL-


55
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 
$8 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 of McDonnell 
on the fix on that gage, and on setting that 
pressure on 970, and I'm going to get to the 
bottom of it.
McDivitt Yes, but I think, though, that the pressure 
would have still built up even if we had the 
relief set at 1050 or so. It would have still 
built up.
White It might have built up and stabilized,
^NFIDENTI& •


54 -& & HH& ENW T'
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 Sure it could.
McDivitt But I sort of suspect that the—well, I don't know.
It's different from this other problem where we 
were told that the thing didn't require heaters 
below ?8 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 0? system—I thought those performed 
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
ePMFIDC NHA t-


eeNHDC NTIAL. 55
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 0 flow rates were satisfactory as far 
as I was concerned.
McDivitt I think so. I was amazed that secondary 0^ flow 
was such that I really didn't get too hot in it.
White Yes, I was not as uncomfortable as I had been at 
other times.
McDivitt You know, after awhile' you hit yourself in the 
head so long that it finally stops hurting.
White It's like that big heavy suit, after awhile you 
begin to feel good. I know the average guy on 
the street probably wouldn't like the flow rate, 
but it didn't seem to be too bad. It wasn't too 
objectionable......
•feQN^ENTIAt;,


56
White I think we jumped into something else. We were 
in secondary 0o 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, hut 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.
MoDivitt 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 C0? partial pressure. The gage 
has been discussed prior to this time,It stayed 
down satisfactorily.
MoDivitt 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.
MoDivitt 40 minutes.
White We went on the radiator about 4° minutes and we


57
McDivitt
White
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 till I 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 telling me something about it when I 
lost contact with them. I did it just to be sure." 
But that was the only time that I thought we even 
might have had a problem in it, and I turned it 
off. We used double coolant loop early in the 
mission,and after we turned the secondary system 
off we did not use it again until the Reentry. 
Prior to the reentry, we turned it on.
That's right. That coolant system really worked.
Okay, here is one at which we'll get at them—


58 -(SO NFtDEMTIAK
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 Normal 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 The first bad moment of the flight.
McDivitt —I pushed the button in and no water came out, 
and I almost had a heart attack. I said to Ed, 
"Ed, this is going to be the shortest four day 
flight in history." Ha, ha!
White Jim said, "Guess what? The water doesn’t work."
McDivitt Ha, ^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.
^QNriDENTI^


eC TO  I DENT I AL 59
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
Oh, so I handed, it over to him and then he took a 
drink out of it and didn't have any problem at all. 
What happened was the hose was wound in the helix. 
It came out to the gun in a straight line. When 
I drank out of it on my side this thing always 
crimped like it was an old rotten piece of rubber 
that had been bent over in that position many 
times before. It looked like something that came 
out of a 1890 steamboat or something, instead of 
a—
It looks like your old oxygen mask hose.
That's right. It looks like my old rotten oxygen 
mask hose. So I think that we ought to get at 
least a decent piece of hose in there. The next 
thing is the water gun that you drink from. You 
push the button in and a little spigot would come 
out and the water would start running out of it. 
This worked great. You could always get the wa­
ter to come out when you didn't have your hose 
bent. It got worse and worse and worse and worse 
and worse. As far as returning it towards the 
end of the flight, I almost drowned a couple of 
times because I'd get that thing out and I couldn't
«W NttU


60
get it back in. I finally ended up actually using 
two hands to operate the water gun so that I 
could get the button back out.
White The button definitely did get more friction in it 
as the flight progressed.
McDivitt It seemed like it was all scored up and it kept 
getting worse and worse and worse as the flight 
went on. 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 tp launch. I think this is
C O NFIDENTIAL


<8O mDtNTIAl 61
certainly not the time to be deciding what the 
heck the position these switches were going to be 
in. We were always briefed that this thing would 
be in OFF. We were going through the switch 
positions and they'd ask me to check in the count 
at. About T-45 minutes or so.
White And I couldn't see that one.
McDivitt You couldn't see that one and you asked me to look 
down at it. I saw the thing was in EVAPORATOR, 
so I question the STC. He checked around and they 
had a big flap about what position it was supposed 
to be in. Pretty soon we got a call back and he 
said if I could get unstrapped and reach the thing, 
I ought to turn it over to OVERBOARD. We thought 
it should have been in OFF. They had it in EVAPOR­
ATOR so we finally decided we ought to go to 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 little valve over to OVERBOARD where 
it should be and then got strapped.
White You sure they didn't have you put it OFF?
McDivitt No, we went to OVERBOARD.


62 ■C O NFIDENTIAL
White I remember they argued. I thought they had it on 
EVAPORATOR first.
McDivitt It went from EVAPORATOR—
White That seems like the least likely of any position 
to put it in.
McDivitt That's right. We went from EVAPORATOR over to 
OVERBOARD. So I think a comment that I'd like to 
make right now about the whole water management 
panel is that it's a simple thing. It's got 
three knobs and each knob's only got three or 
four positions. We had the EOS engineers at 
McDonnell give us a briefing on this simple water 
management panel. We had about seven guys there 
with seven different versions of how it was de­
signed, how it operated, and what the different 
positions we were supposed to be in. They got us 
so screwed up that when we left there we didn't 
have any idea in the world what it was supposed to 
do.
White I think those designers didn't either.
McDivitt They didn't either and it was pretty obvious that 
they didn't. We went through a lot of discussion 
with that water management panel. Finally I think
C O NriDC NTtwr


C O NFIDENTIAL -
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 $2 
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 canister. 
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, 
if we had gone that long. I think that before 
we fly another flight we ought to have all the 
people at McDonnell and NASA, who are responsible 
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.


64 ^RDPITIAl
McDivitt —and the Water Valve should be put in NORMAL 
NORMAL, and left there. That was exactly what we 
did and we knew how to work the waste management 
valve. We didn't screw it up, but I'm not sure 
that if with a little trying, we couldn't have. 
We never had to use the Evaporator Fill Mode.
The Flush Mode,or the waste management portion of 
the thing,had a couple of different positions. 
In the normal OVERBOARD position and in using 
the Preheat and Flush switch over on the side, 
we managed to dump a large number of urine dumps 
through this. We dumped both our launch-day 
urine bags which were full. I probably urinated 
eight or ten times and you probably about five 
or six times.
White About five times.
McDivitt 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 well 
just before this. I was the man in charge of 
dumping urines, it seemed like.
White The Urine Dumper!!!
McDivitt I was the only one who could reach the knobs and 
switches. It generally went down in spurts.
C O NFIDFMHA


■ C O NFIDENTIAL 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 tine 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’Jwell, McDonnell finally designed this thing 
so it works after about JO 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
G®MHDENTIAtr


66
you take over. I extended my wrath.
White I just had a feeling' you wanted to say something 
about that, Jim. Ha, ha!
McDivitt After having messed around with that thing for 
96 hours trying to make it work.
White I think you expressed my feeling too.
McDivitt Did I leave anything out?
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 it was.
McDivitt That's right.
White The humidity sensor—I thought if the readings 
are right, it worked very well and proved the 
point that the humidity in the spacecraft is


aoaFIDEW IM 67
relatively low, and that the water problem is not 
quite the problem we had it cracked up to be.
I'11 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 It was a real bad mistake! Ha, ha!
White No, I thought it was all right in there. The only 
thing wrong with it was what they had it treated 
with for fire-proofing. 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.
McDivitt We smelled bad enough, but it was no contest when 
it came to comparing ourselves with the spacecraft. 
It smelled worse.
’White If there was any moisture it grabbed it all. I 
don’t really think there was any moisture for it 
to grab.
McDivitt I don't think so either, Ed. I kept feeling that


68
thing and it was dry as could be.
White There was no moisture that I could notice.
Ihe 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 well. I 
noticed one thing, though, as we progressed along. 
The 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,


wnriDEW T^ 69
and I flew with it almost the whole flight.
White I don't think it was all the way up. The one 
thing though—I think the interphone operation 
and quality were quite good.
McDivitt Yes, I thought so too.
White We were ready to communicate back and forth. It 
was just the way I would liked to have done it. 
I thought it was very good. The UH performance at 
the countdown was satisfactory and just after we 
got into orbit we felt that we had a bit of a 
communication loss. We switched to UHP No. 2. 
Later during the flight we used both UHP sets and 
didn't have any difference in performance from 
either one. During the recovery you were using 
the UHP primarily. I think you had as much com­
munication as you could expect.
McDivitt That's right. I think so too. I do think, though, 
that we had a very bad UHP situation in the first 
eight or nine orbits. It was really lousy. As 
a matter of fact, I was getting concerned that 
maybe we were going to have to land because we 
were going to run out of communications.
You were actually working more on this problem
^J RHBEN ftfcfc—
White


70
In the first eight it was lousy. I was really
than I was. You were communicating during the
EVA work and also after I went to sleep. I heard 
you working on the Communications Check and that’s 
when you went to the reentry antenna.
McDivitt That's right, when we ran through these checks, 
it finally became apparent to everyone that the 
reentry antenna was doing a better job than the 
adapter .antenna. And then later on, I switched 
back to the adapter antenna for some reason which 
I can't remember right now. We ran a couple of 
more checks and it seemed to be—
White I know what we did. We ran an HF check, Jim, and 
we switched back to the adapter so we could use 
the HE antenna back there. We got just as good 
UHF transmissions at this time as we did on the 
reentry antenna.
McDivitt When they checked them out again, they said they 
still thought the stub antenna was better. So, we 
went back to reentry antenna.
White We used r.eentry just about 95 percent of the 
flight.
McDivitt That's right. In the last 55 orbits it was great.


71
concerned about having to come down because we 
didn't have any radios.
White One thing that 11d like to say is, I would give 
a good gold star to the controllers down there. 
I thought their voice procedures were excellent 
and their methods for giving us information were 
all good. I had no comment, whatsoever, other 
than I thought it was all very good.
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.
McDivitt I think so too.
White Okay, the voice tape recorder—let me vent my 
wrath on this one.
McDivitt Get 'em Ed, get ’em!
White Right. This is another thing that should be fixed 
before the next flight. I think we're going to 
end up being very, very sorry. We’re going to 
end up losing valuable data from time to time.
This will be due to no reason other than a voice 
tape recorder which is poor on all accounts.
l^W ENTtM :


72
McDivitt
White
We’ve already lost some very valuable data from 
this flight. We could have taped the entire 
EVA and brought those communications back down. 
As it was, we couldn't tape them because we had 
to put the thing in UHP so that we could transmit 
to the ground. We lost all of the blessed 
stuff going to the ground anyway.
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


C O NFIDENTIAL- . ”
McDivitt
White
should be set up so that it can record conversa­
tions on normal UHF, HF, and INTERCOM type opera­
tions . As Jim pointed out, in our flight alone 
I think we lost sets of valuable 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.
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 it would be desirable and 
important to have a voice tape of what's going on 
throughout the flight. I wouldn't have any ob­
jection to having a tape recorder with the capa­
bility of recording more than the one hour at a


74
time that we have now. I’d like to see us record­
ing a great deal of the flight. It'd be nice to 
have a switch to turn it off from time to time 
if you did want to discuss something that you 
didn't want to go on tape.
McDivitt I don't think we ought to put the whole flight 
on tape. If we flew a week-long flight, it would 
take a week to go through the tape. You wouldn't 
want long periods of nothing on there. I think 
the way we wanted, to operate it this time would 
have been all right, if we could have just opera­
ted it that way. There were certain periods 
where we put a tape on and ran it all the way 
through. Well, that was the tape that covered 
a certain experiment or something.
White On our D-9 Experiment, we used it.
McDivitt Yes, that’s where we used a whole tape on it.
Then there were periods that were questionable 
when you were sleeping and I wasn't doing anything, 
or I was sleeping and you weren't doing anything.
White If you carried adequate tapes, and you had adequate 
warning when the thing went on and off, you would
not have the same situation we had on the D-9


75
Experiment. You could, have the tape stop in the 
middle of the experiment and be lying on your 
back looking out with the sextant. You haven't 
got any idea in the world the tape's run out on 
you.
McDivitt Right.
White I think that it's a very, very unsatisfactory sys­
tem. It ranks right up along with the top ones, 
and we've already hit on some of them already. 
The digital command system I thought worked very 
well. I thought the light in there gave us a 
good indication of several things. It gave us an 
indication of when the station was about to come 
on and communicate with us. We used this as a 
clue to turn on our UHF to warm our transmitter 
up so we would be ready when the transmission came 
up. I think updates from the ground came up in 
a very orderly fashion. I don't have any objec­
tion about that or any further comments. Do you?
McDivitt Ed, I thought it was very good.
White Handled in a very good manner.
McDivitt I think so.
White The only update that I have an objection to is


76
that they updated our time reference system and 
had it inaccurately updated by a second.
McDivitt Yes, I think there is a big flap about that.
White I'd like to find out about that, too. The real
time-transmitter, delayed-time transmitter, stand­
by transmitter—they seemed like they all worked 
pretty well. We had no use for the standby 
transmitter and we used the real-time and delayed- 
time transmitter throughout the flight. You don't 
have any comments on this, do you?
McDivitt 11ve 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 Playback to CONTINUOUS." So 
I put the Tape Playback Switch to CONTINUOUS. 
Pretty soon they called up and said, "Do you have 
your TM switch to REAL-TIME and DELAYED-TIME?" 
I said, "No, I don't have. You're going to have 
to put it down there." They didn't bother telling 
me that they didn't have any command capability 
whatsoever. I went ahead and put the Tape Play­
back to CONTINUOUS, which means that you're dumping
gO NFIDENT-b H-


77
White
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.
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 ihqy didn't have something to say, it was kept 
in a good manner. I thought it was a very profes-


78 C O NFIDENTIAL
McDivitt Yes, I thought that they were to he commended.
As a matter of fact, when we have our world-wide 
network debriefing or whatever the heck we're 
going to have I really intend to applaud them 
loud and long.
White I thought the teamwork between the spacecraft 
and the communicators on the ground was 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.
McDivitt One other thing I want to comment on is the voice
control center. If we had carried that idiotic
C O NFIDENTIAL


-eO ^FIDEMTlAt 79
contraption that McDonnell had designed to keep 
the moisture out of that thing, we would have 
had one more hunk of junk in the spacecraft with 
us. It would have been a completely -useless thing 
because of the number of times that we switched 
switches on that VCC. Heck, we switched switches 
on the VCC more than all the other switches on 
the spacecraft put together. I think if we would 
have had to pull off that big piece of plastic 
every minute, it would have gone on the floor and 
stayed there. That1s right.
White That was a very poor fix to try to solve a bad 
design.
McDivitt Okay, why don't you talk about that sleep config­
uration?
White Okay, with the sleep configuration, we knew right 
away we had bought a weenie. The first time I 
tried to go to sleep, we tried to turn everything 
off. We tried turning all my volumes down to zero. 
We turned to HUSH-TO-TALK only, and I could still 
sit there and hear it about a one by one level. 
It was just enough so I could hear audibly what 
was going on and understand if I paid attention


80 eewiDomAr
to it.
McDivitt If you. really listened, you could hear.
White That's right. If you were very close to going to 
sleep and something went on that was interesting, 
you could hear just enough to wake you up and 
pull your interest to it. It made sleeping 
rather difficult. We didn’t want to disconnect 
ourselves from the system altogether. We’d like 
to have a way to actually turn the volume all 
the way down and provide the astronaut that's 
awake the capability of controlling the voice 
control center's volume so that he can turn the 
sleeping astronaut's volume up and talk to him 
anytime.
McDivitt That's right. I think what we really need in 
there is an ON-OFF switch for each half of the 
VCC.
White So you can effectively cut him off and turn him 
back on.
McDivitt That's right. You just reach over there and you 
break the communications with a simple ON-OFF 
switch. Then if you've got to get to it in a 
hurry, you just flip the thing back on and then


81
talk to him. I don’t know where on the VCC you'd 
mount it.
White I think they can solve that problem pretty well. 
It might not be in that manner but I think they 
can solve it so you've got it definitely on or 
off.
McDivitt That’s right. They need a simple way of disconnect' 
ing the man from the communications 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.


8.6 Electrical System
82 (^HriDEHTIAt
White That's right. Okay, the electrical system—
White Okay, the systems monitoring. I thought it was 
satisfactory. We went through and. monitored the 
systems every time for the GO/NO GO Checks, and 
quite a few times along the line in addition to 
this. So I thought the method of monitoring was 
satisfactory. I don't believe we really had any 
way of monitoring the electrical power remaining.
McDivitt Yes, that's a drawback, and we all know it, I 
guess.
White Right. That's an unsatisfactory condition aid
I don't know what we're going to do about it.
I think it's too much of a job to try to think 
that you're going to sit in there and calculate 
all the things you have on,and try to keep an 
onboard plot of what electrical power you have 
remaining.
McDivitt Yes, I think this is a ground function. I don't 
think that we can realistically do it onboard the 
spacecraft.
White I don't believe we got any indication of how our 
electrical power was going from the ground .except
-e^MriDENTIAL


McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
for one time when they called us up and told us 
we were l?0 amp-hours, I think it was 190 amp- 
hours , over— 
That was after we turned the computer off. I 
wanted to find out why we turned the computer off 
and if we were really short on electrical power. 
Then they told me we were 160 amp-hours over the 
200 amp-hours cushion. I almost went tbrought the 
overhead.
I think I'd like to have had a little more infor­
mation from the ground on the status of our elec­
trical system. The main batteries—I have a com­
ment on them. They started out with a charge of 
about 24 volts and progressively decreased to the 
point where I was a hair concerned about them. 
They progressed down to the 22.5 reading and 
began to shade lower than that near the end of 
the mission. I was using the parallax to be sure 
I had a satisfactory reading on the gages each 
time. I noticed they decreased down to a minimum 
of 22.5. Maybe it got to 22 but it was getting 
near the end of the mission.
Ha, ha! Maybe 22.49.
Just the way I'd lean my head I could get the
aaMW iENTlAL ^


« -a& HSBEN W *.
reading the way I wanted it. Ha, ha I The 
squib batteries—our electrical briefing I 
thought, was' very good. Everything behaved just 
the way they told me. The squib batteries started 
out pretty high,around 27 or 28 volts, and they 
progressively decreased in voltage as we went 
through the mission. The main batteries—every 
time I checked them they always checked out at 
about 9 ‘ a0 far as the amps were concerned. The 
adapter batteries—I was glad we'd had the brief­
ing on them because I realized that knees on the 
adapter batteries were in operation during the 
launch when we got a high reading on the left 
stack ammeter up around 27 or 28 amps, and we had 
a reading of around,! believe,14 amps on the right 
one. I didn’t alarm Jim with this information 
because it was still below my cut-off point of about 
JO amps or so. I felt that it was due to the knees 
in the adapter batteries causing unequal loadings 
of the main batteries with respect to the adapter 
batteries. 
McDivitt Hold it. I want to make some comments about the 
electrical system and the power as we used it.
C O MFIDEMTIAt


White
aeHFIDEMHAt 65
When we powered, down, we turned off the a. c.
power, the CAMS power, the ACME' bias power, the 
rate gyros, the horizon scanner, the MJ, the 
computer, both FBI'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 all the lights on in the 
cockpit—the over, the middle light, and the two 
side lights. Then for 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 of 
power that way. They were surprised that we were 
l60 amp-hours ahead, and I don't think that we 
got that way by accident.
I’ve got a comment to make on that. We were both 
watching the loadings and 1 could read them a 
little better over there. We started out operat­
ing arourd14> maybe a little better. The reading 
on the combined amp-hours slowly decreased down 
aemiDLNTIAtg


86 C O NFIDENTIAL
and near the end of the mission, we were down to 
12 or 15 amp-hours on unpowered down configuration. 
That was as low as I saw it go, down around 12.
McDivitt Another thing that we did. was that when we weren'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 little bit. So I think that 
by really powering down the spacecraft and getting 
all the non-essential items off the line, we helped 
ourselves a lot. We got this 160 amp-hour cushion 
because we really worked at it, not because it 
just happened like that.
White This takes a little diligence.
McDivitt Yes, not because it was a miscalculation on the 
guys who were planning the flight, but just the 
fact that we really worked at keeping the lights 
off, keeping the radios off, and keeping those 
little bitty things down. You know, you only 
have to save two amps per hour. We ran on a single 
suit fan almost the entire flight, except when Ed 
was getting warm when he was sleeping we had to
dEO NriDENTIM


C O NFIDENTIA L, 8’
go to two suit fans.
White Right. When it got so uncomfortable that I 
couldn't sleep, we would go over. We really did­
n't do that too much.
McDivitt No, we didn't. We made a real effort to keep the 
electrical load down. I think that it sort of 
showed up there towards the end of the mission 
when we really had enough spare power to run the 
IGS through the last day—uselessly of course, 
but at least we ran it.
S.7 Computer
McDivitt In the launch we had the computer in ASCENT. Ed 
was reading out the errors during launch. I read 
our the rates which didn’t require any information 
from the computer.
White I was readingout the lack of errors most of the 
time.
McDivitt Lack of errors, right. Why don't you discuss the 
error status.
White I think we discussed it earlier and I'll just go 
briefly through it. We didn't have any errors 
that I feel would be worth repeating during Stage I 
At guidance initiate we got a full-scale-down indi­
cation. This indication I had been told


88 -£i0MFIDENTIA.b
fairly routine, and it appeared routine' to me 
too as it began to steer into zero and steered 
right on into zero. As we approached 1SECO the 
error started to increase a little bit and in­
creased out to a little less than a degree in 
pitch-down on the error needle. Aside from that, 
we didn't have.,as far as I can see, any other error 
that was worth talking about during launch.
McDivitt Okay, at SECO + 20 the IVI’s counted up as we 
separated.rolled around, and did all the maneuvers 
we were supposed to. The IVI’s acted as they should. 
When I got turned around and was faced toward the 
spacecraft ,1 was in a hurry to get all these 
things done. I started thrusting and I went from 
Ascent to Catch-Up, and then hit the Start Comp 
button.; I lost a couple of feet/second here, 
but this was sort of insignificant at the time. 
The IVI’s counted up in the Catch-Up Mode and they 
operated properly throughout the rest of the chase­
phase of the mission. We were getting the kind; 
of information that we needed right there early 
in the flight. Ed had 52 punched in and it read 
out at JO feet/second, I think he said earlier.
C QhriDrfflfab -


C O NFIDENTIAL a?
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
Yes, I picked that up later on because I wasn't 
even concerned with it since we had a good orbit. 
Once we had a good orbit that kind of information 
wasn’t that important.
Do you want the IVI readings at this time? 
Yes, you might just as well read them out. 
The IVI readings at the time we decided to read 
them —at zero, zero, zero on the attitude indi­
cator *-20 forward, right 11, down 5- 
The attitudes weren’t really what they should 
have been, because we had a good insertion and 
we had to go right then and we had to get turned 
around and get at that booster. I didn't fool 
around with getting the spacecraft at exactly the 
right attitude to read out the IVI's. I thought 
that was of academic interest. It would be great 
for post-flight analysis but it wasn't going to 
help the flight at all. So I didn't do justice 
to those things. I'm sure that we can go back 
and resurrect this thing to find out exactly 
what it was. It wasn't very meaningful at the 
time. The orbit maneuvers consisted of really 
just chasing the booster around and reading up the 
IVI's as they came out. We received all our updates 
4£QNriDENTIAU>


90 C O NFIDENTIAL
properly. We got the computer on and got it 
loaded. The DCS updates were going in and they 
were getting verification on the ground. One time 
I remember we didn't get the DCS light. As a 
matter of fact, they sent the load up again and . 
we still didn't get the DCS light. They verified 
on the ground that it was going in.
White Well, the funny thing vas when the computer wasn't 
on we got a DCS light.
McDivitt The DCS lights come on when they get set up for 
the TX and send out a realbtime command, too.
White Well, maybe the TX when they sent up-- They 
kept telling us that they got a good load in it 
and I had no light. I really didn't quite believe 
them.
McDivitt Neither did I. As a matter of fact, we had it 
verified at the next station.
White Okay.
McDivitt And that's where the onboard comput er thing ends.
I might go through what happened to the thing.
We were over the .States and had the onboard computer 
on for getting a new load in it. I got just about 
over Florida. He said, okay, I could turn the
tSO NFIDENTIAI


^FIDENTtM 91
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 IQS power off and hack 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 loaded to me like I probably 
had a failure in the ON-OFF Switch or the ON-OFF 
switchi^p function. And they said okay. So I 
said, "What do you want me to do here?" I knew 
we could always turn it off 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 cheeking it. Then we got over 
Tananarive and I got this message to turn the
W ilFIDENTIAL


92
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, ^^ 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 nan come back to life. I have nothing 
else on the computer. I sure wished I'd have 
had it though.
C £^IDENT4A»


C O TO O TlX t 9?
8,6 Crew Station
McDivitt Controls and displays—-okay, I’ll talk about 
that. The sequential Telelights all operated 
properly—came on in the proper colors, and 
punched off and everything. The event timer 
operated properly. The IVT 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.
White Malfunction detection system.
McDivitt Malfunction detection system. An integral part 
of the malfunction detection system, are the fuel 
and oxidizer pressure gages for both the first and 
second stages. This is one of the abort criteria 
On the scale of these gages down below the glass 
is a beautiful, beautiful set of lines and numbers 
and hash marks that are wrong. They updated the GLV 
information and found out that these things were 
in error by quite a bit. Now, to take and fix 
these gages would have taken a couple thousand 
bucks. I don't know exactly how much or how
eeNHDEMTIAL 1


94 -C O NFIDENTIAL *
long, but it would, have taken a few dollars. In­
stead we decided it would be simpler and cheaper 
and a lot quicker to go ahead and paste some 
paper decals over the top of the glass. The 
parallax with these things is horrendous. The 
decals were pasted on over the top of the glass 
in such a manner that they completely obscure 
the inside-the-glass readings.They also obscure the 
center needles which are not only the clue to 
what the tank pressures are but a clue to whether 
you have any APS power,which is also critical. 
When you cut these things back so that you can 
see the inside needles, you see the inside gage 
too. I think this nickel-dime fix to our multi*I 
million dollar vehicle is ridiculous. I think 
that we ought to get those inside gages painted 
the way that they're supposed to be painted. I 
think we ought to end this Mickey Mouse gage 
routine right now and get going on QT-5's fuel 
and oxidizer gages for both stages. It's ridicu­
lous the way they are right now. The altimeter 
worked as advertised. I mentioned that it went 
down and back up again at around 100,000 feet.
C PMFIDENT4M


«€O HnDEHTlAt 95
The rate of descent seemed to he all right. The 
accelerometer was okay. The switches and circuit 
breaker panels—I 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 if we turned some­
thing on or off.
White I remember that. One was over on my side.
McDivitt Was one the A pump on the secondary
loop or the B pump on the secondary loop,or did 
you turn that on?
White No. I think one of them was up there, and I for­
get how we got it on.
McDivitt Maybe we just bumped it. Yes, there was another 
one over on your right-hand side and there were 
a couple of them in the center circuit breaker ; 
panel. One time I know I bumped one on the left­
hand side circuit breaker panel. I thought it 
was the - electronic timer. It was one right above
■GQMFIDENTIAU


96 f^MIDENTIAL
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
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.
I've been always telling you to get some long 
arms. H^, ha! I didn't use the swizzle stick 
very much.
Yes, but you don't have to reach over and get 
those switches all on the left-hand side.
I found the swizzle stick was quite useful for 
unstowing items out. of the center stowage box. 
That's right.
It was really good there. I used that every time 
when I unstowed.
It's a good piece of equipment. Okay, lighting—do


C O NFIDENTIAL 97
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 you* night reference at all. So 
I think the instrument lights, the two on either 
side above the panel, are satisfactory. I also 
thought the deletion 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
C O NFIDENTIAL


98
could, make the readings. I think you could put 
spot lights in there and not get by that prob­
lem.
McDivitt That's exactly what I was going to say. Lights 
aren't going to solve that problem.
White No, it’s just plain bright outside. When you look 
back in, even though you have your lights on, it's 
fairly dark inside. I personally wasn't troubled 
by this very many times during the flight. Were 
you, Jim?
McDivitt No, I wasn't.
White I didn't feel that was too bad. So actually, I 
felt that the lighting, although not abundant, 
was adequate. I think the actual lighting of the 
instruments would certainly be nicer if we had 
individual instruments lit up. Oh, one thing— 
several times I would like to have had a flash­
light in there, something where I could direct a 
real beam of light. The little side lights, I 
thought, were close to being useless. I didn't 
use my little side light, the auxiliary light, 
very much at all.
McDivitt As a matter of fact, I didn’t either.
White Very seldom. I think that if we're going to have 
feO NElDSHTlAl


99
a little auxiliary light like that, it 
ought to be a light—
McDivitt It ought to be a big auxiliary light! Ha, ha!
White a directed beam, This goes right back to 
something that we forgot to point out in water 
management. I think we ought to point it out 
right now loud and clear. I think that we have 
to have a system in which we can gage the water 
outflow. I think the medical people feel fairly 
strong about this also. I know that I restrained 
from drinking because I didn’t want to drink all 
the water out of there prior to the end of the 
four days. I got a feeling Jim was doing the same 
thing.
McDivitt That's right. I was doing exactly the same thing.
White I didn’t drink abundantly at any time during the 
flight except perhaps right before the reentry.
I felt I was taking quite a bit of moisture with 
my reconstituted food. I felt that if I overdid 
it the first part of the flight, we wouldn't get 
through the last part, because water is so critical
McDivitt That’s right. We’ve got a number of expendables 
like CAMS, and we’ve got a couple of gages for


100 eet'iriDC MTtAi
White
McDivitt
White
the propellants. We've got the EOS 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 aa critical as all these other things in 
flyiqg, 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 white light on the little utility light was 
not satisfactory. We tried to look to see if we 
could find out what we had in the cabin bottle— 
Water tank.
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 k^ow 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 
system.


101
McDivitt You know even if we can’t get something that they 
can pipe into the spacecraft, at the very least 
we ought to TM the pressurant pressure down to the 
ground and hack up again, or something, and get , 
some sort of calibration curve—
White So that we'd know what we have remaining in the 
adapter.
McDivitt We could at least call the people down at the 
ground and say, "How much water do we have left?"
White That’s right. And. I think we ought to be able to 
tell what our bottle has inside of it in the 
spacecraft.
McDivitt Yes, I 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
eeN R& Ow*


102 ^HTOffi*t
McDivitt
White
switches and know where they’re supposed to he, 
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.
One thing that I'd like to comment on here a 
little bit is that j amber light that I insisted 
that they put on the Preheat-Flush switch over 
back of the water management panel. I felt it 
came in real handy. Two times during the course 
of the flight I left the Preheart switch on after 
I flushed it for short periods of time to make 
sure we didn't have any ice left in the lines.
I did it on every occasion, 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.
And so I think the left panel, center panel, right 
panel, pedestal, and console are not lit abundantly 
but are lit what I'd call adequately and perhaps


^NFIDENTIA"
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 Yes, I think probably the wattage on those bulbs 
should go up an order of magnitude to make them 
effective.
White You use it so seldom that it wouldn't be a big 
power use. You'd only use it when you needed it.
€@ NflDEMTtfrt-^


104 C O NriDENTlAt
It wouldn't be something you'd use very often.
McDivitt I'll tell you what it all is,though. When you 
want it, you want something that you can see.
You just can't see with those things at all.
White I don't particularly understand what the interior 
and exterior lights mean. Do you?
McDivitt I think the exterior lighting is probably the 
lighting that could probably be used for docking. 
We didn't have any exterior lights.
White I thought the intensity control of the lights was 
an absolute necessity and I think it was satis­
factory. I think the fingertip lights are quite 
useful, and were commented on already. They should 
have the Lexan covers, and we've also commented 
that they should be located between the finger­
tip and the first joint. The onboard data—now 
here we come to a very useful piece of equipment. 
Ha, ha! I believe I made a considerate effort
three times to update that thing, and I never 
got up with it any one of those times.
McDivitt We had three positions on our flight plan strip.
We had launch,the first five minutes— the next 
time I tried to get it was 23 hours. The next
eO NflDENTIAl •


^OEN flAt.'
position was 98. .Ha, ha1
White And. neither time did I catch up really where we 
were. I turned and turned and turned and then 
got distracted into something else.
McDivitt Quite frankly, the only things I. ever saw in that 
flight plan roller were the 25-hour and the 88- 
hour times and I never even read what it said.
White I didn’t quite agree with—
McDivitt 84 it was, I'm sorry. It wasn't 88, it was 84. 
And Ed wrote something on here. He wrote my 
parachute-deploy time.
White I wrote your times during reentry on there.
McDivitt It would have been much more useful if there 
hadn't been anything on it at all.
White Yes, we put a few times up there—
McDivitt I couldn*t read those things, which were the only 
numbers that I really was interested in at all.
White 4OCK 2+J8, (Shute 12+5J. The only two that I 
thought you really needed were those two. I put 
them on there. I didit thoroughly believe Gus 
when he said you ought to take the thing out, 
throw it away, and leave a hole in the instrument 
panel. But I'm inclined to agree with him right
^eMflDC MTIAL


106 6©tW fN TOt
Mow. You ought to take it out, throw it away, 
and leave a hole in the instrument panel. But 
honestly, what I do think ought to go up there, 
is a good digital clock readout.
McDivitt I don't think an analog clock in that position 
would do you any good though.
White They Doth have a high degree of parallax.
McDivitt Yes, the parallax would make it useless. I think 
if it goes in there it ought to be digital.
White Yes, a one-second clock.
McDivitt I'm not really sure that we’re going to get a 
digital clock in because of the complexity and 
the weight and all that jazz.
White Let's talk about the clocks right now, Jim.
McDivitt Okay, let's talk about the clocks.
White I'11 hit mine and then you hit yours and then 
there should be a conclusion that we could come 
to.
McDivitt Very good.
White I think the clock on my side is unsatisfactory.
I wouldn't recommend flying it on another flight.
It's difficult to read. There are two hands 
going around, keeping track of minutes, and some­
time you read the wrong minute hand. The one
C eNFIDEMTIAe


10?
that's keeping your hack-it'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. So 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 that Accutron 24-hour clock was excellent. 
The accuracy of it was lousy. It lost four or 
or five 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 I was guilty of the same thing.
McDivitt 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
C O NFIDENTIA L


108
readability. It didn't have any chronometer func­
tion to it at all. It had strictly a second, 
minute, and hour hand on it. It told you GMT 
and it didn’t tell you anything else. It told 
you GMT in a way you could read it. You could 
read out the minutes, you could read out the hours, 
and you could read out the seconds. I really 
didn't have any trouble with it at all. It had 
a nice thin second hand which I find to be much 
more useful than those great big blunt things 
with huge arrows on the end of them. I hate to 
lose the chronometer feature on that right-hand 
side, but I do think that the readability of 
this thing,as far as the GMT is concerned, is so 
much superior to that other clock that it isn't 
even comparable.
White I’m not sure that the chronometer function on 
that side is really too important.
McDivitt Don't you?
White No, I would be perfectly happy to go ahead and 
take that -out and put a good clock on there in 
Greenwich Mean Time. Now I've got some further 
comments on—
C eHfIB EMTIAL


C O NFIDENTIAL 109
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 CAMS 
hum on my watch. I work with two clocks on my 
left arm and it worked out real well for me. I 
had elapsed time on one and I had Greenwich Mean 
Time on the other. I used the elapsed timer as 
the one on which I made my hacks. So I feel we 
got adequate backup. If one poops out, you can 
use the other one to make your time on. So, I 
think we should have a good clock to keep track 
of the time in the spacecraft on the instrument 
panel. Now, I'd like to get back on the clocks
again. I think that elapsed time is the only kind 
of time that we ought to have in the spacecraft. 
I think that we ought to have a good method of 
keeping track of elapsed time. I think probably a 
ten-hour clock that keeps track of each ten-hour 
incement that you pass to a high degree of accu­
racy, is the kind of clock that we need. I don't
C O ^flDENTIAL


110 ^IB EW
know what we're going to do about wrist watches. 
Maybe they'll design us a ten-hour wrist watch 
that we can wear. I don't see any reason why 
they can't. They can design twelve-hour ones just 
as easily. We're going to go to this in Apollo. 
We should face up to it and go ahead and spend the 
money to get ourselves a proper timing 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'd want to convert them to what I was using 
on my flight plan. I found this a great 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 it off of a twelve-hour 
face wrist watch. I added up all my twelve-hour 
incements and came to whatever I wanted. If I 
-eQNriDrfiTiAL


C eNMDENTtAL 111
had something like 6J 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 time all the way and 
use twelve-hour incements. They would call up 
your time and elapsed time and use your own clock 
to keep track of it. I felt it was simple enough 
also to do it in this manner. But I feel that 
this is inferior to having a good elapsed timer 
and ten-hour digital incements.
McDivitt I tell you I hate to see us get involved in some­
thing where you've got a clock thats so difficult 
to read,where you've got to add up twelves and—
White Now you're on the other side of the fence now!
McDivitt No, I think that we ought to do things like retro-
fire time and that r soft of thing in a 
standard time that you can use -- something like GMT. 
eoMFiDEbmX i


112
White Well, you really need— -elapsed
time. If we had elapsed time—
McDivitt If we 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 
think 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 flight is 
going to be a horrible mess because of those two 
timing systems.
McDivitt I know it. I agree. Before we launched, we knew 
that we wanted to run it in elapsed time, and 
there wasn't any doubt about it.
White 1 think maybe if we make the point strong enough 
maybe they'll 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


C QNriDC NTJAL 115
White
had the launch, insertion, Mode II and Nbde 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 
CAMS or without GAMS burns, time to reverse bank, 
and all the other things that we had. It was a 
format, something that could 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 two 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.


through the checklist over and over. When we did
114 (FO M flPE M T rA L
McDivitt We got every checklist that was required to make 
the spacecraft run on these two sets of cards, 
which together were about 5/4 of an inch thick.
White I feel that we had a real workable solution to 
the problem. These things were the same size as 
those carried on GT-5. They were much more ex­
panded than what GT-5 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 is later 
in the brief.
McDivitt Well, anyway, we actually received our cards at 
about 8:00 the night before the launch.
White That's the thing that I was hollering about the 
loudest not to have happen and it happened. I 
understand why it happened, but—
McDivitt We had so many changes in the flight plan and 
nobody was working on turning this stuff out. 
Our time was so filled with over-all training 
and the change in flight plan that we just didn't 
have time to go—. We did not have time to go


C W ftDENTIAl 115
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
go through them it took too long to get the 
thing back to us. Dick Benson came down to the 
Cape and did an absolute marvelous job, I think, 
in getting these things turned out.
I think he did, too. I think we all owe him a 
real vote of confidence.
That's right. He did an outstanding job.
I think the biggest confidence builder that you 
had, Jim, was when we started getting these books. 
That's right. Shoot, I was worried about us get­
ting ready for the flight because I didn't think 
we would be able to get all this stuff together, 
finally he showed up and really went through it, 
but it doesn't change the fact that these check­
list cards and data books didn't arrive until 
8:00 the night before the flight. We had a few 
changes that had to be made. I guess I went to 
bed about 9:50. Dick Benson and Martin Miller 
were still in our conference room making changes 
to our books. So a lot of these things we didn't 
see until we flipped them out in flight. I think 
our data books, as we had them laid out, couldn't 
have been better. Well, I shouldn't say that;
5€>MFJDENTIAL


116 ^MFIDC MTIAl!)'
there is always room for improvement.
White Yes, I think we could, organize them a little 
"better for utility and use. We had so many 
changes in so many things that
got put in at the end. It got so that they were 
put in in a hit of a helter-skelter manner, but 
certainly they were easy to find.
McDivitt Well, I don’t know. I was really quite pleased 
with the outcome. I think that the general ar­
rangement of one data book and two— whatever we 
ought to call those other books—
White What did we call those other books?
McDivitt Two Experiments and Spacecraft Procedures and
Flight Plan Books—
White Two procedures and one data.
McDivitt Yes, two procedures books and one data book. One 
thing I would have changed — I would have expanded 
the flight plan and made maybe two or three times 
as many pages as we did. We could have written all 
the notes right in it and had enough room to make 
it intelligible. Because it turns out, thaWs 
where we really kept all of our notes.
White Yes.
McDivitt Right on the flight plan.
SeW IDC MTIAIj*


eO MFIDENTIM n?
White About the way they had it initially was pretty 
good. Maybe that's a little more than we need, 
but—
McDivitt No, I don't think, it is, Ed. I think that is the 
way it should be.
White This is a whole hour on one page.
McDivitt Really?
White Yes. So later on, you see, they went from one 
hour down to six hours on a page. Maybe if they 
cut that in half and made two or three hours on 
a page—this is probably about the—
McDivitt Two hours on a page for our flight would have 
made 50 single sheets or 25 double pages. That 
would not have been bad.
White That probably would have been just about the 
right length.
McDivitt We'd have gotten a lot more out of our notes, I 
think, because we found ourselves scribbling in 
places where it was pretty hard to determine 
where you were.
White The requirement to make changes in the book after 
the flight goes on is absolutely nil. So, I think
C O NFIDENT! A tr


118 C O TIFIDENTIAL8*
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 any of these books would have come 
apart; because it would have destroyed numerical 
sequence. So,I think something other than rings 
ought to be used..
McDivitt I tell you one thing I found,—that size book and 
that concept that we had, I think, was really good.
White That was just the right size.
McDivitt It's just the right size. Their sheets are big 
enough where you can write a.lot on them.
White They're easy to handle.
McDivitt They're small enough so they're easy to handle. 
They're easy to stow. 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 I had one procedure book and both my cards.
McDivitt And both year cards. So that between, the two of
-^QMnDC NTIAL


-8QNFIDENTIAL- ns
us we had all the data books right on the flight 
suit, which was just right where we wanted them.
White Another thing we did—we hand carried this equip­
ment down to the spacecraft to be sure it was 
there on launch.
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 this is 
exactly what you need and I don't believe you 
need to overlap 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 so 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
-eDMFIDENTIAL


120 e^jFIDENTIAL
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
edges. I would have rather seen the stars ex­
panded more so that we could tell it. We used two 
polar plots of stars that were put out for the 
Apollo thing that we picked up on our training. 
We actually flew with one of the training things. 
I took one out of my brief case.
Those weren't put out by Apollo, Those were put 
out at our request. Remember? We asked for a— 
Yes, but I thought they came from the Apollo office. 
No, they came from our own Flight C rew S upport.
I know we requested them, but I thought that's 
where they dug them up.
No, they got them from—
Okay.
See, what they did is they added on all the Apollo 
navigation stars. They came from our own boys in 
FCSD.
These polar charts are really the cat's meow.
All those charts are pretty good.
So I thought the star charts sure gave us all the 
information we needed. The maps and overlays— 
I think we really ought to cover the maps and over­
lays by the experiments. The map with the sliding
O eNFIDENTIA ir ^


■W W EN W 121
overlay of the orbits, I thought was a real gooA 
tool.
White Very easy, yes.
McDivitt Very easy to use and I am sure glad we came up 
with that.
White I think also carrying pre-plotted orbits on the 
maps was also useful and stayed pretty—
McDivitt That's right. Right at the last second we decided 
to take four maps that were glued back to back 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.
SQMriDC NTIAL


122 ^QNTO NTIAL
"White You can keep track of how far you’re off.
McDivitt 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 Yes.
White We had a lot of other information onboard and I 
don't know whether we should go into all that 
stuff now?
McDivitt Oh, yes, I took schematics of all the systems 
right out of the GOH. I didn't ever have to use 
them.,but I thought it was worthwhile having them 
along. Everybody was getting so screwed up on 
the water management panel and I took my notes 
on the water management panel with me. I had a
-eO NFIDENTjAL


COM FrDEb ffb M : 125
McDivitt
8*8 Stowage
White
McDivitt
White
couple of drawings.
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.
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 little bit of time. 
When I got to actually stowing the refuse back 
in the right 'hand box, it was easy enough for me 
just to reach over my left shoulder and put the 
items in without even turning around. It was
COW ^N TIAL


124 -6®NFIDLNTIAL~
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 the equipment 
we had in there, that we were not able to jetti­
son after MA, 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 storage 
for almost all of the loose items during flight. 
Jim and I had the area just chucked full.
McDivitt This was not any big surprise. Remember how we 
were talking about how we were going to put all 
that stuff up?
White We were going to put a big refuse bag in there.
McDivitt We decided that the most likely place to put these
big items would be back underneath the seat be­
cause we weren’t going to keep our legs back


-^SW fihlW M r ’^
there. We never did get them hack there.
White There was no possibility to put them back there 
once we filled it up.
McDivitt Yes, but even if we wanted to, I don’t think there 
was any big desire to put them back there.
White It would have been nice to stretch but that's 
just about all. That would have been from time 
to time.
McDivitt That's right.
White I found that actually the thing that I appreciated 
the most was having a lower seat so I could actu­
ally stretch my legs out forward than actually 
behind and bending my knees.
McDivitt Yes, I was more interested in straightening 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 it would be just 
about useless.
■^atjrjDDiBAL


126
McDivitt Well, I got things out of it. I got a defecation
White
bag out one time and I got another little bag out.
I don't know what else I had back there.
The right hand box with the clamp lock was easy
White
to get in and out of. I stored things from time 
to time in there.
Yes, I found that the most useful storage area
McDivitt
that I had was the right-hand little velcro cov­
ered container right down by my 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.
Is that the one with the canvas cover on it?
White Yes, I really used that one.
McDivitt Yes, that was pretty nice.
White The periscope container I didn't use much at all.
I really didn't need to use it. I kept the blood 
pressure adapter in it throughout the whole 
flight.
McDivitt The left-hand, aft food, box actually had. food in 
it. It was pretty difficult to get the first 
piece out. It was a long hard struggle, but I 
finally got one piece out. Once I got one piece 
out,the rest of it was a real snap. They had the 
eemiFiDENTug


-6»HFIDEblTIAPf 127
things taped together. I left the door open the 
whole flight after we onoe 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 pull 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 without getting 
out of my seat. The left-hand side box had the 
film stowed in it and it was easily accessible.
I think the most useful stowage place that I had 
in the spacecraft was the little Volkswagon-type 
bag that we had made up and bolted on the center 
pedestal.
White Oh, that was a jewel.
McDivitt We kept our checklists, maps, data books, and 
procedure books in it. When we went to sleep and 
had a change of command and we wanted to get to 
one of the pieces of equipment that the other 
guy had, we almost invariably stuck it in that 
little pouch. I really think the most useful


128 -geW HBW ft,
thing that we had. put on that spacecraft were 
those little pouches.
White Yes, I think the pouch could even be made a little 
bit bigger.
McDivitt I think it could, too.
White Then it could receive a little bigger item and 
perhaps have a little more volume thit it could 
expand out to.._ I think that it was a very
useful item. We used that as storage area more 
than any other.
McDivitt That's right.
White I used the long khaki refuse bag on the side for 
various things, but the • main thing I use it for, 
once we got the flight going,was a refuse ca. .
I would put all my refuse in there until I got 
a full container of it. Then I would package it 
up and put it back in the right land box. I 
thought it was very useful.
McDivitt I used it for all kinds of things. I stored your 
Mae West in it, and I had some of the camera 
equipment in it when we were doing EVA.
McDivitt When I got all the good pieces fished out of it, 
I finally started putting trash in it. 
w w w a£


129
White We both have an interesting item on this. Well, 
I emptied mine out all the way, but I think you 
entered with it full of trash.
McDivitt I reentered with that bag full of trash and it 
didn't tear off.
White It was in pretty good shape.
McDivitt It was light-weight trash. Papers and things 
like that.
White I have a comment on the other little trash bag.
I never used it.
McDivitt Neither did I. I would get them out and I did not 
even know where they were. Yes, I think it’s 
just too small.
White Yes, it's just too small and I think that Volks­
wagen pouch can be improved upon. I think both 
right and left canvas storage bags were very 
adequate and should be continued. I think it's 
satisfactory just the way it is.
McDivitt They could make the Velcro strips on it a little 
longer and 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 curl in 
and make an opening. I never could get the thing 
2


15° C QMHDLHTIAL
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 System
White I thought the defecation bags worked as well as
anything we had. There isn't anything you're 
going to do to make it go to the bottom of the
■C eNHDENTIAt


151 S€>NFIDEMTIAL
bag when you use it. I think you should, be 
familiar with how to close the bag. I only used 
one bag and I think you were a two-bag man.
McDivitt I was a two-bag man.
White The stuff didn't float out of the bag or anything. 
I would permit the thing to remain open while I 
used the paper. I actually used the paper as kind 
of a charging r echanism to push the stuff on down 
in the bag. Yiu 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 ms^e tie closing not quite as nice as I 
would like iJ to be, but I was able to close it 
up all right I broke two of the disinfectant 
bags and I c it the bags. There were two different 
kinds of dis .nfectanis. 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 bags break too hard. I hate to have 
to cut those things before I stick them in there.
I cut one and the darned thing floated back out 
again and I didn't notice it. I had the bag just


CO NFIDENTIAL 18
about sealed up when I noticed this thing float­
ing around inthe spacecraft. I had to push 
it back down in there.
White When I cut it, I got the stuff on me and a little 
bit around. The two that I broke, that were 
contained inside the plastic bag, seemed to work 
all right. On the whole I was satisfactorily- 
pleased with the defecation bags. I felt also 
that the liquid was easy to work into it. I 
think that's a satisfactory system.
McDivitt You really have that knack of kneeing.
White One thing, it is just like oleomargarine was — 
. Ha, ha!
McDivitt A little different in colon. Ha, ha!
White One thing that I want to comment on was the toilet 
paper with the darn wax job. I did not think the 
toilet paper was satisfactory. It had a waxy 
back so that it was like the back side of a Sears 
Roebuck Catalog.
McDivitt That was not the side you were supposed to use.
White I know it but the other side had such a small 
amount of absorbency. This is why you always used 
so darn much paper Jim McDivitt. Ha, ha!
-C O NFIDENTIAL


I found that the tissues that we carried 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. 
While 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 And both in a similar manner right off the bat.
McDivitt So we had a bunch of tissues that were not con­
tained in anything.
White I think the containers were very good containers.
The method of dispensing would be fine, but they 
all fell out the side. That's the way I used mine 
for the rest of the time. I used those tissues 
for all kinds of things. I cleaned my window with 
them. I cleaned the camera lenses with them. I


134 C O NFIDENTIAL
cleaned ray visor with them. I got my visor so full of
gal 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.
White I used every bit of mine. I think I could have 
used them more properly if I had a good dispenser 
system. I’d grab too many.
McDivitt Those big towels weren't too bad either. They're 
great for sopping up the urine and stuff.
White Yes, they were great urine mops. If we had had a 
big spill of some kind that's what you'd want to 
use,because you could use it, it would dry out, and 
you could use it again.
8.9 Bio-Medical
McDivitt We have already discussed this in great detail 
with the doctors so I think we can go over it 
briefly. The Medical Data Pass Type 1 was not 
an inconvenience. It got the data down to the
-Q CTfftDEN TKb -


^NriDENTlAL 135
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 it was one of the most important parts of 
the mission.
McDivitt That's right. It was really good.
White Both morale wise and just keeping your strength 
up.
McDivitt It was a good picker-upper when you felt lousy.
The chow tasted good. The thing I didn't like 
about it—J think it gave me a touch of the GI's.
White I think it tended to loosen you up a little bit.
I think)now as I look back,I would prefer to have 
maybe two of the items in one of those plastic 
containers and two hard items.
McDivitt Gee, I thought the way they were mixed up was 
pretty good.
White Sometimes though you'd have four rehydrated and
nothing crunchy. One time I had one that was all
e0M M D& HHAL


13 6
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 unacceptable. I think those hags 
are going to have to be fixed.
White No toast.
McDivitt We didn’t open up the toast.
White Well, I ate that one thing of cinnamon toast.
McDivitt I ate the cinnamon toast because you discovered 
that it had a coating on it and it didn't crumble 
so much.
White I guess there was only the one cinnamon toast.
McDivitt Overall, I thought the food was good and there 
wasn’t too much of it.
White That peanut stuff also kind of crumbled.
McDivitt Yes.
White I think we ought to include more meats. I think 
the bacon was outstanding.
McDivitt Oh, that bacon was absolutely great.
CeN riDEN W a


O W FIDENTIAL 137
or three of them.
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


13 8 C O NFIDC NTIAL
McDivitt The only thing I didn't eat was the bacon and egg 
bites, either.
White I think if I had my druthers, I'd take bacon.
McDivitt One of the biggest 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 Ed had one real good one,and there were a couple 
of them where I didn't wiggle around for about five 
hours,but never did I sleep more than two hours.
White You weren't soundly asleep.
McDivitt I just sat there and I rested. I had one one-hour 
period right there at the end that was pretty good 
sleep,and 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
eO MnDC NTIAL


CON FIDEN TIAL 159
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
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.
Yes.
Early in the flight the ammonia fumes kept me 
awake. The first time I tried to go to sleep they 
kept me awake.
I don11 even know if they kept me awake.
I really noticed it then.
I think we really need a sleep period longer than 
the four-hour sleep period. First of all we always 
fooled around and never really got the sleep that 
we wanted. If we had gotten a four-hour sleep 
period everytime it was scheduled, we would have 
been in great shape. I think we ought to schedule 
a longer one on the order of six hours. 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 
cone together, you can make that a dual awake time 
so that the people could be up. As a matter of 
fact you could modify it in such a way that if you
C pNIiDENTIAL,


140 gO NFIDEMTIAU
White
McDivitt
White
wanted, two people to he 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 oould 
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. 1 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.
You might be able to put it in Horizon Scan. 
Well, even then it goes, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, 
every once in a while, you know.
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.
G©HFIDEMTIA1


141
McDivitt
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 • ®"^ is going to require two 
guys. D-9 requires two guys, and to adequately do 
it to get the pictures we want,you just need two 
guys up.
McDivitt Let me modify that position of mine even further.
If you scheduled a six-three and then the other 
guy with a six-three that would leave you six 
hours up together everyday. I think that might 
be adequate.
White You should also always try to schedule your eating 
periods so you aren’t eating during this up time. 
You should schedule your eating when the other 
guy is sleeping.
Right.


142 C PHFIDENTIAL
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 If you got tired you could go on and take four 
hours for sleeping. If you needed it, you would 
go on and take longer. If you only needed one or 
two hours, you could go ahead and take that. I 
didn't feel as strongly as you about being tired. 
You said I was tired.
McDivitt You commented on it a number of times during the 
flight and also you looked like you were tired.
White Several times I missed a rest period. I think 
we got fouled up a couple of times on it. I did 
get tired before I took that five hour rest. I 
knew I was tired.
McDivitt You had that one really good sleep right around
C $tt4FID£HTIAU.


^NFIDENTIA 145
85 hours or so that really seemed, to pick you up.
White It helped me a lot. When I came out of it, I 
really felt groggy until I had had a few minutes 
to wake up. I think this picked me up consider­
ably and probably this gave me a little gain on 
you as far as the rest of the flight goes.
McDivitt That s right. During the time you were sleeping, 
I fell asleep. I saved one night cycle out and 
went to sleep. Ha, ha!
roNf1DENT4 M


U4 W NFIDENTIAf4
9.0 OPERATIONAL CHECKS
9.1 Apollo Landmark Identification (P-6)
McDivitt The equipment we carried onboard the space­
craft really didn’t apply exactly to D-6. We 
didn’t have a Questar lens. The 200 mm lens that 
we carried did not have the periscope mounting 
for it. It did not have any way you could 
aim it with a telescope, so the only aiming 
device that we had onboard the spacecraft was the 
gunsight mounted in the left hand window.
The cameras that we used for this experiment 
were the 16 mm movie camera with. 5 mm telephoto 
lens on it and the fixed mounted 35 mm Contarex 
with the 200 mm Inns. The fixed mounted Contarex 
was in the right-hand window, and the 16 mm camera 
was in the left-hand window. .
White It was kind of interesting since we were in 
free drift, and they told us to go ahead 
and run a tracking task. But the first one that 
I ran was Apollo Run No. 1, which was over the 
junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile in 
the middle of the delta of the Nile River.
cmriDC MUAr


145
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


146
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 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 Ric<} too., or 
was this the only landmark that we really ran?
White 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?
•^O N'FIDEMTIAL


C gRriDC MTIM  14 7
White l'm not sure exactly the sequence in there.
McDivitt Okay.
White I think before that .though, I did run a series 
on D-6 Targets 11, 12, 15, and 18.
McDivitt Okay. Why don't you go ahead —
White Shall I discuss those?
McDivitt Yes.
White Okay. 11 was Adagier Morocco, 12 was Wheelis, 15 
was Alexandria, and 18 was Dhyran. They gave 
me all these four targets and I realized 
right away that I couldn't possibly handle this 
many of them and do it adequately. This was 
the first time we'd been given ti? go-ahead 
for some tracking on which we could use CAMS. 
I elected to use pulse as a fuel conservation 
method. I selected to try Wheelis and Alexandria, 
since I thought that I could locate them quite 
easily and that they were sufficiently far 
apart to track adequately. As we came up on 
Wheelis (I'd been stationed there prior to this 
timei I knew pretty well exactly where it was. 
As it turned out, there were soar high clouds 
over Wheelis, and I wasn't able to observe it. 
No. 1J—I picked up Alexandria and took manual 
^O NriDC W IAL


148 -ew w H ^F
pictures with the 200 nun 'Contarex. Since I 
was actually taking the pictures, I had to 
divert rny attention a little bit to the camera, 
so I didn’t actually look down, and, I didn't 
actually see the airport. But I had seen it 
prior to that time, and I did see it many times 
afterwards as we passed over. The recommendation 
that I made from this was that the targets should 
be far enough apart to allow adequate set-up,to 
go from one target to another. I thought the 
updates were good and the general location of 
them with respect to my orbits was good. And 
the next one is El Paso International, Jim.
McDivitt Okay. This was the first tracking task that we 
were going to do with the telescope, the 
16 mm movie camera,and the fixed 200 mm lens on 
the Contarex. We started out with a time of 
closest approach and a time we should have been 
able to see the target. The only kind of 
identification assist that we had at this time 
was a piece cut out of a WAC Chart,that showed 
El Paso International,and the world chart with 
a gigantic scale on it. This made it a little 
bit difficult from an acquisition standpoint. 
■€^RHM H«*U


C O NFIDENTIAL ^
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


150 GO NFIDENTIAL
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 p> inting. When you put it on the dark 
land, it seemed to be adequate, but I think we 
C O NFIDENTIAL


149
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 Rivem—and at that point was 
not very noteworthy—and the mountain range, a 
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 
^C O NFIDENTIAL


1J 0 C TNFIDENTIAt
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 Faso 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


CON FIDEN TIAL 151
can increase the intensity of the gunsight by 
quite a bit. During the night time you can turn 
it down and the brightness is just about what 
you need. We made this run on this pair of 
sand spits, and the tracking task was quite 
easy. Now, I just happened to pick something 
that was obvious to me and tracked on this and 
picked it up while we got on at about JO degrees, 
until I got to the vertical, and then I tracked 
it out to about 45 degrees past the vertical. 
This wasn't a real tracking task, in that I 
didn't select a target before I got there. But, 
I just stuck with whatever target I happened to 
be pointing at and ran the tracking task. I 
think we learned something from this pass in 
that we want to be very careful about picking out 
targets in the middle of an area where there 
aren't any good water-land, borders; there aren't 
any good contrasting colors. There wasn't a 
really prominent feature that I could start 
from, that worked down to the city and eventually 
to the airport. So, I think that on this parti­
cular pass, although we didn't get any pictures 
of our intended target, we learned quite a bit


152 O MW ENTIA L
from it. I don't believe I have any other 
comment on that pass. Do you?
White No. I was quite surprised when we missed El 
Paso. Remember we thought, "Boy, this is one 
we're going to nail."
McDivitt And the funny part of all this is that we had 
both flown in and out of El Paso International 
Airport no less than a hundred times. We were 
pretty well assured of where we were going and 
what it looked like. But we didn't find it 
early enough. We progressed too far before I 
really saw the town, and even then I didn't 
see the airfield.because I wasn't sure I was 
over the right town until I was over it. And 
then,it was too late to look at the airfield.
White I think that the point that you're making is 
going to be well brought up in what I'm going 
to say next.
McDivitt Okay. Why don't you — you made the next pass, 
I think, on Tel-Aviv.
White The next pass was Run No. 6, Target 15- The 
information I got was adequate to locate it. 
It turned out that this target had the essentials 
that Jim was looking for and mentioned on his last
O PhinDC MTIAL »


153
pass. I hail a nice body of water. The Dead Sea 
was a good location, and actually the city 
itself was located at the end of the 
Mediterranean, so I felt that landmark-wise I had 
a pretty good target to track. I came in and 
the first target I picked up was Jaffa, and I 
was on it so well that I decided to go ahead and 
track Jaffa. At first I had thought it was Tel- 
Aviv, and a few seconds later I relized that it 
was the city 10 or 20 miles north of Tel-Aviv. 
The reason I picked it up so easily is because 
there was a little spit of land that jutted out 
into the water and it sat right in this little 
natural basin. I looked down and I saw Jaffa 
and I actually saw the little round circular 
airport in Jaffa. I also saw Tel-Aviv, and I 
saw the airport that I was really looking for, 
but I decided I'd go ahead and track Jaffa and 
take a few pictures of Jaffa as we went over. 
You have to realize that I wasn't using a 
gunsight on my side, and I was also controlling 
the spar aoraf t and firing the camera at the same 
time- So the tracking is probably a little
rougher than it would be from the left-hand side.


154 6®NFIDENTIAb
Bat I lid get a good indication of the capability 
to track a target and to pick a target up, and 
I think that I was quite surprised at the ease 
at which you could track. I also concurred with 
Jim's conclusion that a good prominent landmark 
primer, preferably a body of water somewhere to 
nail down your target, is the most desirable 
feature. I also feel that an important thing 
that the next crew going up could do would be 
to spend a lot of time on just plain map study 
ir the JO degrees north to JO degrees south, 
and try to pick up the prominent features to 
permit them to become quickly adjusted to what 
they can see and what they can't see down 
below. I think that a little concentrated map 
study prior to the flight would help a lot with 
the D-6. Also a concentrated study on the 
targets themselves would be quite beneficial. 
This is something that we really never got to 
do. The original 245 targets were too voluminous 
even to consider time to study each one, and 
when we got the final 19 targets, it was pretty 
late in the flight to be working on an 
experiment that wasn't even on our flight. Even
C W FIDENTIAi-


C O NFIDENTIAL 155
wi th the limited knowledge that we had of the 
target 3 I felt that acquisition -and tracking of 
the targets wus a lot easier than I had thought 
it was going to be. I guess that's all.
McDivitt The next target that we had was Yuma International 
Airport. Here again we had a target that was 
not a very prominent landmark. The time of 
closest approach and acquisition time and the 
aiming angles were adequate. It gave me a good 
idea of what I should be looking for and when I 
should be looking. I used the same maps again; 
I used the cutout of a WAG Chart plus a great 
big world chart. There was quite a 
discontinuity in the scale of these two maps, 
but I'm not really sure that we couldn't have 
done the job with just those two. I think tnat 
what we probably needed was a world map that 
showed a little more detail and a WAG Chart
that showed a little bit more area. What we 
probably could have used most of all was a 
photograph of the area. As I came in across 
the California coast, I picked up the Salton 
Sea and El Centro,just below the Salton Sea, 
and then I <new that Yuma was on the Colorado 
C O NFIDENTIAL


’56 C O NFIDENTIAL
River, which should oe a few miles to the east 
of the Salton Sea. There was a nice big bend 
in the Colorado River. Unfortunately,the 
Colorado, although it is a reasonably good 
sized body of water—if just plain doesn't 
show up that well. It was a little difficult 
to see, but I finally picked it up. I saw 
the bend in the river. The river doesn't 
actually go through the town of Yuma, so I 
started looking for Yuma, and I did wander 
around a little bit before I finally found the 
town. Then I was unable to find the airfield 
within the town. When I was just about directly 
over the airfield, I picked it up. Here is 
where I think the photograph would have been a 
lot of help, because the map that I had just 
showed a yellow blob indicating the city with 
a circle to indic-.te where the airfield was. 
It showed the airfield to be to the south of 
the town. What I was looking at was a large 
group of buildings, the town 'tself. Then 
as I went to the south, I saw even more 
buildings and I wasn't sure whether the airfield 
was south of that built-up area. As it turned 
tO NriDENTIA-f


GewriD ENTrat 157
White
out, it was south of the main built-up area that 
actually had another large group of buildings 
south of it. I did pick up the airport itself 
at just about 5 degrees before the nadir, and I 
tracked over to the target,probably just at the 
nadir and just shortly past. I had the 16 mm 
movie camera going with the telescopic lens on 
it. T had the gunsight on bright. I used 
Pulse Control Mode. I got right on the target 
and I managed to fly the spacecraft in such a 
manner that the gunsight never deviated from the 
target by more than a half a degree, I feel, 
if it deviated that much. I think it was 
considerably less than that. But there wasn't 
any great difficulty in the tracking task, and 
I managed to control in all three axes and hold 
the target just about where I wanted it. Here 
again we had a problem with the contrasting 
target; the water-land mass was quite some 
distance away. In this case, how far is it from 
El Centro to Yuma?
White I don't know, Jim.
McDivitt 150 miles?
Yes.


158
McDivitt It was a reasonable distance, probably something' 
on the order of 150 miles or maybe only 100 
miles, but the problem was that between Yuma 
and El Centro there weren't any identifing 
masses that led you toward Yuma. And I had not 
up till this time looked down to try to find 
where the Yuma airport was, because we'd been 
saving fuel. So,this was the first time that 
l’d seen Yuma airfield from orbit. As I get 
into the next target, I think you'll see what 
I’m leading up to. Having a first look at a 
target like this, being able to identify the 
city, but then essentially wasting time before 
I found the airfield within the city, I think, 
cost some valauable time and consequently cost 
some good pictures; because the best picture 
is going to be that picture which is taken 
exactly over the airfield.
White That wouldn't happen again though, would it?
McDivitt No.
White You'd probably have it pretty well nailed.
McDivitt No, it wouldn't. So,the next target I had was 
Cairo — Cairo International Airport. Now, 
we'd been over Cairo quite a few times before


C O NFIDENTIAL 159
this, and I had looked down to find Cairo. I 
think we had had an Apollo Landmark or D-6 
type of thing.where we were supposed to 
look down and just acquire the target, but not 
actually track it or take any pictures. When 
we did come by, we could actually look down and 
find the city of Cairo the first time we came 
by. Later I found the Cairo Airfield, and Ed 
and I were discussing Cairo Airfield and 
Alexandria Airfield. We both had one in sight. 
When I picked up the Cairo Airfield(I was told 
to pick up the Cairo Airfield),it had all the 
ingredients that I think is necessary. I had 
seen it before. I knew where it was with respect 
to the local landmark. The local landmarks 
were the Mediterranean on one side, the Red 
Sea on the other side, the Suez Canal connecting 
these two large bodies of water, and a river 
leading from near the Suez Canal over toward 
the city and the airfield. Then, knowing the 
position of the airfield with respect to these 
landmarks.since I'd already seen it, I came in 
over North Africa along the Mediterranean Coast 
with no platform on, just in Pulse Mode, no
€O NnDC MTIAL


160 e^mbENTIAl
attitude reference, found the Mediterranean on 
my left, pointed the spacecraft on ahead, 
determined the direction I was going, picked 
up the Red Sea, picked up the Suez Canal "between 
the Red Sea and the Mediterranean,and followed 
the river in. I started this quite a distance 
out. I knew just about where the airfield was, 
but it wasn’t coming into view. Finally, at about 
20 degrees before the vertical the airfield 
finally came into view. I tracked on the 
airfield about 10 degrees before the nadir. I 
was tracking the area in which I believed the 
airfield to be,so that I had already had the 
pitch rate set up that I required of my 
spacecraft. As I got on the target I still had to 
track in multiple axes, but I already had the 
rates built up, and I tracked from about 10 to 
20 degrees before the nadir to 45 degrees past. 
I think this will probably be the best tracking 
experiment that I did. Later on, I had another 
one. Later on I had another tracking task 
against Basra in Iraw on the Persian Gulf. Here 
again, we had the ingredients that were 
necessary to pick up the target. We had a large
G^MnDC MTIAL


O TFIDEbITIM 161
to the target. You have to have a lot of contrast.
body of water, a river leading up to a lake, and 
then the airfield sticking out in a very 
prominent way. Now I'd never seen the Basra 
Airfield before 'I tried to take this picture. 
But the landmarks near it were sufficient so 
that finding the location of it was not difficult. 
There weren't any towns around. It was pretty 
obvious from the bodies of water where I should 
look for the airfield, and I picked it up also 
20 degrees before I got to the nadir and was 
on it by the time I got to the nadir. I tracked 
it from there out to about 45 degrees past. 
Once again I had a reasonably good tracking 
task. I think that on the tracking tasks on 
Yuma, Cairo, and Basra, I managed to keep the target 
within the center half-degree cirle of the 
sight. I used the 16 mm movie camera with the 
75 mm telephoto lens on each one of these cases. 
Did you have any other targets, Ed?
White No.
McDivitt I don't believe you did. I think the big 
thing here is that you've got to be able to have 
a landmark that stands out long before you get


162
White Or some real technique or type of familiarity 
with the target. I think if you were really 
familiar with the area you might pick up 
things that we don’t pick up now, but we could 
with a little more map study and study over 
above.
McDivitt That's right. I think that the first thing, 
though, that you need to help you find the 
target is a really contrasting thing. Now the 
next thing is that you've got to be familiar 
with the target, as Ed said. Now if you have 
never been there on the ground and don't know 
what it looks like from there, I think what 
you need are a few passes over the target to 
study it from the air, and look for it from the 
air ,and try to pinpoint in your mind the local 
terrain features and local contrasting features 
that will help lead you to the airfield. 
Because,it looks to me like it's easiest to find 
a target when you're exactly over it.
White W, you're right. There's a point when you 
pass over the top where everything really is 
clear.
McDivitt The big thing is either a lot of target study on
C eHfIDLNTIAt-


16?
the ground, or a previous pass across the target 
so that when you go across it, you not only know 
the general area that you're supposed to point into, 
but the exact spot where that target is and 
some identifying features that will lead you 
to this target. So with the initial things 
like a lot of contrast to get you in the area 
and then a lot of detail gathered either from 
target study or from a previous pass across the 
target,! think that you could go ahead and 
find it. Once on the target the tracking 
task in the Pulse Mode is not difficult at all.
I think you can track within just tenths of 
degrees of the target without too much difficulty 
whatsoever, in multiple axes. And I found that 
without having the platform up every, 
tracking task I did was in multiple axes, and 
although you’re going through some very 
peculiar maneuvers, it's very instinctive to 
track up and down, left and right, using the 
gunsight, without any regard to what your attitude 
with respect to the local horizontal is. In 
air-to-ground gunnery you sometimes find that 
you've got to pick your attitudes up from the 
^CO NFIDENTIAL


164 eewwftAt
ground. They sort of tend to be a constraint 
on what you can do, but that's not the case in 
this kind of a task.
White The thing that really amazed me, Jim,is the 
first time I saw an airfield from up there. 
First time I saw one,I saw it directly from 
overhead. I was amazed at the clarity I could 
see of field. Although,of course, I saw no 
airplanes sitting on it, I felt that I was 
seeing down to a resolution of 50 feet or 
better with my own eye when there was a contrast 
of some type available to me. In general*I 
thought the clarity of things that you saw 
was far better than it is from just flying at 
40 000 feet. Things are much smaller bu+ they 
‘are much clearer to me. Also,»at night things 
are much clearer. And over one town we passed 
in Australia the lights were very, very clear 
down there to me. I think that with some type 
of an optical aid we can see a great deal. 
I think that with cameras with higher power and 
more capability,we can take pictures of a lot 
more down below. I think that the only picture 
I've seen so far that I thought would be nice
Q0NriDfNTIA.L


C O NFIDENTIAL 165
from a tourist standpoint is the one I took of 
the Cape, which everybody seems so excited about 
right now. That's one that was taken with the 
sun on the window and at roughly a JO-degree 
angTe down from the horizontal, which indicates 
you're shooting through a lot more atmosphere 
than necessary. The clarity was quite surprising , 
even to me. You can count the launch pads and 
see sizes of buildings. Because of the oblique 
angle, you can actually measure the sizes of these 
buildings. I think we've got a tremendous amount 
of photographic potential from in space. I think 
that Jim and I mentioned a little bit earler that 
the area capacity inside the spacecraft limits the 
capability to carry a good size telescope or a 
very big piece of camera equipment. I think that 
coupled with the EVA capability that we have, we 
can carry some equipment back in the adapter—some 
nice sizable cameras and telescopes—and build 
mounts on the outside of the spacecraft. We can 
go EVA, pick these pieces of equipment up, bring 
them out, and mount them on the sides of the 
spacecraft so that we can take a series of
C O NFIDENTIAL


166 CW FIDOniAL *
pictures and. use really good, big, higher-powered 
telescopes for observations. If we do mount them 
out there, of course, we should mount them somewhere 
so that if we had a failure of some kind and 
had to come right in, or weren't able to open 
up the hatch again, we could separate them by 
some type of pyro. But I think that is the one 
way we can combine our EVA operations with the 
desire to bring up big pieces of equipment and 
operate them with our spacecraft.
McDivitt I agree. I think that the possibilities of 
viewing things on the ground from space are 
practically unlimited, and I was quite surprised 
at the ease with which you can control the 
spacecraft and take pictures and I was surprised at 
pictures you get. We ve got an awful lot of 
work that we can do in this area. I think the 
technique of acquiring these individual targets 
needs a lot of work. I feel that the best way 
to do it, if you're going to be limited to one 
pass over the site, is to use a photograph of it made 
from some previous time. I feel that the need 
for a large landmark nearby, especially 
a water landmark, is pretty great. I thought
C ^FIDEMTIAL


QDNHDC NTIAE  167
that the information that we got from the ground 
of what time we would be over the target and 
what time it would be JO degrees below the 
horizontal were excellent pieces of information. 
It certainly contributed a lot to finding the 
target. I think there's an awful lot of work 
that we can do in thia particular area. You 
have anything else, there, Si?
White No. Oh, this is one thing that I have been 
bubbling about the last week or so, wanting to 
tell somebody, and haven't been able to tell 
anybody. I couldn't,of course,tell it in 
the press conference. I really didn’t want to 
talk too much about it at the meeting we had 
before with everybody, but I think this is one 
area in which a trememdous amount of capability 
exists,and I think we'd be very foolish if we 
don't work further to exploit it.
McDivitt I concur.
€O NFIDENTIA b


168 €ffNFIDENTIALa
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 ignor light. And I'll clear that 
one up realy quick. We put them in at two different 
times and neither time did we get a scanner ignore 
light. We did this at night the first time, didn't 
we? That was really the only time we did it.
McDivitt Just the night one. That's right.
White That's right. We did it once at night. I estab­
lished the rates in three axes and allowed them to 
build 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 
O TNFfDENTIAIf


^O l'^IDENTIAL  is?
start from. This was quite easy. I just had to wait 
for the spacecraft to move so that I could see the 
horizon in any position, and then 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 around until my head came up, 
and all I had to do then was pitch back to the 
horizon to get to the JO 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 
from 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
ee^riDC NTIAL


170 W W BffiAtr
position, rolled, around so that I could just pitch 
straight up, and end up at the horizon blunt- 
end-forward, heads up,and wings level. I think 
I could've gotten it down to about a minute and 
20 seconds. I felt that I wasted a minute 
doing this.
White You were taking it slow.
McDivitt Okay, now, i'll go through the Apollo Yaw
Orientation debriefing here. The control mode, as 
we said, was Direct when Ed put me into the 
condition. I used the Direct Mode, I believe.
I damped out the rate without any difficulty at 
all. The orientation, l've already gone through. 
What I should have done was to go nose-down. 
What I did do was that I came to the horizon 
first, tried to find a yaw reference and couldn't, 
then went down to the ground. I should have gone 
straight down to the ground. The time, as I 
mentioned, took 2 minutes and 20 seconds. I 
feel that I could have done it in a minute and 20 
seconds. We did not get the scanner ignore 
light due to acceleration, but we did 
get the scanner ignore light when we finally
C O NFIDENTIAL


C O NFIDENTIAL 171
got to a position where we were outside the 
attitude constraint of the scanners.
White There were a couple of things. As far as the 
initial rates were concerned, they were J 1/2 
degrees/seoond roll-right, 3 degreed pitch-down/ 
second, and 2 degrees yaw-right/second. The final 
orientation that Jim came to was such that his 
pitch was on, his roll was on, and his yaw was 
off hy 18 degrees. We found early in the flight that 
a yaw reference at night on the stars, particularly on 
a dark night, was very difficult.
McDivitt Yes. I still thought that the quickest yaw re­
ference was to go to the ground.
White As far as the day check, we decided that the night 
was by far the tougher case, adn it didn't seem 
to be too difficult. So, we thought that since 
the day was so easy we wouldn't even go ahead 
and do it. The orientation by day was a quite 
easy thing.
9.J One Attitude Thruster Failure Check
McDivitt Okay. We'll just go right through the 
debriefing here. It was not difficult to 
establish the rate as long as we had the roll 
jets in the other axes. We could damp out the
C O NFIDENTIAL


172 gSNFIDEMTIAt-
rates. We used the Direct Control Mode. It's 
just pretty straightforward. It's identical 
to the simulator. We didn't learn anything new 
from this check except that the simulator was 
indeed correct. Do you have anything to add? 
White No. That it was pretty straightforward.
.4 Horizon Scanner Track Check
McDivitt Horizon Scanner Track Check is next. The 
horizon scanner ignore light came on as expected 
except the attitude band through which the horizon 
scanner operated was considerably broader than 
we had expected. The scanner ignore light went 
off again at the proper attitude , considering the fact 
that the scanner ignore circuit keeps the 
scanner ignore light on 7 seconds after the 
scanner has relocked. So, we always had the 
scanner ignore light go out at a different 
attitude than where it came on because of the 
fixed rates we were using. We went through the 
zero bank angle,pitch-up and pitch-down. We 
went through the zero pitch,bank-left and bank- 
right. We then got to the roll with pitching. 
Here, I only banked to the right and pitched up 
and down. I didn't bank to the left and pitch-up
C eNFtDENTIAt


C O NFIDENTIAL 175
and. down. We did the pitch with rolling, and 
here I pitched up and rolled left and right, but 
we did not do the pitch-down, rolling left and 
right because of a fuel limitation and a time 
limitation. We had another experiment that had to 
be done. We had to get the platform off and we 
had a limited amount of time to accomplish this. 
I sort of felt that the check was very well 
accomplished at this time. The data is in the 
data book. I saw no need to waste time doing the 
other two maneuvers, especially since we were 
so limited on time and fuel. Did you have any­
thing to add to that, Ed?
White No. I think that the remark that the data is
in the book is adequate.
9.5 Horizon Scanner Check
McDivitt The first one is the sun. I think the best wasy 
to do it is to have Ed read out the comments 
that we wrote in the data book as we did this. 
We started with the blunt-end into the sun.
White We started blunt-end into the sun and we got
■ the scanner ignore light momentarily as the sun
C O NFIDENTIAL


174 ^ffiM N flAF
hit the scanner head.
McDivit t It went right out again. It went out in 7 
seconds like it was supposed to?
White Right. It was just a momentary light and 7 
seconds later it was off again. Going hack 
around to the 180-degree position, we didn't 
get the scanner light again. Again in here,we 
got a scanner ignore light when we were 
faced right into the sun with the nose, and it 
went out again and came on once more,and then 
stayed out.
McDivitt So, sequentially, we started with the blunt-end in­
to the sun and started a yaw to the left. As 
soon as we came around into the sun we got the 
scanner ignore light, and it went out a short 
time later. We came around right into the sun, 
and at this time the scanner ignore light came on, 
went out, and came back on again. Is that 
correct?
White Yes, and then finally stayed out.
McDivitt And stayed out. Then we yawed back around till 
we were blunt-end to the sun again, and yawed 
back into the sun,and back around blunt-end to 
the sun again, and we did not get any more 
aoNHDDtrnAL


C O NFIDENTIAL 175
scanner ignore lights. The next step is the 
Moon Scanner Check. We did. this with the 
moonset and, Ed, you might add the time that we 
did the Sun Scanner Check.
White The Sun Scanner Check was at Greenwich Mean
Time of 11:50. We'll have to correlate that later.
McDivitt I think that we were supposed to be in the blunt- 
end to the sun configuration at 11:54 and star^ there, 
but I’m not really sure about that. Okay, the moon 
check was performed just about like the sun 
check. We started blunt-end to the moon and 
made two cycles. Blunt-end to small-end and back 
to blunt-end,and small-end back to blunt end. 
Ed, go ahead and read the data.
White Okay. On the moonset, we started with the moon 
quite high, so we had a good moon. We started 
at 12:17. We had no scanner ignore lights for 
the first 180 degrees and .actually.throughout 
the next cycle we had no unlocks or any lights 
for two cycles.
McDivitt So this was completely normal.
McDivitt The Thrusters Check No. J —we turned the 
spacecraft, since the thruster firing wouldn't 
influence the orbit except to change it
C O NFIDENTIAL


176
slightly, and we went ahead and fired the 
forward-firing thrusters for 1 second. Ws 
didn't get any change in our scanner ignore 
light configuration. It was out and it stayed 
out during the entire thruster check. So I 
guess that it operated all right. We'll 
summarize all of our scanner comments at this 
time.
White You want me to read some of these?
McDivitt Yes. Why don't you read off some of the comments 
you have in there.
White They're in your writing. You might read the 
first page and i'll read the second, since 
they're in mine.
McDivitt We went to Horizon Scan Mode of control for 
about the last day of flight, and left it in that 
mode just about until we retrofired. I*d like 
to read out some of the comments that I made here 
as we lost the scanner, when we got the scanner 
ignore light. At 16:05 Greenwich Time, or 
about 72 hours elapsed time, I turned on the 
Horizon Scan Mode in about a 25"degree nose down 
attitude with a pitch up rate of about 2 degrees/ 
second. The Horizon Scanner Mode added pulses
C O NFIDENTIAL


-CO NFIDENTIAL w
to the pitch up rate and increased my rates to 
something considerably above that, but then 
as we came up into the Horizon Scanner Mode 
deadband, it started pulsing rapidly and 
killed off this rather large pitch rate and held 
the spacecraft right in this attitude. So, we 
had a very good acquisition of the mode from a 
somewhat undesirable condition. At the first 
sunset the scanners were pointed right at the 
sun but did not break lock. We did not get 
any scanner ignore lights at this time. Later 
on, at 17:04, about an hour later at sunrise, 
the scanner ignore light came on with the space­
craft pointed in such a manner that the small end 
of the spacecraft was pointed about 45 degrees 
to the right of a line drawn directly between 
the spacecraft and the sun. So that, essentially, 
the sun was shining on the horizon scanners at 
about a 45-degree angle. The scanner ignore 
lights stayed on for 10 or 15 seconds, and then 
went out. There were no false pulses from the 
jets at all. At 7:55, just at sunset, again in 
about the same position, I was 45 degrees to the 
right of a line drawn between the spacecraft and
C O NFIDENTIAL


the sun. The scanner broke lock. We started 
pulsing down for two or three pulses, then 
stopped, but the scanner ignore light stayed on 
longer than 7 seconds and then it went out. 
We pulsed up one or two times to start 
recovering from these initial two or three 
pulses that started us down, and then the light 
came on again. It was only off for about 2 or 
3 seconds, just a very short time. We were 
at about JO degrees pitch down at this time. We 
then started pulsing pitch-down rapidly with 
the scanner ignore light on. We pitched down 
and did a J60-degree maneuver in pitch; we 
started just about horizontal, pitched down till 
we were looking at the ground, continued pitching 
down with respect to the spacecraft until we 
were horizontal, upside down, now faceing 
the opposite direction than we'd started, and 
continued pitching down with respect to the 
spacecraft. The small end ended up straight up 
and we continued pitching down again until we
started coming back back down to the horizon. I 
did not at any time during this maneuver attempt 
to control the spacecraft. The pitch-down


gmW HAt 179
thrusters continued to fire throughout the 
maneuver at intervals like there was indeed a 
signal coming from the Horizon Scan Mode. As 
the spacecraft started back down toward the 
horizon, I thought sure that the horizon scanner 
would catch the horizon, because at this time 
the sun was no longer right on the horizon. 
However, we developed a slight amount of roll 
during the last 120 to 150 degrees of pitch, 
and as we went down through the horizon, we were out 
of limits in roll and Horizon Scan did not pick 
up the horizon. I then took over the spacecraft 
and maneuvered back to a position from which the 
Horizon Scan Mode could reacquire and put it 
in this condition. It stayed locked on. Ed has 
a few notes here. We’ll have him read his.
White About the only notes that I made on the scanner 
was that at sunset and sunrise it had a tendency 
to break lock. I have a note here that at 22:22, at 
sunset with the sun right on the scanner, i.e. 
90 degrees to the spacecraft, the scanner 
broke lock three different times. At 22:58, at 
sunrise, the scanner put in spurious inputs 
but was able to control and didn't lose lock, 
tO NriDENTIAI;


180 C O NFIDENTIAL*
Sunrise seemed to be the time at which the 
scanner had the largest tendency to break lock, 
and if it didn't break lock, it would at least 
put in spurious inputs which were obviously not 
required other than due to the confusion factor 
that the sunrise was causing on the scanner.
Again, I have one at 11:58, at sunrise, the scanner 
60 degrees to the sun, broke lock once and pulsed 
quite a few times extraneously, but caught 
itself and continued to track. I think on the 
whole that the scanner worked real well.
McDivitt So do I. As a matter of fact, I believe in the
last 20 or 24 hours, however long we had the 
Horizon Scan Mode on, that we only really lost 
control of the spacecraft that one time, where we 
did the pitching maneuver I've already discussed. 
I think in every other instance, although it 
pulsed needlessly two or three times at sunset if 
the scanner was pointed toward the sun, it never 
really lost lock and it certainly never lost 
control. The light would come on every now and 
then, but it would —.
McDivitt But, I don't think that the light came on more than 
three or four times in those last 24 hours.
C O NFIDENTIAL


g& NFIDENTIAL 181
White Ko. They sure didn't
McDivitt And even though the light wasn't on, it seemed 
like we would get an extraneous pulse every once 
in awhile at sunrise or sunset. But I 
thought that the Horizon Scan Mode worked very 
well. It certainly proved to me that it was an 
excellent attitude-hold mode, or pilot-relief 
mode.
9.6 HF Transmission Reception Check
McDivitt I think that I'd like to start out with Ko. J 
in this case. We received an update to start 
and stop our checks and had no difficulty doing 
this. I think that the transmission and recep­
tion, No. 1 and No. 2 under this major heading, are 
covered in our data book and I'd like to have Ed 
summarize them at this time.
White We ran a one day and one night-long test on it 
in which we attempted to have all stations contact 
us. The data in the book. I think the data will 
point out that the HF is a rather unsatisfactory 
mode of reception. It was difficult for us to 
evaluate our transmission that'll have to be done 
from the data from the stations. But as 
far as reception was 
tEON FIDCb LTIAt


182 6QNFIDENTIAL
concerned, we got a little bit during the night 
and just about nothing during the day. We ran 
also a sunrise and sunset check and we made the 
long counts as indicated,and listened for any 
return on all our HF tests from Thule and Elmendorf. 
We could hear Elmendorf calling us, but they were at 
one time barely readable, and most of the time you 
could hear somebody trying to call, but they 
were very broken and difficult to read. More 
detailed data is in the Flight Data Book.
5-7 Orbit Navigation Check
McDivitt Following the format in the debriefing guide, I 
think that the maps and overlays that we had 
were excellent. I felt that the concept was a 
very good concept. It gave us a good check on 
where we were throughout the flight, as far as 
accurate times went. We used at times the other 
track charts that were printed before the flight. 
We found that these were off some fair amount, 
although they furnished good information also. 
Once we had the time error that we could apply to 
times listed on the map, we found that we were 
able to use these quite well also. I think that 
the map and the overlays that we used in our
C O TFIDENPAt**


C O NriDENTrA L 183
White
Orbit Navigation Checks was a very good scheme. 
The control mode we used was Pulse, and the 
timing was just the GMT timing we had in the 
spacecraft. I’d like to have Ed discuss a 
little of the technique now.
Actually we had a form in our book that we had 
made up to make these tests, but I think it 
became apparent to both of us as we came along 
that this is a fairly simple thing to do. If 
you want to just try to update your map without 
having an update from the ground, it was 
quite simple to point the spacecraft straight down 
to the earth and get a point which you could 
recognize on the ground,and actually plot this 
right out on your orbit map. I think we could 
probably make checks in this manner and update 
our map almost as well as we could by having a 
longitude and time called up from the ground. 
I’d like to make a comment right now that I 
thought the little map that we had with the 
orbit plot on it was very useful, but it
was weak in one respect; I was always wanting 
more detail on what I was seeing down there.
We, fortunately, carried a map with about two to


184 C O NFIDENTIAL
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 he a drawback to have a large map in the cockpit 
as long as you kept it golded down in the proper 
manner. Do you have any comments on that?
McDivitt 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.
White You know, another thing that I found very interesting 
was when they called up plot points and they'd give 
you JO degrees right, down 45 degrees. Even without 
the platform, those meant a lot to me. I could 
visualize very easily where I was going, whether I 
was small-end-forward or blunt end forward. I could 
visualize quite well, without a platform, JO degrees 
down and yaw JO degrees over, looking for a point. 
It seemed I could check points nearly as well with


W MFIDENTIAl les
or without the platform. It wasn't hard to orient. 
McDivitt I think that's probably time. I do think that
this is a good scheme. I'd like to see us continue 
it on future spacecraft.
White Yes. I'd take it again if I had my druthers. 
What do you feel about a bigger map?
McDivitt I think for this kind of thing, this Orbit navi­
gation C.ieck, the map and the overlay we hud. were 
about the right size, but when we got around to 
looking for things on the ground, I thought the 
maps and charts we had were pretty inadequate. 
I'd like to see us get something with more 
detail on it, just the way Ed says, and I think 
we will cover this in better detail when we get 
over to the Apollo Landmark thing.
9.8 Relative Humidity Test
McDivitt Another operational check that l'd like to discuss 
at this time is the Relative Humidity Test that 
we did during the flight. All data is in the data 
book, but the thing that l'd like to say most of 
all is that the relative humidity was consider­
ably less than anyone had ever expected. The 
cabin temperature was less than anyone had ever 
expected, and although we were instructed to 
C O NFIDENTbM.


-C O NFIDENTIAL
measure the cabin wall temperature with a thermistor 
that was on the end of our relative humidity gage, 
I found that this was pretty difficult to do since 
they'd covered the entire inside of the spacecraft 
with the sponge rubber,. We couldn't find a good 
place where there was just bare metal. I took some 
measurements on the inside of the left-hand side 
food box. I took one or two readings off of the 
metal frame that went around the window. Those 
are the only two places I was really able to 
contact spacecraft metal. Do you have anything 
else that you want to add to that, Ed?
White No, the data is pretty well laid out in the data 
book. I don't think there is anything else. It 
did surprise me, and it was a very pleasant sur­
prise because I was interested in taking my • 
gloves off and putting my visor up. I sure 
did as soon as I found out it wasn't -going to get wet.
9.9 Zodiacal Light Check
McDivitt I'd like to have Ed describe this.
White Okay. We did this one on the fourth day at 22:42 
Zebra, and it was one on which procedures were 
called up. What they wanted to do was find out 
if the thrusters firing could cause any inter- 
■SO NriDZNTIAir


CON FIDEN TIAL 137
ference on some zodiacal light photography that 
was planned on later flights. The first test 
was to pitch straight down toward the earth, 
open the shutter on the Contarex camera And 
actuate the pitch-up with the shutter open. Then we’d 
take another picture and actually open the 
shutter again and activate the pitch-down thrusters, 
to see if these two thrusters would cause some 
type of light interference to the photography.
On the pitorn down part of the phase, we waited 
till the moon had set, and as we were pointed 
down toward the earth, we came upon an area fairly 
clear of clouds. But, unfortunately, there were 
a few soattered lights from homes or cities down 
below us, which might have caused some 
interference. I don't think so. They were 
very, very scattered. The pitch-down test 
was satisfactory. The next one was the one in 
which we were actually level with the horizon. 
Again, Jim opened the shutter, I actuated a 
pitch-up, and closed the shutter. He 
opened it again, I actuated a pitch-down thruster, 
and he closed the shutter. It was a pretty 
simple test. We took four pictures.
-CON flDEN TIAL


188 CONFIDENTIA L
10.0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS
10.1 Countdown.
McDivitt During the countdown the visual sighting I had 
was a multitude of wasps sitting on the R and R 
section and crawling all over the windows. Aside 
from that, the sky was clear and I didn't see 
anything else except the gantry going up and down.
White That's about it. It appeared to me the wasps were 
somewhat confused. They felt that the RCS 
nozzle was a very large beehive for them.
10.2 Powered Flight
McDivitt The first topic is lift-off. At lift-off I was 
looking at the instruments and didn't see a 
thing. I think Ed's got something here.
White From the liftoff—I could actually feel when we 
lifted off — the vibrations decreased a great 
deal*
McDivitt What about visual sightings?
White i'll get to that. As we stai'ted to move, I felt 
I could see the relative motion. We had a clear 
blue sky above us; there weren't any clouds, 
but I could see the motion in the sky. I could 
also, as soon as the roll program started,
CO NFIDENTIAL


C ^NTIDC NTIAL ^ ^
definitely see the rotation of the booster and 
spacecraft combination. As we continued on up, 
I was watching within the spacecraft and outside, 
also. I could see the pitch program initiated. 
I could hear Jim call it out, and I could 
actually see it on my instruments and also see 
it out the window. BECO's the next topic.
McDivitt Why don't you go through that. I think I just 
looked out one time to see the horizon for just 
a second. Why don't you go through the rest of 
those there and read them off?
White Okay, at BECO I was looking in also. I was 
waiting for the staging and I had my attention 
inside, and I didn't see the big sheet of 
flame that John and Gus described coming from 
around the separation of the first stage. So, 
there wasn't anything other than the normal feel­
ing of the separation. As far as ''visual eight- 
ing6" were concerned, I didn't see anything else 
at staging. As we started to nose over, I saw 
the horizon coming up and I called that out to
* Jim.
McDivitt I think that might have bean when I looked out, 
but I'm not really sure I could see anything at 
-CO NFIDENTIA L


190 C O NFIDENTIA L w
the time.
White I had. to say something. It is quite an impressive 
view when you're up there—the very the first 
time you look out and you see it. I looked out 
and all I could see was the horizon and the 
blue down below us. You probably couldn't, 
because as I think of it now, we were on the 
side. I could see the horizon and you couldn't. 
All you could see was the sky.
McDivitt Hight.
White So I could see a little of both. I could see the 
clouds, the water, and the whole smear. The 
first time I saw that out the window I called 
that out to Jim, and it was quite an exciting 
view.
White Engine Ho. 2 ignition—I didn't see anything 
that had to do with lighting the second engine 
off. The horizon view, I just discussed. At 
SECO, there was a lot of debris going by.
McDivitt That was at spacecraft sep, wasn't it, rather 
than SECO?
White You'-re right. You're absolutely right. At 
SECO, I didn't see anything other than that 
the acceleration profile went down to zero. At
<O NFIDENTbM7


eON riDLN TIAl- 191 ’
spacecraft separation I think Jim and I both
McDivitt
noticed a J
Right.
.ot of stuff coming by the spacecraft.
White Just plain debris was all it was. Just 
pieces of white junk came by.
McDivitt Probably little bitty pieces of the adapter there.
White In fact, when I got out and looked later on at 
the spacecraft separation plane, there were pieces 
of the same kind of white stuff still ■•
back there attached jaggedly to the adapter 
section. Fairing jettison—I couldn't see 
that. Did you see anything on the fairing 
jettison?
McDivitt
IO.5 Orbital Flight
When I jettisoned the fairings, I saw the 
horizon scanner faiting go whipping off, but I 
couldn t look at it and the nose fairing both. 
Sq I only saw the one go, but there were some 
more pieces flying all over the place, and they 
went just as soon as I punched the Fairing­
Jettison Button.
White Boy! We've been talking about these things for 
the last ten days.
The first one is geographical.
C eMFIDENTIAL


€O NFIDENTIAL~
McDivitt Yes. Geographical. We could see wakes of 
ships. We could see roads. We could see towns. 
Although I never saw any individual houses, I 
could see an industrial area with what looked 
like oil tanks and a few other things. We could 
see canals very well. We could see the Suez 
canal very well from the air. I don't think I 
ever saw an individual ship. I never saw any 
individual cars or airplanes, but you could see 
runways very well. But the thing that you could 
see best of all were long lines. I'm sure that 
if you had a road that was 50 feet wide, or 
however wide you make roads, and it was long, 
you could see it. Whereas, if you had the same 
thing and it was just a square down there,I 
doubt very seriously that you could see it unless 
you were looking for it, specifically.
White I think perhaps also there is the contrast between
the colors. The things that I saw with very high 
clarity were runways. As you looked dawn at the 
runways you caught a high contrast between the 
green or rhe brown, or whatever the color that 
it was laid out in. You could see it very 
clearly. I was impressed by how clear you could 
C O NFIDENT4M


C O NFIDENTIAL------* 195
see things. They were small; there's no question 
that things don't get any bigger when you're 
looking down at them, but in my opinion things 
were much clearer. I could see with a higher 
detail than I could when I fly over in a normal 
airplane,as far as the object itself being 
clearly defined. I also noticed this at night 
when I looked down on it. In the clear stretches 
the city lights were much finer defined than the 
lights are in a city when you're flying over at 
40 000 feet. Things are small but have a much 
higher definition. I think it would be 
interesting to find out in -our photographs the 
degree of resolution that you have. I feel that 
the resolution, if you have the proper contrast, 
would go down to 50 feet or below.
McDivitt Yes. l'd agree with you there. Geographically, 
there were just so many things that we could see. 
I think that we took pictures of most of the 
things that we thought would be interesting.
White l'm dying to look at those pictures.
McDivitt Me, too!
White I agree with Jim that if you look at a city, 
particularly if you look at a city in a desert 
geNriDC NTIAL


194
area where the houses are brown and the 
surrounding terrain is brown, everything’s kind 
of small and it all blends together. Unless 
there was some type of contrast between them, 
it's pretty darned hard to pick up a city right 
out in the middle of the desert. We had 
trouble when we came to El Paso in finding it, 
and Cairo blended right in with —
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
— blended right in with everything. You could 
see the airport at Cairo—I’m not sure if 
I ever did really see the city.
I think I could. When I was looking in that 
area at Jaffa, as soon as I saw that airfield 
out there and was concentrating on looking at 
it, I saw more detail.
Yes. The thing of it all is that.geographically, 
you have to have a real large feature to be able 
to see it very far out in front of you, like the Red 
Sea. Now when I was trying to find Cairo 
one -time, I looked out I was having trouble 
finding the Red Sea. Pretty soon I found the Red Sea 
about JO degrees below the horizon or maybe a 
little more. As I got closer, of course, the 
Red Sea stood out very well. As we get closer
aOHFIDEM ^L


C W riDC NTIAL 195
and. closer and closer, these things really start 
standing out, but when you're looking from up 
around 125 or 150 miles, and you're out 60 degrees, 
you're a long way from your target. It's just 
that you can't see that far through all that 
atmosphere, I guess.
White I think one more comment on the geographical is 
that I think we're really going to see some things 
down there when we get some type of magnification.
McDivitt Yes, a telescope is what you really need.
White If you can get some kind of telescope to help, I 
think we can really see something. I wonder if 
there isn't some way that, while we know we can't 
carry some things inside the spacecraft, we can 
work with something outside the spacecraft— 
camera equipment or some kind of optical equipment, 
that we might be able to have mounted on the out­
side. We can store it somewhere and mount it on 
the outside after we get up there—mount a 
telescope right through, with the eyepiece on the 
inside.
McDivitt Boy that would be great! Wouldn’t it?
White And then when it comes time to come in, you just 
punch the thing off and forget about it. But 
GO MnDENTI-At


196
while you're up there you've got this thing with 
the long eyepiece. I think we can do this with 
EVA. Stow the thing back in the adapter, go back 
and get it mounted up, get back in, and you've 
got yourself just about as long a telescope as 
you'd want to put up there. Same way with 
cameras. I think you can take cameras up. We 
can take some of these big cameras that we've been 
wanting to use,. We can have a sighting device so that 
we can mount this thing on the outside of the 
spacecraft after we get up there,and then point 
it with a pointing device at the ground and get 
some of these pictures that we've been wanting 
to take. I think we've got some possibilities 
there.
McDivitt Okay. Celestial. I think in the nighttime you 
can see the stars without any difficulty. In the 
daytime you just can't see the stars if there's 
any sunlight whatsoever on the window, or if the 
nose of the spacecraft is in the sunlight, or if 
the horizon is in the sunlight, or if some of the 
earth is in the window. I think all these things 
tend to limit your night vision. They create
^Q N riDum — *


CO NFIDENTIAL 197
an optical "barrier, practically, "between you and 
the stars. The difference between the day sky 
up in orbit and the day sky here is, as far as 
we were concerned, was practically nil, because those 
just weren't any stars visible. It didn't have 
anything to do with the atmosphere; it just had 
to do with the optics of our window and the 
nose being shiny. We couldn't see any more stars 
in orbit than we could here in the daylight, but 
it wasn't because of the atmosphere up there. 
It was just because we had that ooating on the 
window that reflected the sunlight, and because 
the nose reflected sunlight into the windows, and 
the same thing with the horizon or the ground. 
"When it was lit up, it reflected light into the 
windows. Actually, you had to get that window 
in total darkness almost before you were able to 
see anything.
White Pull the shades.
McDivitt Pull the shades. And then when you did that, you 
were able to see some stars. On a few occasions 
when I got the spacecraft into this particular 
attitude, I was able to see some stars in the
C O NflDENTIAL


198 C O NFIDENTIAL
daylight. How about you, Ed? Were you able to 
see any stars?
White Yes. I called them out a few times. You did 
have to maneuver just as carefully—
McDivitt That's right. You had to be just exactly in the 
right spot.
White Let's go into the magnitude of the stars. We 
had set ourselves with the Corona Australis 
as a kind of calibrator for us, and this was 
composed primarily of fifth order stars. That 
was very clear, and I could see without any 
difficulty stars of lower magnitude 
than that. I could see, without question, stars 
to the seventh magnitude.
McDivitt And that's exactly the same magnitude I would 
guess. You could probably see them down to a 
magnitude of seven.
White Now, another thing, though, was that the sky 
wasn't any more full of stars to me there than 
it is when I'm flying at about 40 000 feet 
on a real dark night.
McDivitt No, as a matter of fact, it didn't really seem to 
be as full of stars.
C O NFIDENTIAL


C O NFIDENTIA t ’»
White Wo. On. the night when we were flying with that 
eclipse of the moon, I saw more stars than 
I've ever seen in the sky.
McDivitt Yes, and as a matter of fact, I wouldn't doubt 
that we could go out here and fly tonight 
and see seventh order stars.
White I bet we could see lower than that.
McDivitt Thal's right. What l'm leading up to say is 
that I don't think we could see as many stars in 
orbit as we could flying around in an airplane 
at 40 or 45 000 feet.
White That's exactly my conclusion also. You could 
see down to the seventh order stars.
McDivitt Yes, and I think the reason for this is the 
coating on the windows, don't you?
White I think so. I felt like there was just a little 
shield of what I was really seeing.
McDivitt If we'd just gotten that coating off, we'd have 
been in great shape.
White I also noticed a tremendous difference if I 
turned those lights off in the cockpit. It was 
just like turning those stars on on the outside, 
and I don't think we should take those red lights 
out.
C O W FIDENTtAt «*


200 CO NFIDENTIAL
McDivitt No. I don’t think 30 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 It didn't have to me the characteristic orange 
color that it has when I look at it from down 
here. It looks more like a regular old—
McDivitt A regular old star, huh?
White No, it looked 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 something else and 
forgot about it. Let's talk about the air glow.
C O NriDIINTIAr


frON FIDEN T-tAi 201
McDivitt Why don't I discuss that thing that I saw those 
two times at night.
White Yes, I saw it too, so you weren't seeing things.
McDivitt This phenomenon occurred in the dark and I think it
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 How about in the air glow layer?
McDivitt 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
CeKIDCHJ IAL


202 60HF1DENTIAL
was right over land, and was considerably closer 
to us than the horizon was. It was, maybe, 
half-way between us and the horizon. I got the 
impression that it was a lot closer to us and 
it was definitely not in the airglow layer. 
Both times I had this impression. It looked 
like it was coming up out of some clouds. I 
could see the clouds down on the ground, and I 
had the impression that this was coming out of 
them, but it only got to an altitude of maybe 
half of ours. That would be up to 50 or 60 
miles. This is the impression I got. I took 
some pictures of it too, didn't I?
White I had the feeling that the first time you took 
it you had the wrong setting. You had about 250 
at an f11. I don't know what you did the 
second time.
McDivitt I don't remember, either.
McDivitt This thing was in motion, too. It wasn't a 
stationary thing. It continued to move the way 
the lights on neon signs do. It was wiggling 
back and forth.
White When it came around over toward my aide it was ,to 
me, closer to the horizon, and it looked more 
ffO NriDC NHAV


^C O NriDC NTIA t 205
like it -was below and. in the air glow.
McDivitt It looked like it was in the air glow to you? When 
I saw it, it definitely wasn't in the air glow. It 
was a lot closer to me.
White Of course, it started on your side and you talked 
about it for J or 4 minutes or so. Then as 
we drifted around, it went over, I guess, to my 
side. It was irregular shaped and it was out 
toward the air glow layer.
McDivitt Well, the second time it was a lot less bright.
White Are we going to talk about the air glow layer now?
McDivitt Okay. We' re going to talk about the air glow layer, 
but it comes under "horizon". Let's talk about 
that under "horizon".
White Okay.
McDivitt Do we have any other celestial observations? The 
fire flies that we had around the spacecraft con­
tinually— Sometimes you'd be able to look out and only 
see one, and you couldn't see them too well at all 
at times. You could see them in the daylight occa­
sionally, but I don't think you could ever see them 
at night. But the place where you could really see 
them was at sunrise and sundown, because here you 
had a black background of the sky and you had the
C O NFIDENTIA L


204 C O NFIDEMTIAt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
sun shining on them.
They picked the sun up.
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, 
«W W fflM ?


COM FIDEN TIAb  ^
and I think we might have taken some stills, 
but I’m not sure.
White I hope it came out.
McDivitt Yes, it was really spectacular! So we could, 
just about make our own stars when we wanted to. 
Is that all on celestial?
White That's all I can think of, Jim.
McDivitt I couldn't see the zodiacal lights. I couldn't 
see the gegenschein and I could not see the burst 
of zodiacal lights that you get just as the sun 
sets. Go ahead, 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


206 C O NFIDENTIAL
different occasions. It was during your last 
sleep. I was taking a few final movies and I was 
watching for this very phenomenan. It was the 
first time I saw it. It would be a little shaft 
of white illumination and it was a long time be­
fore the sun came up. I don't know whether that’s 
what they were seeing before or not. But when the 
sun itself actually came up, I didn't get much of 
a big ball of light—just some big, bright lights 
coming up from behind the earth.
McDivitt That's all I was getting. I didn't see this other 
thing.
White I saw quite a few shooting stars.
McDivitt Oh, yes.
White They seemed to fall and burn up considerably below 
our altitude. They looked a half or a third as 
high as we were when they were actually being 
consumed and being burned up. I never saw one 
above us, did you?
McDivitt No.
Okay cloud coverage—
White There was a lot of it.
McDivitt There was lots of it. There were a lot of times
when there wasn’t any. I don't guess there's much 
we can say about this.
C O NFIDENTIAL


C O NFIDENTIAL'
White I think we took some good pictures of the clouds. 
McDivitt Yes. Well, throughout the four days we had 
cloud coverage over things we wanted to take 
pictures of. Other times we didn't have any at 
all. It was a variable thing, and we just got 
a lot of good cloud pictures, I hope. 
Horizons. Well, at night there was a definite 
dark horizon, which I assume is the earth's 
horizon. And then there's a dim band, and then 
above that there's a bright band that is much 
narrower than the dim band, and above that it is 
clear, and then nothing. I guess there are 
really three horizons. There's the top of what 
I think is the earth. There's a top of the dim 
band, and then there's a top of the bright band. 
In the daylight you don't see these dim and bright 
bands. It's just a gradual decreasing in 
intensity of light. It starts out with a very 
light blue at the horizon and just gradually 
goes out to the dark blue, and it finally just 
goes to black. Right at sundown,if you're 
pointing 90 degrees to where the sun is, you 
can see the light blue of the day sky coming
CO NFiDENTlAL


208 C O NFIDENTIAL
down. it’s much, much higher than the air
glow that you see at night.
McDivitt If you're looking over at the daylight side, it 
looks like the light blue, goes up probably 
three times as high as the air glow does. What 
do you think about that?
White Let me go into my impressions of the air glow in 
the evening. I saw the same thing you did, of 
course, and it looked like to me that the dark 
part was roughly two or three times as thick 
as the lighter air glow layer below it. We 
were both impressed with the phenomenon of the 
apparent rise in the air glow as you go from the 
daylight to the dark, and as soon as you get out 
in full daylight, the earth's layer is all gone. 
But as you transition between the daylight and 
the dark, you see the layer start out and narrow 
down to what you see as you get into the dark 
side as the air glow layer. And when you 
initially get into the dark area, the air glow 
seems to disappear for a moment, and then the air 
glow layer pops out when you get into full dark,. 
very clearly.
CtW lDEN TIAb -


^riDLNTIAL w
McDivitt I agree. Okay. Do you have anything else?
White That horizon isn’t very good, on the daylight side, 
either.
McDivitt No, the horizon isn't very good on the daylight side.
White The horizon's not very good anywhere, really.
We'll go more into that on D-9-
McDivitt You could see the lights of the attitude thrusters, 
and it didn't seem to make any difference which ones 
you were firing at night. They weren't blinding 
by any stretch of the imagination.
White They looked like lightening maybe. Little flashes.
McDivitt The attitude thrusters lit up the sky a little
but not a great amount. They weren't blinding either.
Not much to say about that. Okay. I want you to 
discuss adapter separation that you saw.
White Okay. On the adapter separation, Jim and I agreed 
to separate the electric and the OAMS, and then 
pause between the adapter separation so that we 
could dwell a little bit on the separation and 
absorb as much as we could about it. When it did 
separate, we got a very clean feeling of separation 
between the two and a very definite feeling that 
the adapter and the spacecraft had separated.
There wasn't much question in my mind. Was there 
much in your s, J im? _
^■or^riDENTiAi


210 C O NFIDENTIAL
McDivitt No, not at all.
White There were a few pieces that came around from it, 
but not as much as there was at spacecraft separ­
ation after insertion. Did you see anything?
McDivitt No. I didn't see anything off the adapter.
White All right.
McDivitt The equipment adapter. I just saw it off of the 
retro adapter.
White Why don't you go tb retrofire then?
McDivitt Okay.
White Do you have anything else on the adapter separation?
McDivitt No, I don't think so.
White I was impressed with the cleanness in the feel, 
and I didn't even want to look around. I 
just happened to be looking over at Jim's window at 
that time, and, as I said, I could see pieces 
go around, and I could especially see pieces 
to this side. What I saw looked like a 
mount with two round things on it. I had been 
briefed on this thing by John Young and he 
said it looked like two pump packages. So, 
I said it looked like two pump packages, too. 
Looked like just what I expected it to.
And there was lots of debris around it as it whistled.
C O NFIDENTIAL


-^©NFIDENTIAL
off to the sidej and then it went out of my view.
McDivitt 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?
White No, I didn't.
McDivitt I don't think there was much there. The retro pack 
jettison—we didn't see it jettison, but shortly after 
that we had rolled upside down and we were flying in, 
and I saw the retro adapter floating around on the 
left side. It had turned around so that it was small­
end-forward rather than blunt-end-forward. You could 
see the whip antenna sticking out the side, the four 
retrorockets, cross-beams, and the plumbing around 
the edges. It was quite a sight. It drifted out 
behind us until it got out a couple or 500 feet. It 
started glowing a little on the leading edge. It 
started fading farther and farther behind us as we 
reentered. It finally went from a dull glow to a 
bright one, and finally you could see the leading 
edge of it eroding away. Finally, it was 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
C O NFIDENTIAL


212 confid ential
very interesting things all the way down, 
including ourselves.
McDivitt We didn't observe anything in particular that 
happened at 400 000 feet. The ionization was 
where we really started picking up the fire.
White I think we kind of timed that with what you 
were talking about the retro adapter up there. 
You said, "Hey, look at it starting to burn.’’, 
and about that time we were starting to throw 
a sheath around us to.
McDivitt That's right. It looked like to me that it 
went from pink to orange and then went out to 
a reddish-orange, and then in the midst 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't say 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
€O NriDENTIAL


C O NFIDENTIAL  213
long shot.
White It was almost like a veil of silk. There was 
no flame.
10.4 Reentry
McDivitt Well, in reentry we rolled. We didn't have any 
trouble in seeing the' horizon as we went around, 
but we were rolling all the way down.
We did see ourselves crossing the ground, since 
wb were heads-up a fair amount. We could look 
out and could see anything we wanted to see. I 
saw the Gulf Coast, and then out across Florida.
White A little bit of dizziness was associated’ with 
the rolling reentry as far as the visual—
McDivitt Yes. It wasn't really dizziness. It was just 
the fact that you could tell that you were going 
around in a circle at a relatively high rate. 
It didn't bother us. It's just that you could 
feel it. The spacecraft didn't oscillate very 
much during reentry. Anything else there, Ed?
White No.
McDivitt When we deployed the drogue, it really made the 
ride interesting. I couldn't see the drogue 
very well. Ed could see it probably better than
C O NFIDENTIAL.


214 ^riDC NTIAL
I could. At this time I didn't know where the 
sun was. We oscillated hack and forth on the 
drogue probably as much as plus or minus 40 
degrees. I never did see the drogue dereef.
I couldn't see up to the top to see if it was 
reefed or not.
McDivitt I don't think there's much else about what we 
could see on the drogue. Can you think of 
anything?
White I could see it up there whipping back and forth, 
and I was sure hoping that it was going to hold 
on and not pull the front end of the spacecraft 
off, the way we were oscillating.
McDivitt At 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
C O NFIDENTIAL


5Q N FIDCM TIAL
finally just dereefed and we had an excellent 
chute. It popped out and came back in. About 
a quarter of it along the edge folded back in 
and then popped back out again and we had a 
beautiful chute. Do you have anything else on 
the main chute?
White No. I couldn't see it until 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 
R and R can with both the drogue and the pilot 
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
€ON FIDEN TIA


216 Q ON riDEN TIAF
at the bottom of the window that I could see 
through. Ed wasn’t having too much trouble seeing 
through his. It was real nice to see the heli­
copter and the swimmer.
White Both the windows were pretty foggy, though.
CON riDEN TIA-


C O NFIDENTIAL 217
11.
11.0 EXPERIMENTS 
Two-Color Earths, imb Photography (MSC-10) 
White This is one in which we had our first example 
of poor flight planning. They scheduled our 
MSC-10 experiment so that it actually conflicted 
with some Horizon Scan Tests that we had to 
make. And since our Horizon Scan tests were 
being made in conjunction with the platform, 
which was only going to be up for a limited 
period of time, we had to interfere on the 
tail end of MSC-10 to go ahead and start 
working on the Horizon Scanner Check. Anyhow, 
we went ahead on the MSC-10, starting at 11:04, 
and went through eight series of pictures. This 
was the time that we had trouble with the event 
indicator.
McDivitt Didn’t we have ten series? I thought we had ten-
White I've only got eight indicated here. Oh, yes,
wait a minute; it says 10 1/2 runs. I only 
have eight recorded here, and a final one 
being run at 11:57- We should have 91/2 runs. 
McDivitt Yes.
White We should have 91/2 runs, and only nine were
C O NFIDENTIAL


218 C O MFIDEMTIAt
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
required. We should have it all. On the first 
three runs the event indicator wasn't used, "be­
cause I was having- trouble with the Hasselblad 
shutter working properly in conjunction with 
the event indicator. About 11:19, I get the 
event indicator working all right, and the rest 
of them were run pretty well. The early runs 
were taken pretty much in night conditions. I 
doubt if much will come out on that one. The next one, 
at 11:09,was taken with the sun right on the 
horizon,right into the camera, so I doubt if 
that one will be too much more than a big 
washed-out mess. The rest of them were all 
taken with the horizon in the proper position and 
utilizing the ring sight. The last part of the 
experiment was interrupted by the Horizon 
Scanner Tests. In other words, we didn’t get to 
the sunset. I think actually the sunset would 
have been one more series of pictures.
I would think so.
Okay. I guess that's all for MSC-1O.
Okay.
Do you have any comments on that?
dO NFIDENTIM


tC O NFIDC MTJM 219
McDivitt No, I don't have any comments. I think we
11.2
logged the time and the weather along the route, 
such as it was, and we got all that into the book.
Synoptic Terrain and Weather Photography (S—5 and S-6)
McDivitt I think we had a lot of unusual and significant
White
subject matter, and it's all in the pictures. We 
had one camera that wouldn't wind the film too 
easily, but other equipment operated fine. We 
didn't get the data reviewed properly—too late. 
And we used the voice recorder as often as we
McDivitt
could record. I don't believe we have all of 
this S-5 and S-6 photography recorded. I 
think as we go over them, though, the ones we 
didn't record will be pretty obvious.
Yes, I think that those two experiments are
White
really in the photographs. The Hasselblad 
camera operated fine except we had one magazine 
that didn't wind up too well, but it never did 
jam up completely. I guess that sort of covers 
it. Wouldn't you say, Ed?
I would too. All the data that we got for it
11.3 Simple Navigat
is recorded in our data book. Let's see
Simple Navigation with the Sextant. Ha! D-9-
ion with the Sextant
McDivitt I guess we might as well cover it.
SO N FlD ENT 1 AU


220 eOW IDEN TIAE
White Well, in the Air Force portion of it, we can start 
right off by saying that the stars they wanted 
us to run the operation on—I think, Series 
Ko. 4—
McDivitt No, that was the last one. They gave us Series 1 
to start wi-th.
White —which was the daylight. The daylight operations 
didn’t prove feasible at all. We couldn't see 
the stars and if we could have, we didn't have 
a good horizon to run them on. So it became 
apparent to us that that run was lost right in 
the beginning,when we first came out of the 
darkness and lost all the stars. We also got 
the big picture that the sextant was not going 
to be too easy to use. It was going to be 
impossible to use without using some fuel, and 
it was going to be dam hard to use when we used just 
pulses of fuel. We needed some kind of stabiliza­
tion. At least I thought so.
McDivitt We might say that the lightbulb in the counter 
readout for the angle was burned out.
White That burned out within two seconds after we got 
up there, I think.
CON FIDEN TIAL ^


C O NFIDENTIA L'
McDivitt Did it ever light?
White First time I turned it on it lit and it went
"flit", and then the light just went bzzz-bzzz.
McDivitt I didn't know it ever lit.
White It lit and then the light went out.
McDivitt Okay. So we lost the lightbulb in the angle 
readout, which made all the rest of the measure­
ments very difficult. And the Air Force portion 
in daylight was completely unusable. You couldn't 
see the stars and the horizon at any time. In 
the night portion, we initially had great large 
angles between the stars and the horizon, and 
we found that about 25 degrees was the maximum 
star-horizon angle that we could handle. Would 
you concur with that, Ed?
White Sure do.
McDivitt As we mentioned when we were talking about the horizon 
and the air glow. We really had three horizons.
We had the true earth horizon. We had the top 
of the dim air glow layer, and we had the top 
of the bright air glow layer. I think that I 
always used the top of the bright air glow layer, 
except where I specifically called out in our
€‘O NriDC NTIAL


222 C O NFIDENT!/*
notes. Ed tended to use different types of
horizons, dependent upon the type of filter he 
had on. Why don't you discuss that a little bit?
White I tended to feel that the bottom of the bright 
air glow layer gave me a little finer defined 
horizon for a no-filter operation. When I put 
the blue filter on, though, I didn't have much 
horizon at all. When I put the green filter on, 
it gave me, as far as the top of the air glow is 
concerned, a better horizon to measure to. I 
thought that the horizon was certainly not a 
very defined point to measure to, and I think 
accuracy would be lost in trying to measure to 
a horizon like this. It's just plain hard to 
take a fuzzy old horizon and try to make an 
accurate measure to it. That's exactly the kind 
of horizon that you've got at night.
McDivitt I concur. There must have been at least a couple 
of minutes of fuzziness in that horizon, and I 
don't think that you would ever expect to 
measure to the horizon within a couple of 
minutes. Do you?
White No. You'd have to calibrate yourself down pretty
eO NriDENTIAL


C O NFIDENTIAL * 223
close to measure. You know it would be just 
pure luck if you kept measuring properly to it.
McDivitt Yes, the thing of it all is that even if Ed 
got himself calibrated 30 that he would always 
measure the same angle between the star and the 
horizor—it wouldn’t be consistent between One 
person and another. I’m not really sure how you 
would ever go about measuring to this horizon 
with any accuracy at all unless you had some way 
that you could-instead of attenuating the light­
build it up in some way and then filter out one 
particular line that happened to be an extremely 
sharp line. The horizon I like to measure to 
best was the top of the dense air glow layer with 
no filter. The next horizon I liked was the top 
of the dense air glow layer with the green filter. 
I liked least of all the blue filter, because it 
just completely eliminated the horizon.
White Yes, I don't think the difference between . the 
clear and the green was enough to argue over a 
preference between. I thought maybe I had a 
clearer one in the green, but I tended to take 
far more measurements with the clear one, so
geNriDC NTIAL^


224 €fiN FID£N TIAU
perhaps they are so closely matched that it 
really didn't make too much'-difference.
McDivitt Yes, I did most of mine with the clear one.
White For the runs in the Air Force portion, I found
out that the stars had too big of an angle "between 
the star and the horizon. To actually follow 
the format, for the runs as given, turned out 
to be too difficult. We did make runs on stars 
and horizons if we took the time on it and took 
the measurements. It seemed like the angle was 
fairly well limited between 20 and 25 degrees. This 
was due to the limited maneuver capability imposed 
upon us and the lack of having enough window space. 
If you get behind the sextant, behind the window, and 
try to make a measurement, you might be able to 
theoretically measure something out to 50 to 60 
degrees. Theoretically, this may be possible, but 
you must can't get yourself up above the console 
circuit breaker panel or down into the foot well 
area, which would be required to make measure­
ments of this magnitude. There were definite
(jO HFIDENTIAL


-C O NFIDENTIAL 225
limitations on hitting the side of the spacecraft 
and trying to make a sighting and losing the 
object out of the upper window as you cranked 
the periscope down to bring the star down to 
the horizon.
McDivitt In trying to accomplish the Air Force portion 
of the experiment, we found ourselves completely 
unable to do the daylight star-horizon measurement. 
So, to get some insight into the operational use 
of the sextant, we took a great number of star 
to horizon measurements at night. They are in 
the book in quite a bit of detail. As we mentioned 
earlier, the helmet was an impediment to use with 
the sextant, so on occasion we had to take the 
helmet off. The greatest angle that we could 
normally get was about 25 degrees between the 
horizon and the stars, but on occasion we got up 
to JO degrees. This meant a certain alinement 
of the spacecraft was necessary so that you 
could get the largest piece of glass between 
the star and the horizon and still get the
CON FIDEN TIAL


226 C O NFIDENTS
White
sextant in there. We found out that to do the 
star to horizon measurement, you had to be 
right-side-up. If you tried to do it upside down, 
the filter blanked out the star and not the 
horizon. I think that there are a great number 
of measurements in here, but I do feel that the 
Air Force portion of the D-9 Experiment was more 
qualitative than quantitative. Maybe I ought 
to talk about the Apollo portion. We made one 
Apollo run where we used two stars. I held the 
spacecraft fixed to within about plus or minus 
2 degrees, and Ed took a great number of 
measurements. Ed made a great number of 
measurements between two stars. And we got 
our JO runs on one pair of stars that 
were quite close together. Then we 
started out with about another 20 sight­
ings on another pair of stars that were 
further apart.
They , were all in Scorpi. I think they 
were about 12 degrees on the first one and 
about 22 degrees on the second one. There were 
Antares and Scorpi in the second series, and it was 
■eO NriDENTIAt


O DNEIDC NTIAt 22?
Scorpi and the third star up in Scorpio in the fi 
first series.
McDivitt Again, we found that the angle that we had 
selected to operate between was too large, and 
we ran our first group of stars in about 12 1/2 
degrees, and for the second pair we tried to 
pick stars that were farther apart so that we 
could get a better feel for larger angles. Illis 
pair of stars was a little over 21 degrees apart. 
We were too optimistic about the angle between 
stars that we could see by looking through the 
spacecraft window. What do you think about the 
voice recorder usage during this experiment, 
Ed?
White I don't know why we had to do it.
McDivitt No, we actually hand-recorde most of the infor­
mation here. The one thing that certainly delayed 
the experiment was the loss of the lightbulb 
within the readout. We changed the batteries and 
bulbs from the cross-hairs and never could get
C O NFIDENTIAL


228 ^eHH& EHTtAt
this particular light to come hack on.
White Did you ever figure out why we needed to hand­
record all these things-why we had to record them 
on the recorder—the times and all that jazz?
McDivitt No, we had to record the angles some place and 
we had to correlate it to a time.
White Well, it says to prepare sextant and photo-event 
indicator for measurements. What do they mean 
by photo-event indicator?
McDivitt The photo-event indicator was to get the exact 
time. Remember, when you were doing star to 
horizon measurements you had to have—
White No, but this is just for the star. I don't 
understand the photo-event indicator. I think 
that just clobbers up our data.
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.
^6NFID£NTIAL


C O NFIDENTIAL -i 229
11-4 Electrostatic Charge (MSC-1)
McDivitt I think what we could say here is that we turned 
MSC-1 on and off when it said in the flight plan 
and when directed by the people on the ground.
11.5 Proton-Electron Spectrometer and Tri-Axis Flus-Gate Magnetometer 
(MSC-2 and MSC-$)
McDivitt We turned off MSC-2 and -J 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 amall-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.
GO NFIDEH


2 JO W HFIDUN TIAL
McDivitt Okay. We didn’t have any operational problems 
with it. Did we use the voice recorder with it?
White Yes, I guess we did. It should all be recorded 
on the voice recorder. If not, we’ve got backup 
times in the book. Our voice recorder was our 
prime means, and our book was just a backup.
McDivitt Right.
11.6 Radiation (D-8)
McDivitt I think one time you were sleeping, and you 
didn't get it that pass, but you got it the 
second pass, didn't you?
White Well, we got them logged when we did it. They 
can go back and get it.
McDivitt Right. There were no operational problems. We 
did use-the voice recorder to record the infor­
mation.
11.7 Inflight Exerciser (M-j)
McDivitt We didn't have any stowage problems with it 
besides those is associated with all the other 
equipment. The outside thin rubber layer broke 
on the exerciser about the end of the first day.
White Yes. I've got a comment or two.
McDivitt Go ahead, Ed.
CON FIDEN TIAt-


C O NFIDENTIAL 231
White I had the feeling that my capacity and my desire 
to do strenuous physical exercise decreased 
during the flight. Actually,it kind of decreased 
to a point and stayed at that point for the 
whole flight. Shortly after I got up there, I 
really didn't have any hig desire to do a great 
deal of physical exercise. I did do the exercises 
as indicated, and I did about eight extra series 
of exercises with the exerciser, tout I noticed 
a definite lack of interest in doing heavy 
physical exercise.
McDivitt I concur with what Ed said, although I'm not 
really sure this came about because of the small 
amount of sleep that we had or just -a» an effect 
of the zero-g thing. I did use the M-J exerciser 
to do other exercises. I used it to exercise 
my arms, not only in the manner that was demonstrated 
but by holding on to one end and pulling the 
other end with the other hand. I used it to 
exercise my legs also.
White I did a few other exercises,just with the 
exerciser. I yanked around a little bit on it, 
as Jim indicated. But I also did some exercises 
in which I pressed pretty hard up against the 
ITI A I


232 CO NflDENTIAL
11.8 Inflight Phonocardiogram (M-4)
front end of the spacecraft; I tried to tense my 
legs and tense my stomach and arms, and I tried 
to exercise in this condition. I probably did 
that a lot more than I did anything with the 
exerciser.
McDivitt To the best of my knowledge we didn't have any 
equipment problems. About the end of the second 
day my sensors started itching a little. I don’t 
know if it was my phonocardiogram or my other sensors.
11.9 Extravehicular Activity
McDivitt Extravehicular activities have been covered 
in great detail earlier Ln the debriefing, I 
don't think we have to go over that again.
11.1 QMiscellaneous
McDivitt In the external observations I did observe three 
satellites, but I think that these were covered 
in detail earlier, and I don't believe we need 
to go over that again here.
White I think that we’ll comment again (we've commented 
on this point before) that the tape recorder is 
the most important piece of equipment that we 
have onboard the spacecraft to record our ob-
C O NFIDENTIAL


€O NriDC NfbV 23 5
servations, times, and other information concern­
ing the experiments. I think the one we have 
onboard with the light located down underneath the 
pilot's right elbow is entirely unsatisfactory. 
I feel that we lost some information on our 
flight due to the light coming on and not being 
observed. We were going ahead with information 
for the tape, but were losing it in this manner. 
I think we ought to correct this deficiency 
prior to the next flight.
McDivitt I concur heartily.
fO NriDENTIAL


234 C O NFIDENTIAL-
12.0 PRE-MISSION PLANNING
12.1 Mission. Plan (Trajectory)
McDivitt It is pretty difficult to debrief this pre-mission 
planning because we had so many pre-mission plans 
that we couldn’t keep track of them all. I think 
that we started too late on the mission planning 
for GT-4, because everyone was concentrating on 
GT-J. Then in the two and a half months that we 
had to do the mission plans, we changed it about 
three or four times, drastically. We not only 
changed the trajectory,but we changed the altitudes 
of insertion; at one time we were shooting for a 87- 
145 orbit and then a 87-161, and then we changed it 
from 90 degree launch azimuth to a" 72 degree launch 
azimuth. We changed how we were going to handle the 
decay of the orbit. All in all, I think our 
mission plan changed just too often.
12.2 Flight Plan
McDivitt Same with the flight plan. We kept changing it 
around and changing it around and changing it 
around, It was really unfortunate. Up until about 
ten days before the flight we were really prepared 
for about two different flights, and finally we got 
C O NFIDENTIAL


C O NFIDENTIAL 23 5
the flight plan nailed down. I think our flight, 
though, was somewhat different than other flights in 
that we did have some real major changes about 
two and a half months prior to the flight. Con­
sequently, we had to expect these things. So, I 
think I'd be the first to admit that I lived with 
these changes, because I had a great desire to do 
the mission that we set out to do.
White We both kind of got to the point where we knew 
that we had a mission to do, and we knew it was 
going to be tough as far as getting a good flight 
plan was concerned, and we were just trying to get the 
the best we could and go.
McDivitt That's right. I think that the situation that 
we finally ended up in was that we tried to have 
a very good launch and first couple of orbits and 
a good last orbit or two. All the stuff in the middle, 
we knew we were going to have to handle real-time.
I finally found myself forced into the situation 
where I couldn't even worry about the middle flight 
plan. We had to lay it out in general and expect 
a great number of changes. This is exactly what 
we did. We handled it in real-time. I'm not 
suggesting that we do this 'for future flights, for
C O NFIDENTIAL ,.


256 C O NFIDENTIAL
I really hate to see us go right on down until 
the last minute before ' we get this information 
prepared. I think it’s too bad, but I think on 
our flight a lot of this just couldn’t be helped 
because of the drastic changes in the flight plan 
in the last two and a half months.
White I don't feel we've got a big beef coming to any­
body. I know a lot of people were working pretty 
hard.
McDivitt That's right. There were a few things on our 
checklist that could have been done earlier, but 
I think the total mission plan,as such,was modified 
at a late date to change the objectives by a great 
amount. We in the crew agreed with the change. It 
almost doubled the amount of work that we had to 
do in those last couple of months, but I think 
that by accepting it and trying to make the thing 
work, we were able to overcome the problem, and it 
was indeed a major problem. A situation that I 
hoped wouldn't occur and did occur on our flight 
concerned the checklist, the data books, the pro­
cedure books, the map for the orbit navigation and 
our charts and graphs. We didn't receive the check­
list and the procedure^ and data books for our flight
G®NFIDENTIA L


257
White
to look at until 8:00 o'clock the night before the 
flight. Consequently, we didn't have a lot of 
time to go through them the way we should have. We 
should have had these books and charts in our hands 
no later than two weeks before the flight. Here 
again there were some extenuating circumstance, but 
I'm not sure that the circumstances were really that 
great. I still think that we should have gotten 
these out earlier. The people down at the Cape 
doing these things worked themselves to the bone 
night and day,practically.to get these things done. 
I have nothing but the highest praise for the people 
from FCSD that came down to do this job. I just 
sort of suspect that we should have gotten started 
on it earlier and that maybe we should have had a few 
more people down there doing it. Any comment on 
this, Ed?
No. This is the thing that I think I was harping 
about a long time before the flight, because I saw 
the same thing happen on CT-5, when the checklist 
came in at the last minute. In fact, the last 
night before the flight. I remember John walking down 
the hall looking at his flight plan and his check­
list and commenting on this surprise and that


258 W IDENTiM
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 no 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 is 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.


C O NFIDENTIAL ^ 259
McDivitt I concur wholeheartedly.
White They may not like everything about them, but I think 
that they proved their value with us in our flight. 
I sure would rather use something,and use it well, 
than use something that may be a little bit better 
and use it poorly.
McDivitt Okay. I think that covers the flight plan topic, 
don’t you?
White Yes sir.
12 .J Spacecraft Changes
McDivitt Here again we had some changes that were brought 
about by the change in flight plan, but I think we 
handled all of these adequately. I just don't think 
that we ought to use GT-4 as an example as to what 
should be done on a flight, as far as no change and 
things like that. I feel that if we don't have the 
equipment onboard the spacecraft checked out and 
ready for service by the time the spacecraft leaves 
St. Louis, they shouldn't fly on the flight. I've 
felt like that since the time I got assigned to this 
flight, and I still feel that that's the way to do 
it, unless you have a major change for a worthwhile 
reason.
White I was sure wondering right to the very end if they
C O NFIDENTIAL


?40 CO NFIDENTIAL
'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 JO 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. Instead, they put them 90 degrees to 
where I had the lines. I can't believe they would do 
something like that. I'm not really complaining. 
I think they did a pretty good job.
McDivitt Do you have anything else on spacecraft changes?
White No.
12.4 Mission Rules
White I thought this was one of the smoother points.
McDivitt What? Mission rules?
White Mission rules.
C O NFIDENTIAL


12.5 Experim ents
^C O NFIDENTIAL,. 2,1
McDivitt So do I. I don't really have any comment. I 
think we had a very good set of mission rules, and 
I don't have much else to say about it.
White I concur. I think we set a record on running 
through the mission rules review, and I have one 
recommendation to make. I recommend highly that the 
crew review their rules thoroughly prior to the 
meeting and send their disagreements to Flight 
Operations Division,so that they can either concur 
with them and incorporate them,or disagree and then 
iron the differences out on the major things before 
you come to the mission rules meeting. Then, 
you'll find that you sail right through in just 
the first meeting, and this is exactly what we did.
going to fly over, the whole JO degrees north to
McDivitt I think we had some pretty good pre-mission planning 
on our experiments, except D-6, and I think the 
people in FCSD,specifically fell down on the job. 
They did not prepare the 3arget Acquisition Folders 
that we needed. They arrived down at the Cape 
about two weeks before the launch with a foot­
thick pile of maps for us to memorize.
White They had a WAC Chart of every place that we were


242
JO degrees south, and that sure isn’t what we needed. 
McDivitt I think that there wan't any imagination used here.
I just feel that the people who were responsible for 
performing this duty fell down on the job completely, 
and did nothing whatsoever but talk about it. When 
we really got around to flying this thing they didn't 
have a thing for us. It turned out that the people 
who finally ginned up the maps for us were the 
people from the Department of Defense Office here 
who were monitoring the thing from the technical 
standpoint. I sort of felt that this target;' 
acquisition stuff was a function of FCSD, and as 
a matter of fact the people who were concerned with 
it led me to believe this. When we got around 
to flying the flight, we found that there wasn't 
any way to acquire these targets. They hadn't done 
any work with it at all, so I think that this is 
a real low point in the FCSD.
White They didn't even have what I would consider a 
satisfactory method of calling the information up 
to us.
McDivitt No, to put it bluntly it was screwed up and un­
worked upon. I think the planning for all the 
other experiments was adequate.
flO NFIDENTIM-


GeNHDENTIAL-r 24 5
White We had. one area where we were a bit too ambitious, 
and. thia was in the stars for the Air Force D-% 
We reviewed this, also, so there was no lack of 
planning. It just turned out that using these 
stars in the sequence that we had for them,with 
the type of fuel constraints that we had imposed 
upon us, we just couldn't effectively run the ex­
periment without using a groat deal of fuel.
McDivitt Yes. And I think that this came about just because 
of a lack of knowledge on everyone's part, on just 
what we could handle in the spacecraft and the 
rates that the stars move through the skies.
White That was something that we learned on this flight,
McDivitt I think so. I think that's part of the qualitative 
data 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 any 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 think 
that the technical aspect of D-6 was one of the 
best briefed of all the experiments. The DOD people
UauriDFNB AU,


244
who were responsible for it had some of the most 
detailed, and thorough briefing guides and forms for 
us on the equipment, and we were more briefed on the 
equipment. It was just the procedures that were 
lacking.
White Yes, I felt that I knew the equipment and its assembly and
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 245 
targets was a pretty simple-minded approach in trying 
to solve this problem, I thought.
McDivitt I don’t think I have anything else on experiments.
White Nope.
CO NFIDENTIAL


C O NFIDENTIAL - 24 5
12.6 Training Activities
McDivitt Well, I wouldn't do anything differently.
White Jim, I wouldn't either. That's one of the 
highlights, I think, of our mission that we 
were well trained for it; and I felt in all 
respects we were well trained. I don't be­
lieve I'd add anything extra, and there's 
nothing I think I'd take out, either.
McDivitt Well, I think that the training went along just 
about as we'd planned it and hoped it would 
work. I do feel that the simulators didn't 
provide us quite the training that we needed 
early enough in the program. I think the 
simulator here in Houston was too busy inter­
facing with MCC and switching from one 
building to another and updating to "5” 
configuration and a whole bunch of other things. 
We never really got it the "4" configuration. 
The one down at the Cape took too long too convert 
from the GT-3 to the GT-4 configuration. As a 
matter of fact, as early as about two weeks 
before launch I had done four reentires on the 
simulator down there.
C O NFIDENTIAL


24 6 C O NFIDENTIAL
White I did four for the whole time.
McDivitt Is that right?
White My total reentries were four. I remember I 
got three that day before the launch. I have 
one thing, though, Jim, that I think that I 
would do differently.
McDivitt Okay, what's that?
White Now that I know what kind of checklist I need 
and what kind of procedures books and data 
books that I need, I'd have those things ready 
a month ahead of time. I'd use them and get so 
familiar with them and iron any little bugs 
out. We still had some bugs in our books.
McDivitt 'That' s right.
White It was a little hard to use. It was a little 
hard to locate things in there. And if I did 
anything differently, I'd put my emphasis real 
early on getting my checklist and data books 
up even though I know fully well that they'll 
change in some little respects right up to the 
flight, but I'd get them out so I'd have them. 
We didn't have anything up to a week or eight 
days before the flight.
C O MFIDENTIAt


C O NFIDENTIAL  24 7
McDivitt That's right. The things like how to do the 
experiments shouldn't change. They should 
stay exactly the same. The operational checks 
should remain the same, and maybe the flight 
plan will change a little, but you really 
could have most of those books done long in 
advance.
White Then you know exactly what information you're 
going to take up on the flight with you and 
can get this laid out long in advance. I think 
this is one bit of experience that we could 
pass on to the guys coming behind, particularly 
the ones that haven't flown before, at least 
in Gemini'—just what information we took along 
and the reasons why we took it and what our 
recommendations would be and what we would want 
to take now. Because remember you and I sat up 
there the night before the launch and sifted 
through a pile of stuff and decided just exactly 
what we really wanted to take.
McDivitt Of course, on the other hand we knew what we 
wanted. I think we were just looking for it 
in that pile of junk that we had on the table.
C eNRDLNTIA L,


248 C O NFIDENTIAL
White Yes,
McDivitt We had that list of things that we’d made up.
White Decided we were going to take. If I had it to 
do over again, I think I'd have this all in 
mind earlier.
McDivitt Yes.
White You and I, two weeks before the flight, I don’t 
think,fully knew exactly what we wanted, and it 
wasn't ready for us then, anyhow.
McDivitt Yes. You're right. Matter of fact, some of 
the stuff we took was our own personal stuff, 
like those star charts.
White Yes.
McDivitt And that polar star chart was mine and that
Mercator was yours.
White Right.
C O NFIDENTIAL


C eNriDC NHAL 24 9
15.1 G O/N O G O'S
13.0 MISSION CONTROL
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 FLA and CLA Updates
McDivitt PLA's and CLA updates, I thought, went 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 was deficient. I don't 
believe they gave any indication of what our 
electrical consumption had been, up till very 
near the end of the flight, and they informed
rW HD ENTIAT.


250 <O bjTIDC NTIAL
us that we were 1J0 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, bur 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 CAMS profile. This might be a part of 
it to be sure.
McDivitt Yes. That would be a good idea,
15 .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
C O NflDENTIAL


SQ N HDEM TIAL 251
says that there was a misunderstanding between 
us. They sent up to do the MSC-10, and then 
they said not to do the MSC-10. Do it later. 
We didn't get the message.
White I dicta't hear that.
McDivitt Yes. I thought all the flight planning was 
good except in this one instance that we're 
talking about. We were directed to do MSC-10 
in one pass, and then before it was done, we 
were directed to start another check. We got 
this information pretty late before we started 
the experiment and hence didn't get it. We 
didn't check over the times ourselves and I 
guess we should have. So that when we got 
around to doing it, we found ourselves running 
into the situation where we were supposed to be 
doing two experiments at the same time. Fortun­
ately, I think we were able to accomplish all 
the objectives of both experiments, but there 
was no need to hurry when we were up there for 
four days.
White Jim, I've got another one too. I've thought 
a lot about it. I thought about this one before
" W N FroPN Tb M ,


252 €ON FIDEM TIAl
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 FDD 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'll unsnarl it all 
right, but, boy, if we could've been putting 
all our times into those tapes and on our data 
books in straight elapsed-time increments, and even 
CON FIDEN TIAL


CON riDCN TIM 255
when it gets into long time, you know, fourteen 
day flights, you can still put in 430 and 20 
seconds as well as you can the regular Greenwich 
Mean Time.
McDivitt Yes.
White I think that it wouldn’t cost us any more to 
have Omega make us a ten-hour watch and fix 
these dials up on it so that we could keep 
tra ck of 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 were forced to run the mission in 
both elapsed and Greenwich Time, and I 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.
CON FIDE TIM


254 SSgHPEHTIAt
13 -5 System s
McDivitt Okay. Mission Control System. I think the 
Mission Control on this flight was nothing short 
of excellent. We got all the information from 
the ground that we needed. We didn't get 
bothered by them unnecessarily, I don't believe.
White They were there when you needed them.
McDivitt They were there when we needed them. That's 
right. I have nothing but praise for the ground 
control on this flight. How about you, Ed?
White I did too, and I had the feeling up there that
I had confidence in what they were doing down 
there and in the decisions that were being made, 
I felt that when I needed information that the 
source was available down there and I could 
always get it. That's a very good feeling.
C O NFIDENTIM


*£©NH& £W W Ak 255
14.0 TRAINING
14-1 Gemini Mission Simulator
McDivitt Okay. Over on Training now. The first topic 
is Gemini Mission Simulator and I think we 
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-J's launch, and about six weeks 
after the launch it still wasn't doing itIs 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
^QMFIDENTiAk


256 ■CON riDCN TIAf
imtil 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 Well, not quite that bad, Jim.
McDivitt Well. Okay. We did get a lot of training 
from it, but I think that the turn-around time 
is completely inadequate. It made the job for 
the flight crews a lot tougher than it should 
have been.
White I don't know really what the problem is, but I 
think the people down there are working hard, 
and when things were working right, the train­
ing was outstanding. But, gee, there’s just too 
much time when things weren't working right.
McDivitt '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.
CON FIDEN TIAt


C O NFIDENTIAL 257
White
When it arrived down at the Cape, it was com­
pletely inadequate for the job, and I can’t 
understand why that program wasn't checked out 
in better shape when it went down there.
I think, also, they're caught as second-rate ci­
tizens as far as keeping their simulators up to 
date and getting the latest spacecraft changes 
in them. They seem to be way behind the space­
craft and indicated to me that the system did 
not permit them to update the simulator with the 
speed with which it ought to be updated to train 
the crews properly. The things that were 
characteristic of Gemini 4 were being incor­
porated in the simulator down there in the last 
two or three weeks when they should have been 
incorporated in the first two or three weeks 
after the changeover from GT-3 to GT-4. I think 
we just have to work on a faster processing of 
the changes in getting the pieces of equipment 
and the changes out to the simulator so that 
they can be incorporated in it. Once they got 
the changes down there, they got them incorpor­
ated into the simulator, seemed like, pretty
C O NFIDENTIAL


258 COKIDEN TIAt
fast. As long as they weren't there, they 
couldn't update that simulator. Another thing 
that I'll, for the life of me, never understand 
is where in the world the food Doxes were for 
that simulator down there. I think somebody 
should explain just why it took about one month 
to locate a pair of food boxes and put them on 
the simulator down there. 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 these food boxes were ordered 
a year in advance, 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 Cape simulator quick 
enough. I came home here to Houston and found 
that we had a complete set of good food boxes 
in the Houston simulator; whereas,the one down 
at the Cape did not have any at all. This sort
eON HDEN TIKL


259- £OIW W W
of goes along with putting the following 
missions in front of the mission that's about 
ready to go. One last comment that I would 
like to make on the simulator is that we made 
a mistake in building it so that it would only 
tilt up 50 degrees. This lying on your back 
in a simulator is for the birds. You can sit 
up in it a lot longer than you can lie on your 
back. Also, everything that you have to do 
when you're lying on your back is about five 
times harder than it is when you're sitting up— 
nothing at all like zerc g. I feel strongly 
that we should look into some method of making 
this simulator go all the way up to a 90-degree 
point.
White Here, here! One other thing on this simulator, 
too, while we’re thinking about it. I think, 
there's no question in my mind, the most effective 
trainer we have is our mission simulator. I 
think it could be made about a third more 
effective if we had a decent out-the-window 
horizon provided. We didn’t have anything that 
I'd call satisfactory available to us prior to
C O NFIDENTIAL


260
flight.
McDivitt
14.2 LTV Simulation
McDivitt
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
White
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.
I hope they can get it so it works as well as
McDivitt
it does up there,down here, because one thing 
that impressed me was that you could go up there 
and be able to run 70 runs.
That's right. In a day.
White And not sit around waiting for things to get
McDivitt
fixed all the time.
I think on the one day we went up there, Ed


14-3 Centrifuge
rA ffl-lb L !' f I L A L  261
and I together,in one day, had about 160 runs.
White Yes. Pretty close to that.
McDivitt 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?
White 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 l'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


262
know pretty well what it feels like. I think 
that it’s good, in moderation, hut I certainly 
don’t think that you should over-train on it. 
It's not something that you need to train on 
every time for every flight.
14-4 Translation and Docking Trainer
McDivitt Translation and Docking Trainer. I thought 
that the Translation and Docking Trainer was an 
excellent trainer for the D-6 pass that we did, 
the Apollo Tracking Pass. I think that the 
simulation that we set up at Martin Denver was 
also an excellent tracking task for this, and I 
sort of felt that we got the techniques from 
these two trainers 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, hut I thought 
it was quite good for the tracking aspects and 
also for thruster failure.
McDivitt That’s right. 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


263
14.5 Planetarium
thruster that failed. I used it quite a bit 
shortly before the flight to practice the 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.
McDivitt Yes. I think it is too. I think it is too.
Anything else on Translation and Docking
Trainer?
White No.
just doesn't have the quality to provide the
McDivitt Planetarium.
White 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


264 ^1^2i»iB®M
information that you want to get. I have one 
other comment, though, as far as the stars are 
concerned. I think that probably we got as 
good training with our stars during our night 
flights as we got during the planetarium work.
McDivitt I 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 star 
chart was probably the thing that really imbedded 
the location of these stars in my mind. I kept 
looking at them night after night after night 
after night, and when we flew I was convinced 
that I could go up there and find all those 
stars that I needed to 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 didn't know the
exact name of a particular star in a constel­
lation, we could always tell which star it was in


“<^!: 265
the constellation and. be able to find, the name 
of the star after we got back here to the ground. 
But I do think that the star training we had 
was worth every minute of it.
White Yes, I'd go back some more, too. I'd go back 
to the planetarium some more.
McDivitt That's right. It's one of the things that you 
really have to keep at all the time, because you 
can never go out at night and look at all the 
stars in the sky. You can only see a certain 
restricted area, and it takes a lot of looking 
to see the whole sky. By the time you look 
long enough to see the whole sky, it's six months 
since you've seen certain stars, unless you 
want to stay up all night.
White Spacecraft orientation. I think the little devices 
they ginned up at the Morehead Planetarium are 
real good in this respect. You can sit there and 
they can simulate your orbit. They can put you 
up in the barber chair and you look out and see 
approximately the number of stars you can see 
out the spacecraft, and I thought that's about 
what I could see out of the spacecraft. When I


^iiio^ii^i
14.6 Systens Briefings
actually got up close to the window, when we 
were 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.
McDivitt Systems Briefings. We actually had briefings on 
every system in the spacecraft, and there are 
quite a number of them. The schedule was such 
that we had a general briefing here at Manned 
Spacecraft Center on each and every one of these 
systems. I think we had a second briefing here 
at the Manned Spacecraft Center on certain 
systems like the ECS before we went to the 
altitude chamber. We had a number of briefings 
on the systems again up at McDonnell by 
McDonnell engineers in St. Louis. We went down 
to the Cape, we had another general briefing by 
the McDonnell engineers at the Cape probably six 
weeks before the flight, and then about ten days 
before the flight we had a final systems 
briefing where they just discussed any changes


267
14•7 Flight Experiments
that had been made since the previous briefing 
and brought us up to date on some of the things 
that had occurred during 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?
White No. I liked 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.
McDivitt Right. Flight Experiments. Simulations. We 
didn't have to do any simulations on MSC-1, -2, 
and -5. 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


268
and we did indeed go make a couple of dry runs 
and a couple of wet runs on the x-ray table to 
make sure that we could get it done quickly. I 
think this paid off. We never had any delay due 
to these x-rays. We certainly all knew how to 
use the exerciser. And the phonocardiogram 
needed no practice. S-5 and 3-6 did not require 
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-l, and D-9 as the experi­
ments that required simulation prior to flight. 
As we said earlier, we felt that the Translation 
and Docking Trainer and the Martin Denver simu­
lation for the D-6 experiment wore very valuable. 
They gave us the techniques that we needed to 
perform this thing in space. Gemini Mission 
Simulator was invaluable, too, for everything— 
for experiments, operational checks and for the 
whole mission.
White As far as any really D-9 work, though, with the 
simulator, all we could go through were kind of


L 269
cursory procedures. There was no star field or 
anything to utilize, which I think would he 
useful. If we had a decent star field, we could use it 
out of the GMS. Also, on D-6 the GMS did not provide 
us anything we could use. There were procedures, 
right. And like you said, the Translation and 
Docking was all right for D-6, but, practically, 
we had no simulator anywhere that gave us any­
thing that I could get out for D-9.
McDivitt Okay. Are we through with the briefings? We
had a real major briefing that lasted three or 
four days here at the Manned Spacecraft Center 
about four months prior to the flight. Wasn't 
it, Ed?
White Yes. Well, was it that long? It was in March
or April—March wasn't it? Somewhere around 
there.
McDivitt I thought it was later than that. We had our
first real major briefing three months before 
the flight,on the Sth of March, and we had the 
experimenters come to Houston and go over their 
experiments in great detail to explain what they 
wanted and how they wanted us to go about get-


270
White
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.
I've got a comment on D-6 here. Ten days before 
the flight, they came in with the information 
for D—6 and said, "How do you want to run the 
tracking on D-6 and send the information up?" 
This was not the time to bring up this type 
of information or try to make this type of 
decisions. These decisions should have all 
been firmed up at the six-weeks briefing, and 
this is what the six-weeks briefing was for. 
It was to tell us how we were going to run our 
experiments. After that time there weren't 
supposed to be any changes to the procedures,
and 10 days before the flight was just to 
incorporate any last-minute changes and solidify


any things that might not he understood too 
well in the procedures. So this is where, I 
think, that the people giving this information 
in D-6 never were with it—as far as getting 
the information ready for us for it.
McDivitt Very good. I concur completely.
White In the future I think the experiments should 
be firmed up by six weeks prior to flight and 
the procedures should be well in hand at that 
time. They shouldn’t drag on and be dragging 
on right on down to a few days before the launch, 
which is exactly what happened on D-6.
McDivitt Okay. Equipment. We had some of the equipment 
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


2?2
White
McDivitt
White
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.
In the 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-


273
ri eel, and became very very familiar with them 
in the months before the flight. I recommend 
very highly that crews that follow in the future 
get the equipment and utilize it so that it 
becomes second nature to them prior to the 
flight.
McDivitt Okay. I don’t think we need any more on that, 
do you?
14-8 Spacecraft Systems Test
McDivitt I think that we learned quite a bit from our 
Spacecraft Systems Tests. We had a great 
number of them in St. Louis and then down at 
the Cape. I think that the amount that we 
learned and the time we spent was a little low. 
I think the ratio of what you got for your hours 
spent was low, but I do feel that it's a neces­
sary thing and that you really should participate 
in this spacecraft testing. There were long 
periods of time when we learned nothing, 
absolutely nothing, but on the other hand we 
got a feel for our spacecraft and saw how a lot 
of the systems were working and the only way 
you can do this is to actually participate in


274
the testing
White You know, it doesn'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 meetings up there at McDonnell 
while our spacecraft was up there progressing 
along through the assembly line. I recommend 
that all crews in the future have representation 
at all those meetings.
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 Enough the need for a representative 
of the flight orewa to be there at the 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


275
14.10 Parachute Training
us right then, I felt fully confident about 
being able to take care of myself out there in 
that water.
White We were well prepared in this area.
time. And if we don’t have enough life rafts
McDivitt Parachute training. I thought that the parachute 
training that we had was good. I thought that 
the parachute training into the water with 
pressure suits on was by far the best that 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 
with, and go through the full inflation and not 
skimp on a thing.
McDivitt You get all tangled up in a parachute just the 
way you're going to get all tangled up in the 
parachute when—
White That's right. Inflate the life rafts and inflate 
the Mae Wests and inflate the whole works every


276
to do it every time, see to it that 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 leam, 
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.
White I've got a comment. Not on that, but a thing 
that fits right in.
McDivitt Shoot.
White I think that the reentry simulations that we did 
should be made a regular part of the preparations 
for flight. It's just as important to me as the 
launch simulation. I think there should be 
regular reentry simulation for the preparations 
prior to the flight in the same manner as the


277
launch simulations.
McDivitt I think so too. I think those reentry simula­
tions we did that day were certainly worthwhile. 
We only had to do a few of them to leam 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. W e 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
■liow~-we_--wan t ed this information given to us. I


27S
think that during the flight it certainly 
proved that it was worthwhile, because that was 
the way we got it, and we were 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. Eki?
White No.
14.13 Zero-G Flight
McDivitt The zero-g flights are the next topic. I sort 
of feel that the zero-g flights were one of our 
most valuable training tools, 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?
White 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-


279
craft zero-g, that you get up there and work the 
procedures out thoroughly between not only the 
guy getting in and out but between the two guys 
that are sitting in the seats. This is the way 
we flew it. We didn’t go up there and fly just 
one guy jumping in and out the hatch. We went 
up there and flew with the guy in both seats , 
whether the man in the left seat actually worked 
all the time or not. There were times when he 
had to help, and in our flight it paid off, 
because there was a time when Jim had to help, 
and he knew exactly what the problems 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


280
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 operational 
check by itself without regard to what went 
before or what went after. I think this is the 
kind of training you really need on these long 
duration flights. Anything else there, Ed?
White No. I concur heartily. I think that practicing 
it piecemeal is the only way you can do it.
McDivitt You have any concluding comments?
White I think we've been making conclusions all day 
long. I think to try to conclude then all, 
we’d never get them.