This document is a preliminary transcript (Part I) derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 5 flight crew technical debriefing. NASA conducted this d…
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GEMINI V
TECHNICAL DEBRIEFING (U)
Part 1
NOTICE: This document may be exempt from
public disclosure under the Freedom of lnfor•
mation Act (5 U.S.C. 552). Requests for its re
lease to persons outside the U.S. Government
should be handled under the provisions of
NASA Policy Directive 1382.2.
THIS MAT E RIAL CONTAINS INF'ORM.ATION AFl"IECTING
THE NATIONAL OEFENSE OF THE UN I TEO STATES
WITHIN THE MEANING OF' TH£ £8P'IONAGIE LAW 5 ,.
TITLE 11. U . S.C, SE CTION 793 ANO 794 . T HE TRANS
M I SSION OR REVELAT I O N Of' WH IC H IN AN Y MANNER
TO AN UNA UTH ORIZED PERSON IS PR OHIB ITE D av L AW.
GROUP 4
OOWNCiftAOEO AT ) V EA R I NTFRVALS,
OECL ASSI F'IEO AFTER 12 VE ARS
t
" 6 () t JF18Er4TI;\ b
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PRELIMINARY
GT- 5 FLIGHT CREW DEBRIEFING TRANSCRIPT
PART I
Prepared By
Spacecraft Operations Branch
Flight Crew Support Division
September 1 , 1965
This material contains informati on affecting the
national defense of the United States within the
meaning of the Espionage Laws , Ti tle 18. U. S. C.
Section 793 and 794, the transmission or revela
tion of which in any manner to an unauthorized
person is prohibited by law.
Gr oup 4 : Downgrade at 3 year intervals
Declassified after 12 years
--- PAGE 3 ---
PREFACE
This preliminary transcript was made from voice tape recordings
of the GT-5 flight crew debriefing conducted August 30, 1965 thru
September 1, 1965 at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy , Florida.
Although all the material contained in this transcript has been
edited, the urgent need for the preliminary transcript by mission
analysis personnel precluded a thorough editorial review prior to its
publication. Errors in this transcript will be corrected as soon as
possible and an official transcript will be published at a later date .
This document contains a transcript of the first part of the
debriefing, during which the crew described the mission generally
from an operational viewpoint . A preliminary transcript of the re
mainder of the debriefing will be published by September 3, 1965. It
will cover systems operations , operational checks, visual sightings,
experiments , pre-mission planning, mission control , and training.
a i eJ~FIDff:!TIAL
--- PAGE 4 ---
9'0Ni;10 ENTll(t
~
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Paragraph Page Number
1.0 COUNTDOWN
1.1 Crew Insertion. . .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. ,1
1.2 Communications . . . . .1
1. 3 Crew Participation and Countdown . .1
1.4 Comfort ......... . .1
1.5 Environmental Control System .2
1.6 Sounds .. .... 2
1.7 Vibrations ........... 2
1.8 Visual ........... .... 3
1. 9 Crew Station Controls and Displays 4
2. 0 POWER.ED FLIGHT
2.1 Lift- Off Cues . .... 6
2. 2 Roll Pr ogram 7
2.3 Pitch Program . 8
2 . 4 Aerodyna.mci.cs. .... 8
2 . 5 Environmental Control System . . 9
......
2 . 6 Maximum q .... 9
.. . .
2 . 7 Windshear 9
.....
2. 8 DCS Update . .... 9
2. 9 Engine 1 Operati on. 9
. .. .
2. 10 POGO. 10
.
2 . 11 Engine 2 Status .. 12
2 . 12 Acceleration g ' s .... .
12
.... .
2 ,13 BEXJO 12
...
2 . 14 Staging
2 . 15 Engine 2 Ignition
.... 13
13
..
2. 16 RGS Initia t~ ~4
..
2,18 GO/ NO GO
.
2. 17 Fairing Jettison 15
20
2, 19 Systems Sta tus 21
2 . 20 SECO . 21
2. 21 Steeri11g , . 22
I'
...... 3.0 INSERTION
3. 1 Post- SEXJO ....... ..... . . 23
. . .. . . .
3. 2 SEXJO + 20 Seconds 26
30
3.3 Inser tion Activities
4.0 ORBITAL FLIGHT 38
Wf.lE>ENTl~E
--- PAGE 5 ---
Page Number
5.0 RETROFIRE
5. 1 !R- 36 Events . . .168
5. 2 ~R- 256 Events . . 172
5.3 ~ - 1 Events . . . . . 173
5 ,4 1R- O Events . . . . . . 174
5.5 Retropack Jettison . . 182
5 . 6 Communications . . 183
6 .0 REENTRY
6.1 400 K . . . . . . . . 194
6 . 2 Acceleration profile . . 196
6.3 Spacecr aft control . .197
6.4 100 000 Feet . . . 197
6.5 50 000 Feet . . . . . 198
6.6 35 000 checklist items . . 202
6 . 7 Commtmi cati ons . . . . 202
6. 8 10 . 6K barostat . . . . . 202
6 , 9 Main chute deployment . 203
6 . 10 Single point release . . 204
6 . 11 Blood pressure measurements . . 204
6 . 12 Postmain checklist items . . 205
7. 0 LANDING AND RECOVERY
7. 1 Impact. . . . .206
7,2 Checklists . . . . 210
7.3 Communications . . 211
7.4 Systems Configuration . . 211
7 , 5 Spacecraft Status . . . 212
7 . 6 Post- Landing Activities . 213
7, 7 Comfort . . . . . .. . 214
7. 8 Recovery Force Personnel . . 214
7 . 9 Egress . . . 214
7 . 10 Survival Gear . 215
7. 11 Crew Pickup . 215
--- PAGE 6 ---
1
1 .0 COUNTDOWN
1.1 Crew Insertion
Cooper The crew insertion , I thought, went very well .
Conrad Yes , we had the suiting thing down on my cuffs and
everything so that we got right ou t t here and, boy,
th& Gunter was ready for us and i n we went .
Cooper They were all set . There were no delays and every
thing went exceedingly well on t he gantry.
1 . 2 Communications
Cooper Communications , I thought were good and no probl em at
all on communications, and everything went real well.
Conrad Yes , Stoney handled that whole thing real well .
Cooper All right, volume was still down on the little comm
sets in the transfer van there . That ' s Stoney' s
little improvement .
1 . 3 Crew Participation
in Countdown
Cooper Crew participation in the countdown was good . I
didn ' t see anything at all wrong.
Conrad Yes , we weren ' t rushed . We felt t hat we had enough
time to get the switches in the right position and
just ever ything went real good.
1.4 Comfort
Cooper Comfort was real fine . We went on to two suit fans
--- PAGE 7 ---
2
right away. I thought we felt plenty cool the
whole time.
Cooper ECS was good. Never any problem with it .
1.6 Sounds
Cooper Sounds , I thought the only sounds tha·; we had that
were abnormal we'd been warned about. When the
prevalves opened, they were fairly loud and when
the engines gimballed they were quite loud , and
both of those we were aware of the fact that they
would cause a lot of noise and vibrat:.on.
Conrad There is something that really dings t he booster
too when they start .. . . I don ' t--whet her they
drop a platform away.
Cooper It ' s before they start moving the gant ry.
Conrad Just before they start lowering that erector. Boy,
something really, like it really bangs tha t booster ,
I thought. I still don't know what it is , but , of
course, we ' d been up there with the erector down
twice before that so we were sort of e~tting used
to those kind of sounds.
1. 7 Vibration
Cooper Okay , vibrations we already covered tr.at . Sounds ,
vibrations.
--- PAGE 8 ---
3
1.8 Visual
,.
Cooper Visual . Nothing....
Conrad Oh , yes , wait a minute, I started getting this win
dow fogging .
Cooper Well, let ' s cover that under the right area .
Conrad Well, it was actually in the countdown when the
erector went down before liftoff .
Cooper Well , okay , allright .
Conrad I mean we still had it later .
Cooper Well, you want to cover that now then in systems .
Conrad Well, is that what this means , is visual, or does
that just mean something else?
FCSD REP Yes, that ' s before liftoff. Powered flight is next .
Conrad Yes , well t lri,s-tra-,:5pened 6e:f'1
Cooper / Allright , even before liftoff , hat this
really is completely unforgiveable. Each window
was filthy. Just fogged completely over, and it was
on the inside of the outer pane of glass . It was
I
within the sealed unit of glass , and it was so
foggy when they lowered the erector that it
it was frozen over solid, I
d neither could
Conrad Well, it had fogged over before they lowered the
(j()tqflDENTIA[ ,.
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4
erector and then the guys heated it w:.th hot air to
make it go away and that just made th:.ngs wor se when
they lowered the erector .
Cooper It didn't make it go away all the way.
Conrad That I s right it made'"it- ~ actually.
Cooper / L my side in my window ~etweer. the inside
pane and the two outside panes of\\8-~s , I had a
sma ll bee , and I had a fly, and I had\several
flecks of things that I had written u~ before and
never got corrected, and they were the whole flight,
and I ' m sure they will show up on all the films
and everything. Now between the outer sealed panes
of glass there were numerous little specks and
of stuff and throughout the flight as . .. well , we ' ll
cover that later, but that was even 7rore the flight
started . The windows were not pla/n a nd were not in
good shape to go forthe--f~.
1 . 9 Crew Station Contr ols
and Displa_ys
Conrad I think the Gemini cockpit is a pretty good cockpit .
Cooper I think in general that crew stations eontrols and
displays were pretty adequate .
Conrad I 've got a couple comments on switches and things,
but these are . . . .
~FIDENTIAL -
--- PAGE 10 ---
5
FCSD REP Okay , how about the time you spent in there on
prelaunch . Do you think that this is about right?
Cooper Yes , yes , I think that this is just about right .
I think that if you cut it down too much more
than that you are going to be ....you could cut it
down some more , there's no doubt . .. .
Conrad It ' s that cabin purge cycles when you ' re not doing
anything really , and that ' s excellent time .
Cooper ... that you can cut it down, but that ' s the thing
that takes the time for both the ground crews ...
and that ' s lost time. I don ' t know . ...
Conrad I don ' t think you want to rush the crew and now
our count that second day went by the clock, boy.
We got in there at the right time . We counted down
and lifted off on, and I didn ' t feel that I was
rushed , and I didn ' t feel that I sat in there for
an excessive amount of time .
Cooper No , I didn ' t either. I thought that it went just
about right , time wise .
,. Conrad Long as there ' s no holds in the count everything' s
great .
--- PAGE 11 ---
6 FtE>ENTI L
2.0 POWERED FLIGHT
2.1 Lif t Off Cues
Cooper Okay , lift- off cues , CAP COM . CAP CO~ didn ' t come
into the act until later . Stoney counted us down
thru ignition and lift-off and then CAP COM picked
us up at l ift- off . Motion is an excellent clue .
There ' s doubt in your mind when you ljft- off . You
know, the second you lift- off that yot .' ve lifted .
Vibration was very low.
Conrad It had dropped out almost completely a.t lift- off,
felt that shaking was very l i ght.
Cooper There was very little vibrati on at all . Okay,
vibration , very l ow. Noise I thought, was quite
low .
Conrad I was particularl y aware of the noises of goi ng
through the max Q regionar y thing . Oh , t his is
lift-off again . I thought the noises were very
well at l iftoff . You know the engines were
running from the outside before , you know, and man
they really make a racket , but from where you are
it's pretty quite . You know there running. You
can here them , there's no doubt about that , but .. .
Cooper Okay , on visual I don ' t . . . . We had a very cl ear
day . There weren't even any clouds in sight on
~ IDENTI~
--- PAGE 12 ---
C.(&)Hft0ENTI:,\~~
au, !to
7
our sight as we were lifting off, and I couldn't
tell any visual cues to lift- off, could you?
Conrad You had the feeling that you were moving visually.
After you get your ro ll program you see it visually
and you can see the pitch program starting visually,
but just at first l ift-off you don't really have
any visual cues . Cockpit displays are just l ike
advertised . The two stage - one lights go out, and
. .. just l ike the simulator.
2 . 2 Roll Program
Conrad Yes , I watched roll program on the gyro, I was
watching for it to come i n on time and in glancing
up when the roll program started I was still
looking at nothing but blue sky, but I was aware
visually as you say that the booster was rolling.
Yes , you can have a airplane when you are looking
at nothing but blue sky and start a motion and you
may not know exactly what the motion is, but you
know t hat you are moving.
Cooper Now on this cockpit display, something that I got two
different answers to from different people on how the
gyro and the actual case was going to be set and it
suddenly dawned on me that they actually set the gyro
so that you are launching down the 90 degrees. You're
--- PAGE 13 ---
8
progressi ng down to 90 degrees line , e. la the
simulator, although the booster sets on 85 degrees
and when you turn to 72 degrees launch azimuth
you are rolling clockwise so far as tr.e crew is
concerned .
Conrad You roll to zero .
Cooper But you are rolling to is real ly to O on the gyro
as precessed around so that you are net really
setting on the actual launch azimuth, you are
actually setting so that when you stai§'e on over i n
yaw then pitch over then in your yaw your on the in
plane line.
FCSD REP You ' re coming down the zero line . Y01.:. 1 re yawing
down the zero l i ne .
Cooper That 's right , and I kept getting diffe.rent answers
on this and this is in fact the case. Roll program
was exactly right on time and ended e>:actly on time.
2 . 3 Pitch Program
Cooper Pitch program started exactly on time.
2. 4 Aerodynamic
Cooper Aerodynamic was nothing new or differE:nt about it .
It was just standard. We build up to the noises at
max Q; the noise built up to gradual level and the
vibration and quantity built up to ma>:~ and then
dropped off very rapidly J.1'd:i!Jitely thereafter.
FlDENTIAL
--- PAGE 14 ---
CONFICtleNTIA~ • 9
2. 5 ECS
Conrad Right on the button.
Cooper ECS was right on the money , no problem at all .
Max Q we ' ve already stated .
Conr ad The cabin s ealed a little bit high like they said
it would . I forget the number. It was about 5.8.
Cooper About 5.8 or 9 and just gradually dwindled back down .
Conrad And just after we got in there by the time I looked
at it again after insertion everything it bled down
on our gage to 4.9, our gage read a little low . I
think the actual reading , you will pr obably find
the cabin actually was 5.1 1 but the whole rest of
t he flight the gage never budged off the 4.9.
Cooper The gage stayed right there like it was glued .
2 . 7 Wind Shear
Cooper The wind shear , we had none and , certainly nothing
that we could tell , but as I understand we ' ve been
told that for that day anyway we had almost negible
wind shear.
2 . 8 DCS Updates
Cooper DCS updates were right on time .
FCSD REP You had two updates?
Conrad 1 plus 45 , 2 plus 25 .
2 , 9 Engine 1 Operat i on
Cooper The engine 1 operation couldn ' t have been better,
----~~K)ENTIAL
--- PAGE 15 ---
10
..
It was beautiful. Just now in between engine 1
operation and engine 2 here we have t wo items we
will insert in here .
2, 10 POGO
Cooper One was POGO.. At 2 mi nutes and 5 seconds we started
picking up POGO and I got a fairly gcod amount of
POGO on through , stopping just at abcut 5 to 7
seconds before staging. POGO dropped. cl ean out
exactly the same time there that we programmed POGO
on the early days.
Conrad Yes, that one surprised me . We ' d he1:.rd and read
tbat both John 8{!.d Gus ' s and Jim and Ed ' s f l i ght
that they were hardly even aware of IDGO and boy
when it came in on us it was loud anc. clear and ,
(
well Gordon , neither one of us could talk hardly;
we were really vibrating with it and I was hard
pressed to read the displays.
-------
By golly , if I had
to re__:-t
ad -;-:h;--e- num;-er
- --:b- _ on
__ _ , e a:·-i~-s p~r-ays
___ I-
.,,. think I woul d
have been hard pressed to do it, because we really
had it pretty good.
Cooper Yes , the rate ... the amplitude of them were such
. . . 11 cps frequency and the ampl itude of them was
such that you were on -- you were on the marginal
--- PAGE 16 ---
11
edge of reading of any large gage and any fine
reading that you had to read, you would never be
able to read any numbers. It was exactly like
the POGO we did all along on the program up at
Ames and as the exact amplitude , I don ' t lmow, but
i t was , . . . . . I think we don ' t want that ~ POGO.
It was no par icu ar y upsetting to me , because I
really was fai rly familiar with POGO having been
through a ll that POGO program, but this thing kind
of t i ckled me that we got it to see that we had
still hadn ' t solved it , but I don ' t think . . .
its something you don ' t want because if you had ot~er
things going wrong during that period of t i me it
would make it vecy difficult to say what you had
wrong or what
Conrad It didn ' t upset me , but it surprised me , you lmow,
because I just wasn't expecting POGO.
RCSD REP Wbat g- level would you estimate it to be?
Cooper Well , we were sneaking right up there .
FCSD REP I mean the POGO .
Cooper Oh, it was right at about 5 g ' s . ·\ 1•
FCSD REP Well , I mean plus or minus amplitude .
Cooper Well I , my estimate on it was that it was something
--- PAGE 17 ---
12
on the order of maybe three quarters of a g . Well, I
don I t !mow whether it was that high c,r not .
Conrad I thought it was at least a half , if not better .
Apparently it wasn't that high . I ws.s really
surprised. Like I say, we were really getting the
Cooper
ramrod out of it.
--
s beyond what we selected as we th~ht
should be the cutoff. It was more tr.an wh~ we
l
had selected at Ames as being max acc 7.
in this.I passed up ver b • there one of
the first things that happened immediately about
the time that we got the pitch program was the
IGS Stage 2 fuel needle failed in thE full -max
deflection position. And it came back on and was
reading after staging briefly and thEn failed again
during staging. It was intermittent .
2 . 11 Engine 2 Status
Cooper Engine 2 status stayed ... was perfect . There was
not anything wrong at al l.
2 .12 Acceleration G' s
Cooper Acceleration g ' s were right on the piofile , were
certainly very pleasant. Nothing wrong at all with them.
2 . 13 BECO
--- PAGE 18 ---
13
Cooper BECO was right on the money .
.
2 . 14 Staging
Conrad Boy, that staging was smooth too .
Cooper They told us that BECO was going to occur early , but
it was
Conrad We did loft a little bit apparently like they said
we woul d because, right a fter staging ....
2. 15 Engine 2 I gnition
Conrad Well , Engine 2 ignition, I wasn't even hardly aware of
that other than we jus t started to get a little , yc,11
know, we just sort of went off the peg at 6 g's and
Gordo said s t aging OK and Engine 2 is good and I
wasn ' t even aware that Engine 2 had lit . You
can ' t hear it, to speak of, but you can feel the
acceleration slowly building up .
FCSD REP Did you see anything visually?
Conrad No , I didn't see anything. I heard the other guys
talking about s ee the flash at the brig. Never
saw a thing and I wasn't aware of any flash out
there either .
I\
Cooper J didn ' t see anything at all at BEDO. The best clue
that I have on my side , is that I see the Fuel
and Oxidizer needles start coming down as the engine
--- PAGE 19 ---
14 •
starts burning. And then they coming c.own fairly
rapidly at first, I mean you get a very definite
motion on them right at first there and. they kind of settled
out. Engine 2 ignition we've already covered.
2.16 RGS Initiate
Cooper RGS initiate right on the money.
Conrad I was going to mention that we had l of t ed and
that we were expected to pitch down a.nd we did when
it picked up RGS.
Cooper It smoothed in very smooth, and the fading was
just right.
Conrad The IGS needle really deflected and I ~as , you know,
I don't think it pitched, it didn't peg- out , but it
did make a large dip and then when the booster
came down just pitched down very smoottly down to
about 75 or 80 degrees, I guess it pitched down
almost 10 degrees.
FCSD REP What rate did it pitch over?
Conrad Very slow, but steady, at just
Cooper It took about 20 seconds I guess to fade it in there .
Conrad The needle came in and made a big deflection and
right after that the booster started pitching and
the needle started back and boy the needl e was
•
--- PAGE 20 ---
CQ~ElDEhJIJA 15
back and thing was right on the money at about 80
degrees. It was a very smooth transition and then
do you remember they were telling, us to look
for this one cps oscillation? Well, I didn't have
rate needl e s like Gordo did, but I wasn't aware of
any oscil lations at any time. That booster was in
pitch and yaw as far as that went
Cooper Those rate needles were like they were glued .
There was never through boost or second stage was
there ever any rate except that one tiny little
rate , one teensy little rate just at when we were
in POGO we got one tiny little longitudinal rate,
'
just one tiny little fleck on a rate, and was the
only one . Otherwise it was just smooth as silk,
the whole time, rate wi se .
2.17 Fairing Jettison
Cooper Fairing jettison. We jettisoned fairings at 3:25
and man do they ever go .
Conrad I counted Gordo down to them. Okay, yes, that ' s
a good point .
Cooper Beside the scanner fairing and the nose fairing go
and when the nose fairing went it went with all
kinds of debris . There were pieces flying all
--- PAGE 21 ---
16
over.
Conrad Yes , and I don't think it went right . I don't
believe it went right , because the Rand R can
was ripped up in the front , and I can show you on
my side the nose went like that and there was some
tape or fiber glass that goes around t he . . ..
It was fiberglass cloth and it was a ll broken loose
in jagged flaps sticking up t hat, you lmow, had
broken loose from a long in here when i.hat cover
went I had decided impression that the cover went
off askew, that it didn 't jettison t he: way i t should
have. And this could be a good point of putting
it back to a fter insertion.
Cooper Well, it ' s supposed to go off askew.
Conrad Yes , well, it just di dn ' t go off clean . That 's why
this was ripped up, see .
Cooper Well , it something somebody might look into , but
you don ' t want to recommend that they put back to
after insertion , because your taking a weight
penalty to carry that all the way up.
Conrad Yes, I realize that , but . . . .
Cooper It was designed to go off ... .
Conrad That was the reason in the first place that they
WIDE
--- PAGE 22 ---
17
moved it up there anyhow, because they weren't ....
Cooper No , the reason they moved it up there was because
they didn ' t have strong enough propulsion on those
squibs and spring combinations or whatever they use .
We never did get a reading on that, but whatever
the total propulsive expulsion system wasn't kick
ing, the scanner fairing wide enough but what they
would come back into the booster. But didn't you
have the distinct impression that the nose fairing
broke into j illions of pieces when it blast .
Conrad I certainly, I certainly , yes . That ' s why wh~n
I say askew , I mean something didn't look right.
I can't put my finger on it, but --
Cooper It came off in many pieces anyway. There were many,
many pieces and the whole area was just filled with
debris .
Conrad Yes, and then , I 'm not sure that that's when we got
all that gl op on our windshiel d, the spots ...
Cooper Well, I noted exactly at that time immediately
after the fairing went, I noted about 5 or 6 , I
saw them hit , 5 or 6 gray splots, just small ones ,
very small little gray- type splots and I was
distinctly looking for that and watching for it and
--- PAGE 23 ---
18
they were not there before they were t'nere and I
;
saw them when they hit. They h it duri:'.l.g all this
debris flying around period .
Conr ad I think that you can s ti11 f i nd them o:'.l. the
windshields . They didn ' t burn off during reentry.
Cooper But they ' re not bad and there are just a few little
scattered ones and I think it might be interesting
t o compare how many you get there vers us and how
many you get when you jettison them in orbit . It
may wel l be that jettisoni ng in orbit would be pre
ferab l e , but I didn ' t f i nd anything objectionable
t o jettisoning where they went , they wenm fine.
It did add a lot of debris and I agree with Pete
there was a big torn something or other out there
which may just be a fiberglass thing that is kind
of . .. ,.
Conrad Yes , I want to get down and look at the R and R and
and I can tell you what it was , describe it a lot
better. We ' ll probably have some pictures of it
too in the camera somewhere. I know it ' ll show
up in some film .
FCSD REP How l ong was this visible? You say there was a big
bunch of stuff out there .
ONFIDENTIAL
--- PAGE 24 ---
19
Cooper There ' s a whole fly . Oh, you mean the debris . It
was gone .
Conrad It was gone like that, but it just looked like the
whole darn thing exploded.
Cooper It looked like it just flew into a jillion pieces.
It was all around you for maybe a period of a
second or two .
Conrad I didn't think it was that much , i t was just gone .
Cooper But it was a defininite period of time when you
were aware of all this debris all over and then
clear . Okay, enough for fairing jettison.
--- PAGE 25 ---
20
2 . l8 GO/NO GO
Cooper GO/NO GO: We never got a GO/NO GO beeause we lost
our number 1 radio in about 4 minutes s ometime just
prior . . . let see we got a . 8 . . . . Wti got a V
over VR of . 8 . We got a GO/NO GO of , ..
FCSD REP You did get a , 8?
Cooper We got a .8 .
Conrad Yes , that comes much later - that com(!S after the
GO/NO GO.
Cooper Yes, that ' s right , okay, well I don ' t remember
ever getting a ... yea , we did, we go·~ MCC GO.
Right we got a GO/NO GO , okay, but then
immediately after . 8 we never got any·':hing at all
from there on until aft er we were insi~rted and gone
to UHF No . 2.
Conrad I think it must be in the antenna problem, I really
do .
Cooper Well , there 's some problem there because the same
thing happened on one of the previous flights and
we definitely and completely lost radio and I
swi tched over just before we inserted, I switched
over to number 2 and then when I call1~d but the
IVI's we were back with them then .
--- PAGE 26 ---
21
2. 19 Systems Status
Cooper System Status everything .. . .
Conrad We did have ... Let me describe the delta P
lights . Shortly after liftoff I got the number 1
fuel cell delta Plight and I reported i t and just
about t he time I reported it , then the number 2
fuel cell delta Plight came on . They s tayed on
all the way through boost and they were on aft er
insertion for ten , fifteen seconds and after that
\ they went right back out again and that) i s it .
It didn't effect anything on the fue y e11 operation,
tn currents , the voltages , / t h i n g stayed fine
other than • bein n----tliere was no other way of
telling the~ was out of tolerance so I don ' t think
it is a problem. We expected it.
Cooper I ' m glad that we had them changed to orange rather
than red .
Conrad Yeah, yeah .
Cooper Systems status in addition to that I don ' t think we
had any systems that were exactly right , except
the radio and the acceleration as we had expected
it . We were right on the profile. SECO was ...
2. 20 SECO
!Oa!IIAL
--- PAGE 27 ---
22
Conrad I think we burned out at, Gordo, 7 anc. 1/4 g's.
Cooper Right. SECO was exactly on time, just exactly on
time and IVI's read 002 AFT. Almost ierfect.
2. 21 Steering
Cooper Steering was ... there was no steerine· accelerations
or velocities that we could tell. Steering was
just smooth as silk , apparently they :t.ad us going
right down the slot . And when we came off, apparently
we were lined up well because there weren ' t any
rates because when we came off and wajted our 20
seconds there were no rates whatsoever and it was
just setting there just . . . . as smootr.. as
Conrad As stable as a rock .
Cooper As smooth as silk so that and when we started
thrusting and separating we came off :ust right
straight forward . No deviation , no skidding around
or anything. Just right straight off,
Conrad I thought the IVI's were plus 2 . That ' s what I haVle
written down here. Plus 28 right , 3 t.p.
Cooper I guess that's what it was.
FCSD REP This velocity you read?
Conrad I was going to cover that in your ... ,
Cooper Your right, plus 2, it was -- that's :r·ight . Plus
--- PAGE 28 ---
~IE>l!NTtAE 23
002 .
Conrad I have al l the computer readouts .
Cooper 008 right and how many up?
Conrad 3 up .
3 ,1 Post SECO
Cooper MANEUVER CONTROLLER worked fine . We went right
through ....
Conrad Wel l, l et ' s go through t hat. The way we had practice
SECO, Gordo, got SECO and Gordo unstowed the
CONTROLLER and I armed the BUS ARM Swit ch so that
we get the MSC- 1 doors OFF.
Cooper Brought the propulsion power ON.
Conrad Brought the ATTITUDE CONTROL Elect ric Power ON.
Went from RATE COMMAND to DIRECT. Armed the
switch and hit the computer. Armed t he sep
spacecraft thing and Gordo and I counted the
seconds down . I n the meantime , I punched off
address 72 so that it was reading and then in 20
seconds we had SEP s/c . ...
Cooper In 20 seconds I start ed and I called it out and
started thrusting and Pete would hit the sep
spacecraft ... .
Conrad The reason we did that was so that we would have
--- PAGE 29 ---
the inertial velocity readout on the ga.ge and that
was ·beautiful 25,808 and nominal was S-.lpposed to be
25,807. You can't ask for a better calculation
from a computer than that, and a lot of people
don ' t have much faith in that thing but, I think
that I'll bet that the computed MCC figure isn't
more than a foot or two off. I t couldn ' t be
because everything was nominal for hours and hours
in the past, Day's it went that way where we
stayed on the flight plan to the minute, to the
second so I know that it was a good computation,
and I have the five address readouts that we read ,
We read out address 72 as 25,808; address 94 which
was R dot for gamma was plus 20 feet which is
pretty darn small so we must have almos t a zero
gamma address 97 which is the forward IVI was plus
2 feet; address 52 was perfect , it was zero. So
there was no adjustment needed and if there had
been an adjustment needed that would ha:ve come
at 3 , 042 seconds on the computer if tbere had been
an address . 52 correction and nominal 3,008
seconds so the computer computed the nomi nal thing
off only by less than a minute, about a half a
--- PAGE 30 ---
25
minute of what the actual nominal value
/een , s o I think thats pretty darn good
ascent routine in that comput er, and I think hat
(
now that we have Math flow 6 in there t his i why I
think the guy shouldn't get so darn worried in MCC
underspeeds and giving them burn co/rections
t his Mickey Movse. I' ve been
t rying to make tbis pein-t-ewe· since we got
associat ed with . . . .
Cooper I think we had better immediate data avail abl e on
board than people have been giving it credit for .
Conrad Tha t ' s right , and it really pleased me to see it
come out on the computer this way.
Cooper And had we never gotten our communications back
we would have known tha t we were i n good shape
because of the data we had on board, we didn ' t
have to worry about the ground readouts and
what to do ; we would have known what to do whether
we had been under or over or anything else .
Cooper Attitudes and rates , t here weren ' t any rat es .
The thing was steered right down the s lot . We
came off smooth .
Conrad Spacecraft separation
NflD~NTlAk
--- PAGE 31 ---
26 CONF:10ENT-IA
Cooper We separated as smooth as silk just r i ,5ht straight
.;;
ahead
Conrad Well, we counted down and Gordo said h? was
ready and I SEP spacecraft and he thru3ted and I
went back to RATE COMMAND for them and we came
straight off . I didn't even feel it . The first
t hing we felt was thrust .
Cooper And rolled upright and went to 000 00 - 15 which
happened to be right on the horizon. As it
t urned out that 15 figure was good . It read out
the IVI•s .
FCSD REP That's, you know on 4 . . . they thought they came
off the booster.
Conrad Yes, that's why I mentioned that because
Cooper That's what we were looking for, too,
3.2 SEGO Plus 20 Seconds
Cooper We've already mentioned the IVI displays . Space
craft separation occurred very smoothly. Thrusting
was smooth , nothing wrong at all . Attitude rates
were good.
Conrad Yes, I don't understand this! I don't understand
this guy saying that they can't hear them or they
can ' t sense them. Boy, I was easily aware . . . .
--- PAGE 32 ---
FHID~Nf lAL 27
Cooper 1/ than you can hear
You can feel t hem almost mo,-e
them. You can feel them vibrate r eally, more than
.. you can hear them . I mean , you can hear them
too , but the vibrat ion you can hear them too, but
t he vi bration you can f eel the thrust .
Conrad Have you ever heard a high speed hose or high speed
water j et. Shhh ... That 's the impression that I
had.
Cooper Yes, that ' s right.
FCSD REP Even from the aft firing thruster?
Cooper Ever y thruster we had on t here.
Conrad We heard every thruster on the whol e f l ight
Cooper It never occurred in my mind when the thrus t ers
were fired. You can feel them and I can hear them.
I couldn 't hear them in the sense of an expl osive
sound or a roar . It sounded like wat er swishing.
Conrad Yes , very definitely, more a Shhh .
Cooper And I was aware of it again when we made the burns
l ater on, you know , we made the reverse coelliptic
stuff and all that.
FCSD REP How did these noises , the thruster noises , sound
compared with the way the last crew set the
mission simulator?
'
--- PAGE 33 ---
28
Conrad Hey, that's another i nteresting point.
Cooper They're not very close on pulse.
Conrad Pulse is a ... •
Cooper Pulse is more of a thump .
Conrad That 's the one sound that does sound like you ' d
expect a rocket engine to sound .
Cooper Here ' s a sound just about like this : (knock)
Conrad Yes , it very definitely sounds like a knock .
There is no "shhh" or roar, just a little thud.
Cooper You can hear it just like somebody knccking at the
back of the spacecraft . You can hear it go "tap
tap, tap , tap, tap, tap,"
Conrad Really, the simulator doesn I t sound tl:.e right way.
It ' s a general enough nature and it tl::.e same type
manner
Cooper Yes, it is close enough to give you a good cue.
Conrad The platform mode for instance , you krow, when i t
goes shh, shh, shh, shh ... did the same thing i n
the spacecraft except it was all in one thump
and swooshes when it was constantly firing the
thrusters it sounded like the swish.
Cooper The air-to- ground communications I thought was
excellent the whol e time. I didn't find anythi ng
,
--- PAGE 34 ---
ONEl0EtslJl~E 29
wrong.
Conrad We really had good comm the whole flight.
.. Cooper There was never a time -- the only time the
only fault we find was one or two times through the
remote site when the MCC was trying to remote to
these sites they would get some fading. I must
say the HF worked excellent. When they were
~ r ~ u s i c , broadcasting music to us, my\
gosh they had us practically the world round on
'-----~ T h e music quality was quite _g0od
in most cases.
Conrad I got times on that we can bring out later so that
they can correlate how far
Cooper GO/NO GO , there wasn't any problem on that. They
gave us the GO right away.
FCSD REP How long did it take them to give this?
Cooper Oh , heck, immediately. Almost immediately.
.> vveaf
Conrad There was no swivel because there was no velocity
~
correction.
Cooper There was no velocity correction needed. Orbit
quantitites were good, they had those for us.
It took them quite a while to read us our experiments
but they just said you have a nominal orbit and then
mayb_e . . . . .
eQNFIE>ENTl~t
--- PAGE 35 ---
I
Conrad I've got down here the GMT of liftoff . I wrote down ...
13 plus 59 plus 59 which they l ater change to 14
plus 00 plus 00 . I have the one A time they got "
it up to us okay, which was 10 pl us 11 . Then I
have the 2 dash 1 they gave us was 01 pl us 27 plus
16 which they later revised to 01 plus 26 plus 27,
I wrote those down.
3. 3 Insertion Activities
Cooper Okay, l et ' s start on inser tion activities. SAFE
t he swi tches we did that just right for our check
list . In fact , we are even more convinced than ever
that a good, thorough, accurate, checklist is the only
thing to have and
Conr ad Physically marked them off when they "·e r e done .
Cooper We followed it conscientiously. The sequential
light t ests, we did it j ust by the teE.ts . Stowage:;
. we already had modified our checklistE, ·and we already
had written on some of it that we would do these i f
we decided to. For instance, the D- rlng safety pin,
we did install them at right t i me, and there was no
problem on those ; they wer e nruch easi•~r under zero- g
to get in and out than we had thought and I had no
--- PAGE 36 ---
.kQt4FIDfNJ1A.L, 31
trouble getting my D-ring in, did you?
Conrad I waited on mine , remember.
. Cooper Yes , you waited . .. .
Conrad I s towed my D- ring thing
Cooper So we closed the cover immediately and I decided I
woul d go ahead and see if I could get mine, and I
got to i t right away and it went right in, so I
put it in .
Conrad We, of course, got in trouble in the second orbit ,
but we did not unstrap or put t he drogue pins in
the seat or unstow any items of gear other than the
flight plan books and the 16mm camera and the
Hasselblad. I take it back. We went through the
Flight Plan as advertised and then stowed the items.
We had D-2 canera out, the Blob out, but we did this
in the proper places in the Flight Pl an. But we
never did unstrap .
Cooper We never unstrapped and never put the drogue pins
in until after we go to 6 - 4 GO. We got a
6 - 4 GO.
Conrad But we restowed too , after we got in t rouble . We
throught maybe having to go into 6-4 why,
we'd put ourselves back into the configuration
--- PAGE 37 ---
32
to reenter
Cooper were never up . lready decided
t hat I was not going to launch with th£~ They
"
are just useless as far as I am concerr..ed, and I
as delighted I did not have them; and I didn ' t
miss I don't think, I think
could remove th€m and
-
Conrad The arm restraints are there for the pressurized
case and high altitude ejection . I did go with
mine up . I would prefer to go with thEim down, but
there wasn't any reason , I didn ' t need to get my
hands on the hand control or anything ~.o I left
them as they were, but I don' t think tr.ey were
necessary.
•
--- PAGE 38 ---
FtDENTtAL 33
Cooper Okay, belts . I couldn ' t ~~ he
belts . The harness - While we 're on the harness , I
don ' t like that harness worth anything.
t hink what we need is a simple type adjustable type
harness wi th clips on the legs that you can undo
legs to get to some of the functions you have to :
uri pation and defecation and so on in the spacecy ft .
I do ' t see why we have to have a big, expensi/e, custom,
made ha~ss that you can ' t readily get on off
and this on~ you can not readily get and if
you had one with on it and snaps
like you do on harness , it would
be, I think, a hundred times useful as this one .
Conrad Let me ask you a ~uestion . Do you really - now , do
you r eally - I agree. Let me say this . I agree you
should firs t be able to get your harness on and off,
but in zero- g I ' m not convinced that three , especially
two leg snaps type arrangement. In other words , a
harness that would come completely loose and have
many straps that hitch to the other straps would be
really good in zero- g . What I think we need to do is
to be able to get in and out of that harness that we
have , easier. Like, maybe you could loosen the leg
straps on it but not have them come apart . Now , I
~ NftDENTrAL
--- PAGE 39 ---
took my harness off in flight twice . I took 1 em
"
off once--
Cooper Yeah, but you wouldn ' t even have to step through these ::
leg loops if you had - just like on an airplane harness .
You could undo that and you wouldn ' t eve·'.l. have to worry
about the leg loops . Then all you 1 d have to do is just
slide out of the torso area.
Conrad Yeah. Well» lets sees that ' s what I' m saying. If you
unhook both of those leg loops and you throw the whole
thing down in the footwell and then you pull it back up
again you got a leg strap floating off ever here and
you got a - -
Cooper Well that ' s no problem. It ' s no worse i.han it is find
ing your lap belt . Did you ever have i;rouble getting
your lap belt back on after you took it off?
Conrad I always hitched it on the Velcro over on the side .
Cooper But you never had any trouble ~ ting t o it. I didn ' t .
/
I let mine float free and I never had any trouble getting
t o them at all .
Conrad Well , I just don 1 t lmow now. I really d:i.dn ' t think it
was that bad getting in and out of this harness . My
only concern was that if- - I stayed- -
Cooper How many times did you get i n and out o f it?
~
--- PAGE 40 ---
( OhJFt0! 35
Conrad Twice . The big problem was having you unhitch the
straps on my suit .
Cooper That ' s right . With the cables to go over the harness .
Conrad The harness--the easiest thing was getting in the legs .
That was no problem at all .
Cooper Yeah.
Conrad Where I needed help was getting over my shoulder and
getting the straps on the suit hitched back up again,
which is a two man operation.
Cooper Well , my point is that for normal wearing around the
pad area or wearing around when your suited and every
thing, you ' d be much more comfortable if you could have
those straps loose where they ' re not gouging you in
the legs ,
Conrad Yes , well-- Oh, I agree.
Cooper Or where you had adjustments on them . ...
Conrad . .. adjustments see--
Cooper Okay, well .
Conrad Where you coul d make the legstraps loose but you' d
never disconnec t them so you don ' t have free floating
straps around t here . It was no big problem ....
Cooper My suggestion would be to have them exactly like you
did in a parachute harness . You have the leg adjust-
--- PAGE 41 ---
ment and on that same fitting you have the little snap
"
wher e you can unsnap in the places you want to .
Conrad Oh yes , you dan do it either way. Sure .
Cooper You cou,Yd either loosen them or--I just thi we've
gone to such complex tailoring devices in orde
f ovide some company with a great elaborate pro of
providing expensive harnesses that they .. . per-
sonally don ' t think they ' re worth a darn for what they're
·ntended for . I don ' t think you gain that much . I
think'y~u loose a lot of it .
Conrad ~ stow
that harness .
Cooper The life 7 est. Now I disagree wit everybody that ' s ever
said that those aren ' t in the way. e were them all
theI time mainly because we didn ' t hav a darn place to
s i ore them and they're a pain in the Ii,leck t o get on and
off but they are really in the way. The;r ' re in the way
@f everything you do . They bump int0 your arms .
Tbey ' re there to cut down visibilit on ;rour chest and
they ' re just a nuisance,
Conrad Yeah , e didn ' t have a place t store them.
Cooper We didn ' t store them or we'd have taken
them off and left them off . I am here t o say t hat I
--- PAGE 42 ---
ONFTDENTl~t 37
think they ' re r eally bad where they are .
Conrad After the big sweat was over and we got a GO and we
were relatively sure we were going to stay there for
awhile unless we , you lmow, had some other emergency
come up , I would have preferred to take off the harness
and the life jacket and stow it somewhere if we ' d
have had a place to stow it .
Cooper Right .
Conrad But the other thing is that maybe that ' s just my per
sonal feeling . I ' m extremely meticulous and we kept
that spacecr aft as empty as possible . Everything had
it ' s place and it stayed in it ' s place .
Cooper And that harness and the vest--are pret t y big, bulky
items -
Conrad And I wasn ' t going to have it rattling around down there
on the floor , loose .
Cooper Okay, on the drogue pins . By golly, I thought those
new l i ttle things on the drogue pins made them very easy
to get in and out. There wasn ' t a bit of problem wit h
those .
Conrad I popped the drogue pins in and out on mine .
Coope~ I put mine i n or out once just to ... .
Conrad I think Gordo put his own in and out once to see if he
--- PAGE 43 ---
could do it and he coul d . That worked real well .
Cooper Okay. Fuel Cell o and Fuel Cell Hydrogen Quantity Read .
2
Yes , we read them at least a million times . Fuel Cell
•
Power Readings . Yes , everything checked out fine on
t hose. Bermuda 2- 1 update : fine . Orbital Flight .
FCSD Rep You ' d better get out your flight plan on this because
t his is the original stuff I was telling you about .
Conrad Well , that ' s all right . This probably will go fairly....
FCSD Rep All three , if you go the way you did it.
4.0 Orbital Flight
Cooper Okay, on 4 . 0 Orbital Fli ht . Platform Alinement.
Conrad There ' s our first problem .
Cooper There ' s our first problem. Our plat orm mode did not
work and I don ' t lmow what ' s wrong wit but the
darn thing does not zero out on the space
I
craft. It allows a good e to sit in
there and won ' t zero it out and it is ex remely s l oppy
·n pitch . The whole thing, I think tb7:r was something
~rong with the whole thing because it d esn ' t work at
I
a \ 1 like the ones in the simulator, an the whole thing
...
plu's or minus a half a degree a very, ver y
system lucky to be plus or
thing really wrong with it . I personall y think that
--- PAGE 44 ---
~ pl&f~T A~ 39
\
something was wired up wrong or something in i t because
it was not working right .
Conrad We didn ' t really get a chance to evaluate it too well
because we had trouble with it so we stopped using it
and by the time we ' d been able to do anything with it
we had other problems , fuel problems and so forth . So
we never did get back to using it again .
Cooper Well, we had other control system problems which were
overpowering, platform problem wise , but we did try one
burn on the platform and it was a terrible mistake . The
darn thi ng did not have the accuracy to really hold it
and we got one foot per second in and out of plane there .
Conrad Yeah. That was in those coeliptic .
Cooper In one of those , that coeliptic burns and we ~ade our
other burns then on Rate Command and man, that Rate
Command system is just beautiful . It holds that space
craft so tight that it can ' t vary.
Conrad Yeah . We had a beautiful control system, I thought . When
Gordo made any of the burns on the Rate Command or
anything l i ke that it really responded -- well.
Coope1: Rate Command has tremendous torqueing. Boy, it ' s strong
and it ' s instantaneous and you can just stop it right on
the money. Really good.
--- PAGE 45 ---
40
FCSD Rep Okay, on this platform alinement thing. You went to
SEF and caged and SEF and Platform Control Mode,
Cooper We pitched down to visual when we went to CAGE and then
went to SEF and we went to Platform mode and after fid
dling around with it awhile we decided the Platform mode
wouldn ' t work so I went to Pulse and then I , just using
my needles , Platform needles then , I just pulsed the er
rors out until we torqued around and got the ... got
it ... on a fine line.
Conrad Okay, Now , there ' s no doubt in my mind that the Primary
Scanners , there ' s no doubt in my mind now, but we lost
on Primary Scanners . We started to aline the primary
Scanners and I don ' t think we ever got to platform a line
correctly because the primary scanners were not working
correctly,
Cooper Now the primary scanners, The funny part of it is the
Primary Scanner was working in such a rr.anner - working
just enough, that it checked right because when we checked
out t he alinement of it and the tolerances on it it was
working fine , but there was something in it on one of
the tests that we did later showed thai it was actually
driving, tending to drive the spacecraft down .
Conrad Continuing to torque you down to about fifteen degrees
nose- down ,
--- PAGE 46 ---
• 41
Cooper Or more .
.
Conrad In other words , it continued to try to aline t he platform
at about fifteen degrees . It tried to put the nose on t he
horizon is what it did .
FCSD Rep It tried to aline the platform up at fifteen degrees
nose down?
Cooper Or more . I figured it was about somewhere around-
Well , one time it alined us at about 40 degrees nose
down and it still was indicating in scanner limits .
Conrad The scanner got worse as the flight went on, but I don ' t
think it ever worked correctly .
Cooper No . I don't think it did , now I look back .
Conrad That ' s the thi ng right there and I think that this- -
I 'd l i ke to know what they decided from tracking the
REP on how we put the REP out because we put the REP
out in the proper position, but I don ' t think the
platform was alined correctly . We had trouble with that
scanner in the sunlight on the horizon and this was right
when we were using it to aline - j ust before we put the
REP out .
Cooper Just as we were using it to aline and put t he REP out ,
the Scanner began to skew all the platform needles off
and it skewed off and , --went to ORBIT RATE.
--- PAGE 47 ---
42 L
Conrad Now wait til we get the onboard tapes because the tape
..
recorder was working and this all is on the onboard tape ;
the conversation that Gordo and I had about that. So
we weren ' t really sure it was working right but it
f
wasn 't that far off that we were going in the dark--
Cooper . Approximately 30 seconds before we had to pitch around
or had to yaw around to eject the REP, I had to go back
to CAGE and try getting a real rapid P] a tform aline in
there , SEF and PULSE and I had the neec.les zeroed and we
may not have been so far off but you don ' t know . That
isn ' t enough time to really get it alined. In other
words . I had about the time we did it and got there we
probably had maybe , 30 seconds to Plat::orm aline . That ' s
about all we had .
Conrad Well , we were just hoping that if it had been pulled off
only in pitch why, you know , we ' d get it right--we'd pull
the pitch right back in again.
Cooper But the scanner was acting up very badly by that time .
FCSD Rep How long did you aline the Platform initially?
Cooper Initially, we alined the platform for about 15 to 20
minutes and it seemed to aline allright although at that
time Pete and I had a discussion right then that we seemed
to be alining nose down .
--- PAGE 48 ---
Conrad Now , you see . Here ' s something that I've never heard
from the other guys .
Cooper Now there ' s another thing. See, we never had a simulator
to show us . Never once did we have any darn thing to
show us what out the window should look like .
Conrad And when the Platform is alined and you ' re zero- zero- zero ,
boy, oh boy! That ' s a , just -- It's a very peculiar looking
situation and it ' s not what I expected to see at all .
Cooper No , it isn' t me either .
Conrad And I ' ve never heard either Gus of John or Jim and Ed say
"Put a little gouge out" Now I ' ve got a gouge tha t I
can draw for you where I 'm sure tha t I can put the Plat
form in roll and pitch within a degree in roll and pitch
of where it should be out the window on the horizon and
it ' s by using the corner of the window and the RCS
thrusters on the front : the front RCS yaw thruster in
the lower corner of the window and you can put the
Platform-- you can put the spacecraft zero- zero and roll
and pitch just, well , like that. We didn ' t know that
before we went .
Cooper This is one of my strongest recommendations if we aren ' t
going to have any kind of a visual out the window display
at least we ought to get some of the great planners to
•
--- PAGE 49 ---
44
•
-----
draw up on a piece of paper what the window , what the
;:
horizon should look like through the window whic~ d
requested several times and never got -- to show ~~~) guy
what these various things should look like out the
......__
window;'---...We spent the whole darn eight days trying to
~rt=--'l;fl:e-s-0--~ ~ ~43 ~ould look like
and I'm not sure we were very clear on it to the day
we re- entered,
Conrad Yeah.
Cooper Now that 's ridiculous! And it ' s becau:3e of this odd
angle that you sit off in there . It completely fouls
up everytning, as to getting these various angles :
inverted and right side up and 90 degrees angles and
all this .
Conrad / 1think we ought t;=-I ' ll tell you i ; ~ d recommen
dation for the guys who are going to
do this on GT- 7 with that Hasselblad can take a pound
or two of fuel and sit up there and pl:.otograph
the camera back inside the spacecraft get
the window perspective in this thing .
zero- zero- zero , bank right 90 , bank lnft 90 , at ifferent
nose pitches above the horizon ,
<iOt◄r ,e eNirrXt
--- PAGE 50 ---
Really , we sat ther e and had hours worth of discussions
in drifting flight when we'd be drifting through , you
know , and we ' d say, "Hey, doesn ' t that l ook like they'r:e
about 30 degrees nose up and roll right 60 degrees?" and
then we ' d try to find those lines and match them and
see . . . there ' s an awful lot of learning there . By
golly, if we ' d have a Platform Aline Gouge , a visual
gouge idea , we'd have picked up this trouble right off
the bat. We real ly didn't think the platform. was
alined right , but we really didn't have anything to
tell us t hat it wasn ' t .
Cooper Now looking a t it where we know now after we went to the
other scanner finally and we got proper operation knowing
what we learned during the flight it appears now like
we were--the number one scanner was trying to aline us
several degrees down over what it should.
Conrad Yeah.
FCSD Rep Did you ever go back to Primary after that?
Cooper Oh . We checked it a lot of times after that and tried
it numerous times and it got worse and worse and worse
and it finally was actually driving the spacecraft down
to minus 90 degrees and still the scanner, that ' s the
funny part of it , the scanner wouldn't go off until you
were about 60 degrees below the horizon.
--- PAGE 51 ---
46
Conrad It seems to me we ' ve got some data for them on Primary
scanner over the states so they could h~ve it on telemetry,
They should be able to find out what happened on that ,
Cooper Yes , something was really fouled up , I think , Insertion
Check List--
Conrad We went through it by the numbers ,
Cooper By the numbers , Thruster and Control Mode Check - we went
t hrough by the numbers. Everything was fine .
Conrad Well , we were a little bit late, We get a little bit
behind and it was about the time when we were late per
forming the thruster control mode check because that was
supposed to be done before you got to the Canaries and
we did it after the Canaries .
Cooper That ' s right ,
Conrad We were behind, but we started catchine: up .
,
--- PAGE 52 ---
ee,~FID El'<ITIAI!-
Cooper Com Systems Check. We were right on the money, on time ,
on that .
FCSD Rep Everything checked out okay on that?
Cooper Yeah.
FCSD Rep Com System?
Conrad D- 4, D- 7, I did by checkoff list and checked out
okay over Carnarvon.
Cooper 6-4 GO/NO GO, well , that was quite late .
Conrad No. We got a GO for 6- 4 over Carnarvon . That's
just to get past 2- 1.
Cooper Okay, Yeak Okay, got the 6- 4 GO/NO GO, that ' s right,
D- 4, D-7 GO/NO GO . Those were right on the money
and everything was fine there. Third adjustment
maneuver.
Conrad Was nominal
Cooper Was nominal end everything was fine there. Power
down D-4, D- 7 was nominal . 16mm, 35mm, D-6 equipmert
unstowed and mounted and there we begin to deviate
a little because just prior to this time we began
to get this rapid decrease in the -well- where
was it there?
Conrad It was - let me go into the log-book here for one
second because I got some.
--- PAGE 53 ---
48
-
FCSD Rep This Perigee adjust. Did you do that i::1 Rate- is
that the one you did in Rate Command? Or is that
the one you tried in PLATFORM? ~
Cooper Did that in PLATFORM and it worked fine on that one.
Did that one in PLATFORM and it worked ,~eat, but
then on some of these other burns we did I tried
it in PLATFORM and it really didn 1 t work well at
a ll. That 's why I rather suspect the P::.ATFORM
thing. There's something wrong with it . I think
i t was better at some times than others . It was
allowing a lot of drift.
Conrad Okay, in the log book I have it at 50 m:.nutes which
is just prior to Carnarvon that I found the Fuel
Cell o2 and H Heater Circui t Breaker OFF. Now
2
that--I found it off because they told us to heat
the Hydrogen not the Oxygen, but the Hydrogen final
ly drilled down to the 220 and they want ed us to
use the heater and I turned the heater on and I
noticed that I didn 1 t get any ammeter rise and so
I looked at the circuit breaker panel and the
Circuit Breaker was OFF. So, now in ret rospect
seei?hg·the o ON which is on the same circuit
2
breaker burned out, I'm sure that it blE,w when this
thing burned out,
f
--- PAGE 54 ---
..
FCSD Rep We were at the power do':m. on the D- 4 and D- 7.
Conrad Oh Yeah. Well, about that time I think we were
getting back on the Flight Plan. We got the 16mm
out. We got the 35mm out.
Cooper D- 6 equipment was
Conrad Well, it ' s really D-2, it ' s what it was and I had
that work so I decided, "I ' ll put together in
pieces at the blob and the camera put together
separately and they had it all loaded with the
right film and everything and had it on the floor,
and we were ready to go . "
FCSD Rep Were you pushed for time to do this?
Conrad We were right on the money. We finally caught up
after Canaries and we were on the schedule at
Carnarvon.
Cooper Yeah. We were in good shape at Carvarvon .
Cooper Radar test #6, at 01 : 30, that worked fine . We did
bring it on. It worked . Observed the transients
on R dot, range and range rate. 6- 4 Preretro command
load came out fine . Blood pressure on the Command
Pilot there past Carnarvon, let's see . Now that
was back over the Cape here, yeah.
Conrad No , you broke the O-ring didn ' t you? Right off the
IAL
--- PAGE 55 ---
:JI
50
bat we broke the 0- ring.
..
Cooper That 's right . That ' s right . That 's the first
one . We broke the 0- ring and couldn ' t give them
that blood pressure .
Conrad I think that was the one.
Cooper That 's right. We fina l ly gave that one up , The
0-ring was broken on that one.
FCSD Rep Let's see . This first blood pressure that you got
an hour ...
Conrad They got that one and then when Gordo--
Cooper When I, When we transferred over to me and I
plugged it in the ... 0-ring broke and ,:e didn't
have time for tha t pass again .
Conrad We had a bunch more 0-rings . I forget when we fixed
it but we fixed it .. .
Cooper Fixed somewhere around there.
Conrad ... shortly thereafter .
Cooper M-1 experiment .
Conrad We turned it on on time .
--- PAGE 56 ---
51
Cooper Yeah . I got a lot of comments later on that on. That
..
thing is so noisy.
Conrad Oh, you know , I found out what happened, you know . They
went back and recomputed and they found out they had four
days worth of air in the bottle--Ha Ha!
FCSD Rep Four days?
Conrad Yeah. It ran out .
Cooper But the thing. You can turn it off and it keeps run
ning back there . And it goes SMACK- CHOO , SMACK- CHOO ,
SMACK- CHOO .
Conrad Yeah, it 1 s pretty noisy.
Cooper And in a real ~uiet cockpit it really sounds loud .
FCSD Rep This radar test #6 here at O1:3O-
Cooper Used to turn the radar on.
Conrad Used to turn it on.
FCSD REP Used to turn it to standby.
Cooper Turn it to standby and warm it up .
Conrad Used to observe the warmup transients .
FCSD REP And all this happened, right?
Conrad Yes , and it 1 s on the voice tape. Like Gordo said,
.,.
you lmow, what the radar needle did , What it does is it
has sort of a cyclic thing when you put it in standby
and it 1 s ready to run why it sits there and the lock on
--- PAGE 57 ---
52 L
l ight blinks Green/OFF, Green/OFF.
Cooper Lock on light will blink on and it will come out R and
R dot will go from peg to peg. And they 'll settle out
when it really is warmed up good and you' ve gotten past
the transient periods and they ' ll all come back to zero .
Conrad I think what they ' re looking for are clues to tell you
that the set is warming up correc t ly. Ba.ck in the
early days of TACAN we had warmup problems.
FCSD REP In other words , this would be your firnt indication if
something was wrong?
Cooper Purge Section. One and Two .
Conrad Well , we got our first load , this 6-4 load. The first
load that came up over the DCS system and it came up right
over the Cape.
Cooper Purge Section. One and Two . Got that?
Conrad Yes , no . Yes . That ' s when we were getting rushed . Let ' s
go back to that . Let ' s stop right there. The REP was
supposed to go out at 02 : 07 and I purg·ed early and I
always had been purging early because I purged it about
1+50 and then I went through the check off list and they
were all checked off here. I powered up at 1+50 , I
purged the fuel cells and here I checked them off here.
. . . prop gauge experiments and the RAD 1 on and the cold
--- PAGE 58 ---
53
IR on and the power on the exmitter on and the recorder
off and I went through these by the numbers . Com
puter, we went to Catch- Up . We had the hundred feet
in the window . We were really getting ready to
put the REP out and right then and there was when we came
over the hill and we were beginning to get to the dark
side you know, and the sun was getting low and that ' s
when the scanner started going out ,
Cooper That's when the scanner started dropping out .
Conrad And we started getting the scanner light and then now ,
you got to visualize there ' s part of the problem. We're
coming into this "Fuzzy Zone"- horizon and that is the
best way to describe it .
Cooper Yeah, you can't see anything.
Conrad And the spacecraft looks like you're pitched up tremen
dously when you're zero- zero- zero to begin with and we
both had the impression that the scanner was pitching
us up. Well , that may not have been true. It just
may have been that that's the way the sky got to looking
as we approached the dark side zero- zero- zero .
Cooper Actually, you have a transition point there where you
cannot see the horizon and it doesn ' t look like either
sky or earth or anything. It's a complete blank ,
--- PAGE 59 ---
Conrad It ' s really a grey area.
FCSD REP Right at dusk.
Conrad Yeah.
Cooper Right at dusk or right at sunrise.
Conrad Yeah. Now the first time we went through there we didn ' t
even see it . We were working. That wan right after
insertion . So, mind you , this is the s1~cond time we
got to see it and I can' t emphasize thii, point enough,
even though we were on the flight plan and everything
else, you got to let the guys learn what ' s going on up
there. You haven't been up there befor~ in that darn
vehicle you've got to learn it . That ' s :right where we
started getting in trouble .
Cooper That ' s right . That's the exact point t ·:1.at we made .
Conrad I made it for six months now.
Cooper For many, many months we've made this over this flight
plan, sticking this REP, thi s whole REP thing in that
early in the Flight Plan before you really have a chance
to get the systems ironed out and checked over and
everything and if everything goes exactly right and
nothing fails you can run through it time and time and
time and time again and you'll make it and you ' ll make
it on time.
--- PAGE 60 ---
55
Conrad Yeah.
Cooper But you add one little failure in there and you ' ve had
it .
Conrad , Yeah . That ' s where I made my first mistake. We got
purged in an hour and 50 minutes and I was going by the
check off list and right there we got in this discussion
about what was happening to the platform and I missed
the most important thing on the check off l ist . I for-
got to • st as sim-
That ' s the whole G-- d-----
/ been running for the D- 4 cold IR, it ' s been our biggest
constraint and a thing that I knew as well as my right
arm but there was a glitch and the glitch got us off
\ the scheduled activities and I missed it bigger than
eek. I di -
ors on the cold IR and it ' s
a ll my fault and I accept the blame for it . We went
through this quickie aline business and we got turned
around and Gordo had it right on the money, we wer e
right out of plane and we got the REP out 15 seconds
late. It went out at 02+07+15 and we turned around,
waited for one minute, got the radar on, locked on it
.. and we were whistling away from it and I was back on
the Flight Plan and happy as a clam when I suddenly
--- PAGE 61 ---
@OMFIBEt4t4A.L
decided that something wasn't reading right and I realized
C
that I hadn ' t blown the doors on the cold IR and I blew
them and at that time the REP was at 25JO feet from us ,
which is the end of the experiment, but I think it was
still reading- -
Cooper But it was still reading on the, according to the gage .
Conrad Yeah . I think that cold IR read to a great, great thing.
Now , the Radar gage, this is where--here comes the next
mystery- the radar gage said the REP waE leaving us at
this point in time and that--
Cooper Five feet per second?
Conrad Yeah. I have 3 1/2 feet per second written down .
Cooper Oh, at that particular point . Oh, wel:. i t - - when we
first got our first measurement on it ·;he range rate on
my analog dial over there read exactly 5 feet per second
that it was going away from us .
Conrad Yeah. Okay.
Cooper Right on the money.
Conrad To go back to the D- 4 in time it was 0.2, it was 02+ 16+ 15
when I blew the doors , which was corre3ponding to
2500 feet and I ran that REP D- 4 recorder until 02+37+12
and--okay, now. That darn REP! Gordo had the needles
right on the REP and that REP was going straight out
from us at 270 on the ball . It just went , I just
'COr'1FIDEtfJal>Att
--- PAGE 62 ---
, CO► I F 1 DE NJ:1A t 57
thought everything was going perfect . The REP was
moving just exactly out of plane away from us and
it was moving at about the right velocity and then the
mystery came. It just kept on going.
Cooper Yeah.
Conrad It kept right on going straight out, and-
Cooper It wasn't slowing down very much.
Conrad And I got over here on the graph and I kept reading
the mileage and we were up to about 7 feet a second.
It was leaving us , and I realized, I began to think ,
well gee, this is- That ' s when I was really convinced
that the platform wasn't alined and we must have kicked
it out some screwy way. Then it started to drift : ~
us quite fast . It finally did peak out an ent )
-----------
a ~ ...--n:-~---------;---:--:--:-----;------:-:--:;-,i"'T"--,-----,-----r-;-;:--:-:--
he corner at some phenomenal dis ance ,
was almost nine tenths of a mile away from us , but
drift aft quite rapid
and .when we got to the nodal crossing time , it was behin~ (
us by a mile , according to the radar. Now this is all /
on radar. And now , mind you, it ' s nighttime and it was
right there. We could see it plain as day.
Cooper Okay, let ' s see, we were at the--
Conrad Okay, that's when we got to this next screwy thing.
--- PAGE 63 ---
See, the REP went straight out and kept on going. C
Cooper The REP goes straight out and then it just kept on
going. It was slowing down very l ittle and just kept on
going and going and going and going.
Conrad And it never really stopped. What it d:Ld was it
sorta, it sorta starting going off this way, you !mow,
and it never got out to a node point wh~re you had
a definite stopping range and a start back in again.
Well , the range rate never got below a foo t per second .
Cooper The range rate never decreased. You never got a decrease
in range rate , but it just kept- it started drifting slowly
of f the 270 line on back out, but it we·nt straight
out the 270 line to a- -
Conrad
Cooper What was the range? Do you remember what the range was
when it sti ll was out there?
Conrad It went straight like relative motion to us would
have looked like it went out looking down a plan form,
if we were here. It looked like it went out like this
and it slowly started doing this .
Cooper Yeah.
Conrad. And it never did have a stop to it. It finally crossed
behind us back in here someplace.
--- PAGE 64 ---
eNftOf 59
Cooper We never got the point where it crossed behind us be
"
cause somewhere when it was about the 210 point was when
we were out of fuel, of fuel cell o .
2
Conrad Yeah, well , you see, we went by Carnarvon--
Cooper And this was coming down just BALOOM BALCOM BALOOM
BALCOM BALCOM.
Conrad See, here we go . We went by Carnarvon. Here I was trying
to figure out in here what was going on and what we
were going to take out and everything and we went by
Carnarvon and right here at Carnarvon and that's when
Charlie .. . called up and says check your o2 heater
switch to AUTO . Now I had seen it fall , had noticed
that it had been falling and I had gone to the AUTO
position when without even being told --
Cooper You had already gone to nanua.l.
Conrad And then I was doing many other things and I decided
it wasn ' t coming up and so I'd gone to manual and held
it over there a couple times and sort of looked at it
and --
Cooper That didn ' t work either.
Conrad I must have kidded myself into thinking that I was
getting something out of it, and then I forgot it
again and then~-
--- PAGE 65 ---
60
Cooper :But you did go back to the AUTO.
Conrad Yeah . I put ii; back in AUTO , you know , and then I called
t hem, I think it was on the tape and I think I told
them, I said, the S'f!litch is on AUTO . We're okay.
Don ' t worry about it and then right aft er that we got up
to this 240 or so in there and we realjzed that something
was wrong and the heater was out and I guess we told
them--We told them at Carnarvon that t he heater was out .
Cooper Well, we checked at that time then on ·~he annneter on
and off and on and off t hat on both manual and AUTO and
it was obvious .
Conrad And that ' s when we--
Cooper And it was coming down so rapidly that it looked like
very shortly thereafter we were going t o have fuel
cell stoppage..
Conrad We were getting below 200 and falling pretty fast and
we had a big discussion between ourselves and we just
made up our mind to forget the REP. We felt we were
really in trouble.
Cooper So we elected at that point to start rowering down because
we knew that we were using fuel cells a t a very high
rate .
Conrad And we secured the Platform and Radar and everything else.
--- PAGE 66 ---
r
~ ENTI~ - 61
Cooper So we said okay and we ' re stopping it right here and of
course about this time we were in the boondocks area
away from everybody as always occurs.
Conrad We were between Carnarvon and Hawaii .
Cooper And--so we just started powering down everything and
holding on.
Conrad So from there on we were off the Flight Plan.
Cooper From here on to the next twenty orbits the REP was
right with us. Ha, Ha, Ha !
Conrad That ' s what I cam't figure out . How did it get 375
miles from us when it hung around f or 5 orbits? That
darned thing. Everytime we went on the night side-
Cooper It was so--
Conrad As a matter of fact, I didn't see it for a time or two
and then all of a sudden, the nose of the spacecraft was
lighting up !
Cooper We even saw it in the day side . It was so near we could
even see it in the day side and at the transit areas when
the light woul d be shining on it we ' d be just going into
the darkness we could look back and you could even see i;
the dipole on it as it tumbled. The tumble rate was very,
.. very slow.
Conrad And then you guys called up and told us it was 375 miles
--- PAGE 67 ---
62
C
Cooper That s impossible.
1
That thing wasn't that far
away. It hung right in there.
Cooper I think that 's the whole things .
Cooper But 1 1 11 tell you there were two differnnt night
sides we went into. Several- -
Conrad Two different night sides- -well , I reaU y-- i t
wouldn 1 t have surprised me if it had hit us.
Cooper Me either. It seemed to me like it was a lot closer.
Conrad That 's what made me think that well, th? platform
was aligned and I don't know what exactly happened.
I did notice that it sort of climbed on us. So
then I had the feeling that maybe it was doing sort
of a figure eight type thing. That maybe we had
fired it off up or down a little bit yoQ know .
.And it was in three dimensions ; a little bi t out
of plane working it's way around us , backing up
and going a.head and coming back around because the
darn thing was always there . It was there until
the darn lights burned out on it. Anyti me we
wanted to find it if you wanted to move t he
spacecraft around you could find it out there .
EOl"'lf!ltJEt ◄ =F hA. L
--- PAGE 68 ---
Cooper It was close enough so that almost any attitude
you were in you could see i t shining on the
spacecraft. Even if it was clear back out here
you could see the nose just lighting up from it.
Conrad So I know it couldn ' t have been too darn far away.
I mean maybe up to five miles or something l ike
that , but it didn ' t get that far away from us . I
don ' t understand the 375. I was really surprised
that those guys called up and said it was 375 miles
away. 1
Cooper Yes. Well , I don't believe that figure.
Conrad It will be real interesting to see what they dig
out f r om it . Well, all the radar and everything
we had is on the tape , isn't it?
Cooper Well, that was our first big heart breaker .
Conrad We ought to be able to put that all together .
Cooper After all the work we did on t he REP , then not
to pull the rendezvous out , we sure--
Conrad Well , from there until we got the GO to 6- 4 we
just were along for the ride . We just stayed--
Cooper I knew that--I was just so sure of all the time we
. put in simulating that darn thing I just had a
queasy , uneasy feel i ng that maybe we better put
--- PAGE 69 ---
64
in more time on other things .
That something was going to go wrong-~
Conrad I felt every problem that we had I felt real
good about the fact that we had either t he smarts
t o lmow that it was straight forward-- It didn't
take too long to figure out that that h1~ater was
on one line, both heaters , and that we'd had a
single point failure. And as a mat ter- of - fact we
t ook the schematics out.
Cooper And there's another argument for our ha-ring it;' for
when it occured there wasn ' t anybody around to ask
advice .
Conrad I t was very straight forward to throw t he switches
and look at the amp meter to see whethe:c you were
getting anything out. There was no dou·:it in my
mi nd that it had burned out and the sam,= daml
thing with the thrusters. When we finally decided
we had a problem with them we went through the
ci rcuit breakers just like we did in th= trainer
and it was obvious that number 7 was out and 8
went out and then the rest of them started getting sour.
So, I think that all the training we had we were pretty
well prepared.
--- PAGE 70 ---
Cooper I do , too . I ' l l tell you- - the launch- -we were
perfectly normal and right on the money--
Conrad Yes , we were sitting there waiting to find out what
they wanted us to do . I mean we !mew we could
go on the batteries long enough to get to a
fairly decent re- entry place and we wer e taking
bets wi th one another and we were kidding about
McDivitt. There must have been real pandamoni um
at MCC . They were burning up the lines to every
where . Because ther e r eally wasn ' t anythi ng we
could do after that but just sort of wait . We
re- stowed everything and we were ready to go i nto
6- 4 if they wanted us to . We wer e all prepared to
go i nt o 6- 4. We didn 1 t want t o.
Cooper We really didn 1 t thi nk we ' d make 18-1.
Conrad Gor do was the eternal optimist though . I ' d s ay ,
" 125 pounds" and he'd say, "Well , it ha sn't really
fallen anymore . 11 Then it would fal l about another
20 pounds and I'd say, "Wel l , that ' s 100 pounds
now ," and he'd say, "Well , that's really not much
bel ow what it was before ."
I think we had a little more confidence than the
guys on the ground , I really do . I r emember old
--- PAGE 71 ---
66 1':0 NEIDEbll IAJ. ..
Steiner saying don't worry about that liq_uid
:
going through that heat exchanger . He said it
will go through just fine . The one thing that I
thought was that we might have dinged the tank
with the REP but as long as the q_uantity stayed
up there we were in pretty good shape , but I wasn't
sure that we didn't just might have sorre sort of
a hole back there and were just slowly leaking
pressure even though the q_uantity--
Cooper That was one thing--we always worried E~bout that
REP with that big diapole hanging out. If it
skewed up a little going out what woulcl it wipe
out going out . It just happened to be with a lot
of that OAMS--fuel cell lines and all 'Ghat type
stuff back there and that was one thing that
always kind of concerned us about ejecting the REP
now and then.
So that was one thing we kept running )ver and
wondering what i t had wiped out .
Conrad Yes. That was the only thing that kept bothering
me , but it held to 60 though and that was pretty
good.
Cooper Okay. Let 's see boresight on REJ?,nodal crossing.
We didn't get the nodal cropsing. I · sure wish we
toNFll)Et~t1'1L
--- PAGE 72 ---
COMflDEN I IA[ »
could have hung on long enough to find out where
i t crossed us behind there .
FpSD Rep Let's back up just a minute on your lock on .
Cooper Okay . Boy, it just clung right on to it and zap.
We got the lock on and the darn range and range
rate came right on there . It was moving right
out at about 5 1/ 4 feet per second just throttling
right down the old line .
Conrad Address 69 was reading just fine.
Cooper Everything was right on the money.
Conrad Address 58, 59--
Cooper The range was moving right on out just like it
should and we were sitting right there on our 270
point on the ball tracking right straight out for
a long ways out . Then is when the variance came
in, when it kept going out . It should have
started slowing down on range rate . But , it
seemed like it was slowing down awfully slow . It
seems like the range rate kept on for quite a ways .
Conrad You know I had a 58 ,of -63. 8, and a 59 of a 13~8
at .89 miles and we should have never gotten that
far away from i t ever--in the beginning.
Cooper See with it moving out at the R that we had, all
the figures we had ever run on it--we had our own
--- PAGE 73 ---
68
little calculations right here--finally we were
off our graph up there, weren't we?
Conrad Yes . Well , you ' ve got to realize that the graph ' s
=
based on out of plane and this was the hypotenuse
to the thing, but even so--
Cooper But s t i ll you 've got to--
Conrad It still went away more than it should have .
Cooper Because you cosine angles were fairly 13mall in
t here .
Conrad It still went away more than it should have.
Cooper I don't quite understand it.
Conrad We 'll know what the platform--I presume they can
t ell how well we had the platform al igned .
Cooper But there again, there 's the f irst little horse
shoe nail that throws the glitch in things. When
that darn s canner s crewed up right at the most
crucial time . It probably had been screwing up
all along , we just hadn 't really caught it . It
really threw the glitch in right therEi at a point
when it really shouldn't have. We ma~, have lucked
out still , and gotten . it out right on the money
and it may not have been the problem. I don't
know, but anyway with the best we had to work with
we got it out the best we could and it looked like
--- PAGE 74 ---
•
it went out in good fashion . I think we s till
would have been all right if we had gone ahead
and done the rendezvous with no problem even if
we had gotten a little out of plane with it we could
have handled this later on. But, there again it made
it difficult for Pete because it got him completely
off his schedule , too . It got him late blowing
the doors . Well , we s t ill were reasonably well on
top of it . Let ' s see .
Conrad We can skip all this REP s t uff . You got anything
else you want to lmow about the radar?
FCSD Rep It would be best I think to go on through it and
say what you did and didn ' t do so we can stay on
this .
Conrad Yes, well--
FCSD Rep Use your flight plan.
Conrad Well, we got as far--let ' s see, it says when on bore-
sight read and record address 58 , 59 , and 69 and
this was just before 2: 51 when we were supposed
to have a reading to give back on the ground.
This is the reading I got: 58 read -63. 8, 59 read
139 . 8 . The distance was-- address 69 was .89 miles
and I got that at the t ime that it was supposed to
--- PAGE 75 ---
70
be gotten,
Cooper Why don' t you bring the flight plan over here
"
and let's start down it. We might as well
s kip what he has in the flight plan here
because it varies so from there on.
Conrad From here on you can for get this flight plan .
Cooper That ' s right .
Conrad Right here .
Cooper Where 's our little book of the fl i ght plan?
Conrad I've got i t right here .
Cooper Oh , okay .
Conrad Okay. All this time we sweated out getting home
and that ' s when we wound up-- here is where we
s t arted on this flight plan, at 1 day a nd 02 hours,
so that's 12 hour s after lift- off.
Cooper We finally got back on A f light plan ani --
Conrad Yes , and that ' s the first thing we started to do
was to power back up .
FCSD Rep One day. That's 24 hours .
Conrad No . That one day remember we-
Cooper We star ted that one day--
Conrad We went CEl' to 2400 Zulu and then tha t became day
1 , 00 hours and lift-off was 1400 Zulu.
CO N·rrD Et ◄ ifI,A. L~
--- PAGE 76 ---
Cooper From lift- off until 2400 hours the day of launch
was elapsed t ime and s t arting a t tha t t ime we started
calling it day one and then GM!'.
Conrad Okay. So , we went through a l i ttle deal here
where we started to power up and they let us tum-
we'd been drifting hadn ' t we?
Cooper Yes . I ' ll say.
Conrad We turned up the AC , ACME inverter on and the ACME
bias power on OAMS attitude on and we went t9 pulse
and we were supposed to power back down again at
02 + 27 + 25. We were supposed to have this H
2
purge a t 02 + 45 + 00 . Tha t was the first thing,
they were just going to let us purge H we
2
didn 't purge the o:xygen. Everybody was worried
about that . Then we were on the flight plan and
they gave us an update time for our first
medical pass and we stayed- - ! think we took these
vision tests , didn ' t we?
Cooper Yes, we did .
Conrad We just stayed right on the fli ght plan , had the
vision tests , and I have a comment in here that at
01 days 04 hours and 32 minutes we saw our first
meteor r e- enter .
Cooper ~an , we saw a lot of those meteorites re- enter
--- PAGE 77 ---
72 €Or<tFlt,fN I i.2u •
below us . That kind of startles you when you
::
realize they are 9ntering below you. It means
ve you .
Conrad This is when the exp imenters went out of their
minds . They handed us this flight pl8l1 you wouldn ' t
believe where they had 1, 2, 3,4,5 , 6,7,8,9,10 , 11 ,
12 , 13,14 , 15 , 16 ,17,18 , 19 , 20,21 22,23, no 22 experiments
they gave us to do in a row an they ir.volved
everything in the spacecraft anti we had gear all
over . You wouldn ' t believe it . I never had so
much junk--we went wild. That '/s when we called
up and said, "Hey, gang let ' s be a l i t·~le more
reasonable."
Cooper The other problem didn't list them
seque
Conrad Yes , that ' s right.
Cooper They put them in there and we had to keep skipping
around on them to get the sequential time on them
and that was a mess .
Conrad Now, what we did is we copied down in this book
and then we'd write it down at the proper time so
that we had it sequentially in the flight plan.
Cooper It worked out very well .
NFIDE
--- PAGE 78 ---
• 73
Conrad You , don 't want to get into which experiments we
got done and which ones we didn't or do you?
Do you want to go through it that detailed?
FCSD Rep Well, there's an experiment section in there .
Cooper Well , let's cover all the experiments in the
experiment section . We might just comment right
now how that I think our book arrangement worked
out extremely satisfactory and I don't know how
we'd have ever kept up with where we were if
we hadn't had these books to follow . We just
passed these books back and forth and we managed
to keep them stowed pretty neatly. I knew r ight
where they were . Pete· kept them stowed beside
his left leg in the seat. They slid right do~m
the seat.
Conrad Right here and Gordo kept them on his right and if
he had them and I wanted one --
Cooper If he was asleep I would just reach over and slide
them out and vice-versa. And then our Volkswagon
pouches held the l i ttle ones real fine . These
books were used a jilli on man- hour s-- just back
and for th . They really worked out well. They're
easy to write in and we tried to keep meticulous
logs on everything and I think we did reasonably
ftBENTIAt
--- PAGE 79 ---
L ,
well .
Conrad Okay, now we also wrote in these little screwy
ditties . This is where we kept the things if
they wanted us to power-up something or pull
one of their nutty tests that they dreareed up
in the middle of the night . We ' d write them down
just in order in which they came.
Cooper Do we just want to go right on down thrcugh here?
FCSD Rep Okay. Why don ' t we go right on down anc. list what
we did and then when we get in the experiment section
we can go into detail .
Cooper Okay. Where did we leave off here now. At--okay ,
one day 4 hours and 40 minutes . Let' s flee we
didn't do this--
Conrad No , we didn't do the cryogenic test . Tnt's right.
Cooper Then at 1 day 5 hours we did the S- 8 , I)..13, Connnand Pilot.
Conrad That's another thing. They had you doing these
things while one g.:;.y was asleep' and one guy was
awake . You wake up and have a briefing period it's
just a bunch of baloney. We were both awake
and when we took a test why we took it together
and got it out of the way.
Cooper l,'e ate together and slept together and took the
•.•. together. We'd been completely st~rtled
--- PAGE 80 ---
75
wi th terrible pulse rates when we ' d hear somebody
calling from down in that deep barrel , Gemini 5,
Gemini 5, Gemini 5. Ha ,ha.
Lights on all over the place trying to find the
radio switch. Ha- ha. Out of a deep sleep .
Cooper Okay. I think maybe if we'd just go down through
here and hit these things that particularly--
Conrad Tell me where we are in time and then I'll look
in here to see what notes there are in here .
Cooper Well , and then we left these pretty well as we went
through the flight plan here and then we left
those pretty well--
Conrad Well , these are all the next day s o--
Cooper These things are all ready listed in there--I think
were just mainly the things we wrote in here .
Conrad These S-6 passes
Cooper S-6 weather pass at 1 day 6 hours and 10 minutes .
1 day 7 hours 48 minutes 26 seconds . Sequence
G8, we did that . That was the hurricane too wasn' t
i t? And then we had another sequence on that --
the next trip around at 9 hours 22 minutes 49 seconds .
We looked at it again. Then at 9 hours 27 minutes
33 seconds we had a sequence 208 and that was--
Conrad Man, we've got logs for the logs.
--- PAGE 81 ---
76 "C O ► li 1DENJl4,L
Cooper I don ' t know but what we might be better ::
on this just to go through our individual
specialty logs and log where occured at what
time , because that's the more accurate
one of all--because this was kind of our running
logs of what was going on--to warn us when things
were coming up ahead. As far as going back into
this and doing the whole thing that isn 1 t as accurate
as going into-- there are so many specia:.ty
areas in here . We have those logged real
accurately according to time. I think :.t
might be better to go through and get a:.1
those and build a flight plan out of that
r ather than go through the flight
plan because the flight plan had to
be just completely- -we didn't sleep
when we were supposed to and we didn't
eat when we were supposed to and-- .
Conrad Well, let's go on through this thing, and now as far
as the experiments go those guys have a complete
log of what they sent up to us and that should
jive with the complete log that we have of what
we received and from that and what we logged and what
--- PAGE 82 ---
77
we did we can tell you at any point in time whether
we got a certain experiment done or not. If they
want to know if we got something done or not and
if there's a reason why we didn ' t do it why we
usually had that recorded somewhere. Either
in here or in the flight plan.
Why don 1 t we go through this one?
Cooper Okay.
Conrad When we get to a point of the experiment or s ome
thing we can check in here .
Cooper We did the UHF test .
FCSD Rep Why don't you read off those days .
Cooper Okay. One day and 8 hours--let 1 s see 1 day 10 hours
49 minutes . Sequence 03 UHF test 3.
Conrad Right .
Cooper We did that .
Conrad We had--were supposed to do an Apollo a t 01 12 36
17 , Now I don't think we got that one.
Cooper I think that was sequence 208 . Why don't you check
that one real quick--yes.
I think that was the one we couldn ' t get because-
Cooper We had weather over that one .
Conrad Covered by clouds .
Cooper Okay, we had UHF test number 3 at 10 hours 49 minutes .
--- PAGE 83 ---
78
FCSD Rep One day?
::
Cooper We've al l ready mentioned that one . We did get
that one. We have that one written up here actually
i t occurred around down here. Flight
plan up- date . Yes, we had lots of those.
Conrad Now, here was the D-4, D-7,421 .
Cooper D- 4, D- 7 421 occuring at 1 day 12 hours and 7
minutes .
Conrad I ' ll tell you whether we got it done or not . No.
Cooper We didn ' t do that one .
Conrad I don't know why we didn't do it . We were in
drifting fl±ght by then, I guess .
Cooper Then we have a note right here. The D- 6 number
19 scrubbed for the State side pass . They
scrubbed that one . There was a weather problem
on that one .
Conrad Yes.
Cooper Yes .
Conrad Okay now this is an interesti ng thing at 01 days
14 hours , completely different than GT 4, we
started getting these RCS hea ter lights. Those
guys--the only time they got an RCS heater :
light was something like day 3. Ed said. it was
in ring A and he turned on the heater a.r.d he got
--- PAGE 84 ---
79
the light 2 or 3 times and he turned the heater
off then it ca.me on again. You lmow , for an
hour's per iod of time and he nBver had the lights
again. Now, this is another reason why I suspect
this OAMS system-- one of the biggest mistakes
ever made--whoever recommended it on the ground
to power down that OAMS heater to save electrical
ener gy foul ed our whole system because we started
at this point time having RCS heater lights . I
checked for 8 days throughout the flight and I
could always get an RCS heater light. If I
turned off that heater switch I 1 d·have an RCS light
come on every once in a while and so we left those
RCS heaters on all the time.
Cooper From one day and 14 hours the RCS heater were on
the whole flight.
Conrad You lmow they're auto . And the only heat when
necessary, but every time we turned the heater
off we wouldn't run for an hour or two that the
light didn ' t come back on again and it would
either be on ring A or ring B.
Cooper And the temperature that we'd get on the gage
when those lights would come back on was something
in the order of about 60 degrees wasn ' t it?
I
--- PAGE 85 ---
80 L,
55 degrees .
Conrad Yes .
Cooper They ran when the heater was on--it kept them ::
between 60 and 80 . One time ring B got up to
80 degrees. But it ran between 60 and 80
degrees, that those heaters kept the RCS., A and B.
But , any time if you turned tha t heater off it
wasn ' t any time at all until the light cl3.me back
on again so we just turned them on and l ,~ft them
on the whole flight .
And that RCS couldn't have worked better . It
was the most beautiful system you ever s~w.
Conrad Boy , i t sure did . Now , here of course--
Cooper As you say, in contrast to what we had before .
Conrad Here 's another thing when we got into these high
tumbling rates that really kept the spacecraft
cold.
Cooper Shew! The windows even froze over.
Conrad Yes , i t was darn cold .
Cooper We were down to minimum flow . We had beth suit
flows off--completely off. We had the fui t
coolant completely down to the next to Jast notch
and we left i t cracked as we were afraic. we would
completely freeze up the whole coolant if we shut
--- PAGE 86 ---
81- - - --
it completely off and later they told us that we
could go a.head and shut it completely off. And
we were sitting in there just shivering and shaking
and I was a lot colder than Pete. He was cold and
I was really cold. I was really thinking seriously
about--if we couldn ' t get that thing warmed up I
was going to take my suit off and I did for a
while in fact ~ake my inlet and exhaust hoses off .
Conrad Yes, that was his answer to the problem. When he
got too cold, just disconnect.
Conrad Just let it blow i nto the cabin.
Cooper But, it was so cold in there that ·ndows froze
over and we were sitting there spinnin@.
Conrad It had a rapid freeze on them. I didn't see that
except when we were doing the high tumqling and i t
got really cold in there . I
Cooper You could see the frost bui ld up on the outside all
over the spacecraft . Outside up o the nose
section around the thrusters frost all over
down there . When you tumb
have enough time e sunlight-- when the sun-
-- I think to warm up that particular
section. When we damped it immediately thereafter
--- PAGE 87 ---
82 Flf)ENTIA ..
the whole thing star ted to warm up . You could see
the frost melt outside . Everything seei:ned t o go up .
The fuel temperatures would go up , and t'.le whole
ECS system would warm up, the cabin wouli warm up
and everything. We were sitting there--
Conrad A slow drift or stabilized fl i ght--
Cooper When we wer e s itt ing t her e r eally sp inning up, th:ings
just got colder and colder and colder . :IJ"ow by
spinning up I ' m talking about we got up )nee to
12 degrees per second. It wasn ' t any bother to us
except visuall y . You just couldn ' t stan i to look
at i t out the window. It just gave you 3uch an
awful looki ng pi cture . Like you were in an inverted-
upside down--wrong side up- -. So we fin~lly put
the polar oid filter s up . . . the holes .
Conrad We got completely i n the dark ther e .
Cooper I didn ' t even want to look at what was ~)ing on .
It was odd because before you could take a penci l and
put it out here and it's the best attitu,ie indicator
you had. If there ' s any little r ate goi:1g on at all
the penci l would give it to you . You ca1 sit and
hold it r i ght out in front of you and it's just like
an arti f i cial horizon. It ' s the most be,mtiful--
or camera or whatever you ve out there it will do
NFIDENTIAL ~
--- PAGE 88 ---
~rqflDENTIA~
the same thing. You put something out in front of
you and it would just disappear. Whew!
It wouldn ' t sit in front of you. It would move from
one side to the other of the spacecraft due to the
rates you would build up .
Conrad Yes, here's where we got into this business of the
OAMS Heater- Off and ACME-Off and the C adapter to
Command and the Scanners-Off and they wanted to up
date the computer. We brought the IGS and the
computer on and then we powered down again and this
is--
Cooper One day 14 hours where this started.
Conrad Yes , right in here . That was passing over Carnarvon .
Cooper And then is where we brought up the second fuel
cell . We brought back on--
Conrad Got the pump back on the line and then we got ready
for our first big day over the States.
Cooper Yes, that's a great da;y .
Conrad Boy, we were busy though . We learned a lot .
Cooper I tell you though , those passes over the states
were really good.
Conrad The third day was our best day as far as being
organized. They gave us about the proper amount
of experiments and we were well organized.--
--- PAGE 89 ---
84
Cooper Yes, we had a great day . Tha t third da~r was a goody .
Man we had everythi ng right on the button. We
got good shots of it and everything just worked
ou t right on the money. Okay, let ' s se,3. This is
15 hours 40 minutes, that's still with everything
powered up .
Conrad Then we had this D-1 and D-4 and we got those . Those
were photographs . We got the photographs of the moon
and the IR measurements of the moon and with the IR
film and I think they're probably pretty good. Of
course the Air Force has tha t film .
Cooper We found that the I R and the retical and the radar
and everything were pretty well right on the money.
Everything seemed to be boresighted pretty well, and
Pete could look thr ough his questar lense at a s t ar
and be boresighted right in the mi ddl e of the darn
camera. I'd have it right in the middle of the ret
icle.
Conrad Yes , I ' ve got to eat crow on that . I Fas the @J.Y
that was complaining about did they reE,lly have this
stuff boresighted. Everything was extremely well
boresighted . :
Cooper Ye s, it sure was . Can ' t complain about i t at all.
•
--- PAGE 90 ---
85
Conrad No, it worked very well .
Cooper Let ' s see we had an observation of the storm and some
... pictures there at 17 hours and 12 minutes still on
day 1. Oh, we brought the radar to stand-by to
warm things up there at 17 hours-- 16 hours
Conrad Radar temperature went down to 19 degrees.
Cooper 16 hours and 50 minutes-~it wa s the secondary
coolant loop that got so cold. They wanted us to
bring on some added heat source so we brought the
radar on to stand-by for quite a period of time
to warm things up , and let ' s see--
Conrad They wanted to warm the radar up , too . It got too col d .
Cooper Yes , that ' s right. What did we do in here .
Conrad That was S- 8, D- 13,
Cooper That was S-8, D- 13, and that didn't work out very well.
'That was too early. That was the one that was so
early in the morning.
Conrad It seems to me that's the first time we looked at
it and we saw the smoke.
Cooper Oh yes .
Cooper Now , let's see was it the first one or the second
that I saw and you didn 1 t see.
Conrad I don't know. I never saw it.
--- PAGE 91 ---
86 G@t lfill.Et ff1,1'1_ 1
FCSD Rep S- 8 , D- 13 , One day and 18 hours .
Cooper I saw it . That ' s right . We couldn ' t se e it at
all unti l we were almost over i t and then I found
the target .
Conrad We could see the smoke and we were looking at the
smoke and looking at the smoke--
Cooper The sun angle wa s very low and it was very bad
but just after we got right on top of i t and going
on over I located the targets and was trying to
point them out to Pete . At least I sor-; of got
a pattern on the ground and I think tha·; ' s why
I could find them. I recognized the pa·;tern on the
general area of the ground that I could find . They
were in between two r ivers and a bi g r e i mud hill.
Okay, what did we get on that? That wa:3 next and
I got on that one . Let's see that was three and
four and 18 hour s and one day 20 hours 4 minutes
43 seconds . We got that . And then S- 8 , D- 13 ,
Conrad The same one .
Cooper The same one we were discussing there. Yes .
;
COt ◄f ll'Et ◄ tf lsA,b ◄
--- PAGE 92 ---
87
Cooper Okay , we moved to Med Data to Hawaii at 19 hours
and 55 minutes which we did. I got there at 7 i n
the Caribbean at 20 hours and did the MSC- 1 at 21
hours 52 minutes to 22 hours and 44 minutes.
Conrad Then we stayed on the flight plan there and at
Hawaii had a critical tape dump at 1 day 23 hours .
I congratulated Gordo for exceeding his original
flight time at 2 days hours .
Cooper Just barely started .
Conrad Gee . Ob! Here's that "dinged by a micrometeorite . "
I haven ' t told anyone about this because I ' m not
really sure that was what happened, because it
happened twice and it happened right in the same
place . It might have been metal cooling, but right
over my head something dinged the hatch . Just
bigger than heck - dinged. You know , just like
someone shot a B- B off of it .
Cooper Yes, I could hear . That's just exactly what it
sounded like .
Conrad I was convinced that we had gotten dinged by a
micrometeorite . So I put it on the voice tape and
wrote it down here . Then a couple of hours later
we got dinged just as loud just about in the same
•
--- PAGE 93 ---
88 ac: 0 1◄ F 1 D E NJ J,A L ~
place again, so that made me think , well, you know
:
they aren't going to strike the same place twice
so maybe it wasn't a micrometeorite after all. I ::
really don ' t know what it was, but I think it's
worth a look at the hatch. It could have just been
that metal was cooling down or expandin~· or some
thing, you know
Cooper They were right directly overhead on thE! right
hatch .
Conrad Yes. It really sounded like someone fired a pellet
or a B- B, or a . 22 off of a piece of me·;al .
Cooper We decided we wouldn't put this out ove:c the radio
or we would get everybody all shattered . Okay,
well essentially that day 2 - that whole page from
2 hours to 4 hours - went right on flight plan
schedule . We did the Vision Test there and we
called down the scores from both that one and the
day before .
Conrad Now we were on this split purge cycle .
Cooper Yes , now here is where they started making a
mistake. Somebody didn 't realize that I could not
purge the fuel cells from my side. I can ' t get
to those switches, and I had to wake Pete up
€O t ◄ FI 0 Er ◄ T I A k-'
--- PAGE 94 ---
every time he was supposed to be asleep when the
fuel cells were purged . Well, I could get to them ,
but I had to crawl right over in his lap to do it,
so he was awake then . After that I learned to wake
him up early and let him get awake before he
purged them.
Conrad Scared the heck out of that guy at Carnarvon , too ,
I ' ll bet you -- We were going to purge the fuel
cells for the first time and I was sound asleep.
Gordo said, ''Wake up , wake up, we ' ve got to purge
the fuel cells!" I reached over there and turned
on everything and all the Delta- Plights came on .
Cooper He hadn ' t put the crossover --
Conrad The crossover valve on. I said , "The Delta- P
lights are on!" The guy at Carnarvon said, "Stop
purging! Stop purging!" He must have thought the
cells were going to go right then and there so
Cooper And then Pete woke up .
Conrad Then finally I woke up and got to thinking about
what was going on there and found out that I'd
fouled up, slightly.
Cooper All right, let 's see. We deleted on day 2 , 6 hours,
and 35 minutes, we deleted that Philippines S-7 and they
--- PAGE 95 ---
90
were --
Cooper I wonder what the reason was for that . There was
some interference with something. I conldn ' t get
to that one. Oh, what the heck was it? There was
something else going on they had us doing right
then . Oh , somebody was asking me somet:1ing. They
were having a big discussion over cryo . That ' s
right . We had a great big 2 days 6 hours - we had
a big discussion over the net on something on these
cryos and it occured right at the time when we
were supposed to get this one on this Jass .
Cooper Okay, at 2 days 7 hours and 45 minutes we did MSC-
1 again, and in fact I think we did all the MSC- l 's
pretty much on schedul e. At 2 days 9 hours and
15 minutes we were supposed to do an Apollo
Landmark in Africa, and the one they called out for
us to do in the Flight Plan , there just wasn ' t any
description of it . It was very poorly described
and we couldn't find where and what it was they
wanted us to get. They never did call out a
number on this nor did they have it listed here .
Conrad What was the time on that? ...
Cooper It was almost 02:09:20 : 00 .
--- PAGE 96 ---
91
Conrad 02: 09 , huh?
Cooper Yes .
Conr ad Gosh, that doesn't even show here . So , I guess
they never did even call it up from the ground .
You just saw it in t he Flight Plan .
Cooper It was in the Flight Plan - -
Conrad But they riever called it out .
Cooper They n ever called it out .
Conrad I haven ' t got it written down , either .
Cooper Okay, on through the second day we did another UHF
Test , another Medical Data, on 2 days 12 hours and
50 minutes.
Conr ad That ' s when we first powered the platform back up.
We were still building up.
Cooper Two days and 13 hours, we powered the platform back
up and we did a UHF No . 1 , we did a D- 1 sequence 2,
we did a D- 1 sequence 3, we did a D-6 sequence 12 ;
and these are all s t ateside passes . That was a
busy time ! We did a D- 6 at day 2 , 14 hours . We
did a D- 4/D-7 at 14 : 35 .
Conrad What ' s this , now? I have the platform power up , a
D- 4 , a UHF 2
Cooper Right .
--- PAGE 97 ---
92
Conrad - - an S- 6 at 15 : 45 --
Cooper You ' re ahead of where I was .
Conrad Oh, I ' m sorry. Okay, we'll back up. D- 6 at 13 :41--46 . r
We got Tampico instead of Monterey beca-i;.se it was
clouded in . Then we did the UHF No. 1, and we got
this S- 5/S- 6 during our African pass- dicn ' t we?
And we got the D- 4/D-7 over Kano . Wait a minute,
I ' m not sure we got that one. Let me look in the
log here. 4 : 20, no clouds over Kano , so we didn't
get it. It was supposed to be cl oudy O'rer Kano .
Cooper That ' s right . There were supposed to b1? clouds over
Kano. It was supposed to be clouds we '~ere getting
pi ctures of, and there weren't any clouis .
Conrad Yes , it was clear. Then we had an S- 1 , which we
did not do . We did the S- 1 later. That's when we
went to platform power up and the computer on, and
then we started a D- 6 at 15 : 16 . After D- 6 at
15 : 16 was a number 20 , which, if I'm net mistaken ,
was supposed to be Waco ; and we got DaJlas instead
because Waco was cloudy then . Yes , it was supposed
to be James Connally and we took Dallaf1 instead,
because Waco was clobbered.
Cooper What ' s this I have here? That ' s your note there.
--- PAGE 98 ---
·GONftf1 93
Conrad 21 . 1 feet per second Delta P .
Cooper Oh, that was our pre- burn stuff. At 2 days
.,,... 17 hours 34 minutes and 31 seconds we had a
maneuver load .
Conrad Well , I have the whole thing here . We powered
up the platform on day 2 at 15:50 with the plat
form caged BEF, and at 16 : 15 we alined BEF with the
rate gyros on. At 16:45:00 the computer went on
and we addressed 25 90201 , and apogee adjust maneuver
was a t 16 : 50 : 17 . We translated forward to zero the
IVI, so it was actually a retro burn . I mean we
were BEF.
Cooper We were using the aft-firing thrusters.
Conrad Yes. We had a D-6 on the ship , and we didn't see
it, at 2 days 16 hours 56 minutes and 49 seconds .
We didn't see the ship. Then at 17:20 the second
day we alined the platform SEF and we sat the
computer up to address 25 00158 . We made an SEF
burn, which was a phase adjust maneuver, at 17 :
34:58 . Now , that one we did in the Platform Mode
and it didn't burn for schmaltz.
Cooper The platform didn ' t hold it . It allowed us to get
a little bit of left-right and up- down .
--- PAGE 99 ---
Conrad I don't bel ieve that Platform Mode was holding the
t olerances it was supposed to. It was drifting a
full degree, and it was supposed to hold better
than t ha t .
Cooper I t is supposed to hol d plus or minus half a degree .
Conrad By drifting off in yaw a degree , it burned the whole
time 1 degree off in yaw in the same direction .
You see, that accounted for the sort of l arge out
of-pl ane number; it was like 0.8 foot ier second
that we got in to the out of pl ane. Okay, then we
had a D-4/D- 7 at 17: 42:00, a 410 Band a 407 over
Carnarvon; and it was not done .
Cooper Tha t 's right; we didn ' t have a reticl e .
Conrad Because the reticle pooped out . We thought the
reticl e had burned out . It wasn ' t unti l l a ter on
after we were going to fix the reticle by putting
t he auxiliary light in there that Gordo found that
t here was a short in the cord when the cord was
stretched , and that t he short wasn ' t i n the cord
when the cord wasn ' t stretched , and that the sight
was okay. That reminds me of another thing.
Right af ter we got airborne I went to use the
little auxil iary l ight down here . It was in the
--- PAGE 100 ---
95
clip so hard that when I pulled it out , I pulled
it completely apart. I shattered it . I broke out
my lens . Glass floating around and everything.
Where did we stow that? I forgot . I gave it to
you and you stowed i t --
Cooper I put it in the garbage bag.
Conrad That ' s right ; it's in the garbage bag, someplace.
Well , they have gone through a ll that.
Cooper Incidentially, that one single-point cord that we
have in there over on my side , if I had had
something to cut it with, I should have cut it
right in two so it wouldn 't be used again . It's
no good . It works fine as long as you don ' t put
any tension on it. When you s t ring it up to put
it in the reticle, it shorts out .
Conrad Then we went through another maneuver preparation
at 17:50: 00 on the second day. We alined the
platform SEF and we sat up an out-of-plane
maneuver and address 27 00150 , 15 feet per second
out of plane burn, and 90 degrees yaw left . At
02 days 18 hours 06 minutes 50 seconds we made
that out-of-plane burn .
Cooper We did that in Rate Command and right on the money.
--- PAGE 101 ---
Conrad Yes, we did that in Rate Command right on the money.
Then we had an S- 8/D-13 and we documented those
t hings ; Gordo saw part of it and I did.r. 1 t . We
never did really get a good score . ThE·n at 18 : 50
again we alined the platform SEF and seit the
computer up to 25 00164 and burned thiE1 reverse
coelliptic maneuver at 19 : 04:18 , and that was a
good burn too. MCC had put in their Agena computer
an Agena ephemeris, and they ran a rendezvous
solution on a fake Agena. They had us make the
actual burns, and then they computed hJw close we
would have wound up. I was told over the radio
that we got within 0 .2 mile of altitude and 0 . 3
mile horizontal distance from where we should have
actually been. That was well within the tolerances ,
so they were apparently fairly pleased with the
burns . Then we had S-7 at 2 days 21 tours 33
minutes 02 seconds , and Gordo shot moet of those.
They always happened on your wat ch.
Cooper Yes.
Cooper Then we did 2 days 21 hours and 50 minutes . We had
,,
Apollo Landmark south -·
Conrad Th.at' s when I woke up and you had tha·~ Lake . . . I
--- PAGE 102 ---
I
--- PAGE 103 ---
--- PAGE 104 ---
99
got the S- 7 again, or you got it , at 3 days 06
hours and 32 minutes. We del eted an S- 7 at 3
days 05 hours for some reason . I just have
"delete" in here .
Cooper What was that? An S- 7?
Conrad Yes.
Cooper Yes . I don ' t know ; they just told us to delete
that one at 3 days 05 hours . Let ' s see ; we
deleted a Cabin Lighting Survey because Pete was
asleep. That was one time when you were asleep
and I didn ' t want to disturb you . You hadn ' t had
any sleep in awhile .
Conrad You have the note down here that at 3 days 6 hours
and 33 minutes you found the OAMS Control Propellant
circuit breaker open and OAMS Control Regulator No .
1 circuit breaker open ; and you don't know when
they were opened, and I don ' t know when they
opened, but we know what did it . We had been
parking the water gun up there like you are
supposed to be able to do and then pulling i t off .
You tend to pull down thi s way , which would cock
the gun barrel up into the circuit breaker panel ;
and I think I probably knocked them off , but when
--- PAGE 105 ---
100
•
I ' m not sure . So , from that point in time on we
never used the hook-up that you can hock it up on
the -- -.
Cooper We al so found that little-hook up was i •eeling gray
paint off of those bars and i t was floe.ting all over
the cabin,
Conrad That ' s right . It kept knocking the gre.y paint off
the guards and i t kept floating around the cabin .
So from then on we always put the water· gun in the
gun holster down there where it belongs . As a
matter of fact I think it was easier tc get it in
and out of the plastic thing that holds it on the
circuit breaker guards - holds it on tt ere so
tightly that it is a big swivet everytime you pull
it off.
Cooper Okay. At day 3, 6 hours 32 minutes 46 seconds we
did an S- 7 Experiment that aircraft surpor t on it .
This was over the Philippines.
Conrad We got four pictures .
Cooper Right .
Conrad We did an MSC-1 at 07 : 40. We had a medical data
pass in there at 0~: 53,
Cooper Right ,
--- PAGE 106 ---
CONFIDENT~ 101
Conrad Then I have Pla t form to ORB Rate , Prelaunch , and
horizon scan for some r eason . ~uestar 01 , 90
degrees left .
Cooper We alined SEF at 13 : 10.
Conrad Oh, that was these platform tests 1 and 2 that they
wanted us to do .
Cooper That 's right. We were getting ready for another
stateside pass, too . We installed the photometer,
we did an S- 8/D-13 pass at day 3, 13 hours 32
minutes at Laredo .
Conrad Oh , let me make a comment right now on S- 8/D- 13 .
We were supposed to make a measurement , a window
survey, of the window before day one and the last day.
Okay, the window scan was done on 1 day 18 hours
26 minutes 00 seconds. That was the first window
scan . A second window scan was never done because
the last 3 days of the flight we were in drifting
flight . This required a 30- degree sun angle on the
window, and we never did have a control system
back until we were on the RCS sys tem. We weren ' t
about to do any experiments on RCS fuel . That was
right before retro . The second window scan, the
one at the end of the flight , wasn ' t done. But
--- PAGE 107 ---
102
I will make the comment that I don't think the
window changed, just from my looking at it .
Cooper No , I don ' t think it did, either, I think it was
just as bad at first , as it was at l ant.
Conrad That's right.
Cooper And it was pretty bad .
Conrad So, I don I t think they lost anything ·;here on that
data. We just couldn't ge t that one.
Cooper Okay. Let's see. We had a medical pgss at day 3,
13 hours 50 minutes - 13 hours 47 minutes, actually.
Alined the platform
Conrad We went through a really big day . This was day
3 and this was the day we were really organized .
The experimenters sent us up about the right
number of experiments. They gave us enough time
between experiments , and they planned them well
enough so that we didn't have any troubl e changing
the gear around or anything, and we had a big day
that day.
Cooper This was a great day .
Conrad We had enough time to do it all and we felt good
about it. We felt that it was the best day we
flew.
--- PAGE 108 ---
103
Cooper Let ' s see . Day 3, 14 hours and 18 minutes , we did
that Zodiacal Light .
Conrad That ' s right. Gordo really had it on there . I
think he got some good dope out of that Zodiacal
Light . The pictures should be good . Gordo held
it right on the money.
Cooper Let ' s see; and then we did D- 6 .
Conrad On the D-6 134, we looked for the ship again but
didn't see it that day , and that was one thing we
didn ' t get .
Cooper I have here now a D-6 . We did it . This is El
Centro. No , no.
Conrad 021 is Dallas , I think , or something like that .
Cooper That's right . And then day 3, 15 hours 8 minutes .
--- PAGE 109 ---
104
Cooper We had a full day this day , Let ' s see-
at 3 hours-- day 3 , 15 hours , ]3 minutes
,:,
we had D- 6 134,
Conrad When was this?
Cooper 3:05:13:51
Conrad Yes, That was a 134--that was the ship
and we didn't see it .
Cooper Yes--that was the weather.
Conrad Yes--I have "no joy for sunlight here,"
OK then we had a D- 4 at 15 : 59 ,
Cooper Right
Conrad 409 and 410b and we got them both done .
Cooper We got both of those.
Conrad We had a platform aline at 16 ::.5 :00.
Cooper And a medical pass - right - pl atform
aline .
Conrad What was that--the computer waE: off by
240 miles?
FCSD rep Yes . Their computations were calling
for 240 short based on what waE put into
it .
Conrad That ' s right--that 1 s just what happened
and we were trying to fly short .
CQNEJD;l»TI~ •
--- PAGE 110 ---
@NflDi~TIAL • 105
FCSD Rep Yes .
Conrad Well, do you feel better?
Cooper No --
Cooper At 16 hours and 24 minutes we had a
medical pass . At 16 hours and 15 minutes
we alined SEF, powered up the radar,
rate gyros, etc . At 16 hours and 37
minutes we had a D- 4 pass 423a, .
Conrad That was the first missile .
Cooper And we saw it .
Conrad Saw it come up thru the clouds--or right
at the edge of the clouds.
FCSD rep . Which one was this--out of here-
Conrad No--we didn't get any missiles out of
here. It was out of Vandenburg. It
was the Minuteman out of Vandenburg.
FCSD rep. You got it as soon as you came out of
the clouds?
Cooper Yes.
Conrad Yeah- -just as plain as day.
Cooper Right on it . Should have gotten some
good readings on that . We powered up
the computer then at day 3 , 16 hours
--- PAGE 111 ---
106
a.nd 45 minutes a.nd radar was on a.nd
radar off, on--we had that radar test
right in there that they wanted to do.
Conrad Did we get those pictures of Venus and
Fomalhaut. This platform 1 and 2
business?
Cooper I thought we did.
Conrad I didn ' t have a done log on that and
I don't think I wrote that down anywhere
whether we--
Cooper I don't remember whether we ever got
Venus or not. OK, let ' s see---the tape
recorder was apparently still working
there because you changed the tape there.
That day at 1 7 hours-- yeah--he:r:e we go.
Conrad Wait a minute--here, I got it down here.
Platform test 1, magazine 9, picture 23,
l/30th of a second- no - somet::iing
Questar.
Cooper Didn't get Venus--
Conrad Platform test 02 , magazine 9, picture 22,
I/30th of a second-- oh, no fili;er--I 1 m
sorry. Fomalhaut--we got Foma:Lhaut but
CO~FIDENTIAL.-
--- PAGE 112 ---
107
::
we didn ' t get Venus . We never found
it . That' s right.
Cooper That ' s right. We never even found
Venus on that night side. Platform
test 2--
Conrad And I got a remark here to find out
that on day 6 at 01 hours, 02 minutes
and 15 seconds where in the heck were
we because there were great fires on the
ground?
Cooper Yeah.
Conrad OK--so I did write it down--all right-
SA- D-13, day 3, 18 :16 :14--and I had
some comments about that here some place .
16:14 - We scored a 4 and a 1--and the
4 was in the upper--the 1 was in the
upper left hand box and the 4 was in
the second box in the second row.
Cooper Right. OK about this period of time-
let ' s see we had an S- 7--0h, first before
this--then we had run some more tests
on our primary scanner and found out
that it was completely inoperative and--
--- PAGE 113 ---
108
Conrad Yeah.
Cooper Just kept getting worse, worse , worse--
and so--Pete has a note here--tell Houston
about primary scanner--which we did
shortly thereafter at 3 hours, 18 minutes ,
3 days, 18 hours and 16 minutes we did
an S- 7 , and then at 3 days , 18 hours
and 25 minutes we purged, powe:('ed down ,
computer off, platform off, re·;icle off,
rate gyros off, etc. , etc.
Conrad Yeah. Then you have a--you 1 ve got an
S- 7 done at 03:21:20 : 08.
Cooper Right ,
Conrad You had an Apollo landmark at 03:21:38 :02
a 213 and I think that--we got Lake
De Poo Poo or whatever it was , when we
got t hat done.
Cooper We got that one.
Conrad There was a D- 4 D- 7 at 03:22: 48 :17 a
425a--I don ' t know what that was but-
Cooper Well , we also got in addition just before
that at day 3, 22 hours and 15 minutes
we got an S- 6 magazine 4; exposure 12 ,
--- PAGE 114 ---
109
cyclone off Japan which has been added
C
into there. And then you start on that
HF test number 1 starting at 22 hours ,
55 minutes .
Conrad Oh, yeah, 425a was Hawaii , Maui.
Cooper Oh, yeah , you got that one.
Conrad Maunakea was the volcano--it ' s not
active--but anyhow--
Cooper Wait a minute--oh--213 is what--
Conrad Huh? That's Apollo landmark--this was
the D- 4 D- 7--let 1 s see the Apollo land
marks--let me look there and see if we
got 213 on it .
Cooper All right , then that was at 22 :48 - the
D-4 D- 7 was at 3 days , 22 hours , 48 min
utes , and 17 seconds was the 425a--and
416 .
Conrad You got the Apollo landmark at 03 :21 : 38 :
02: 213 , magazine 4 , frame 10 , 1 - 2
pictures you took.
Coop:er Yes .
Conrad Camera 11.
Cooper Then--day 4 start at day 4 , 00 hours ,
--- PAGE 115 ---
110
25 minutes, cabin lighting. 19 minutes
was the medical data, at 40 let•s see--
40 minutes there was the D- 2 series 1, 4,
5--sequence 1, 4, 5.
Cooper Mode 414 I have here--What was that?
Conrad 145 was a military, U.S.
Cooper Yeah. What I s this Mode 414--
Conrad That was if we saw it we were ·;o be in
Mode 414 on the IR.
Cooper Oh, OK. Then we had a D- 6, mode 01 at
44:10, day 4, 44 minutes and 10 seconds .
Conrad On day 4?
Cooper Yes.
Conrad I don I t have anything down hero for that.
Cooper 04:00
Conrad Mode Ol--that 1 s--I think. that 1 s . -~ I
may have the numbers wrong.
Cooper OK--at day 4, two hours, 20 minutes -
vision tests, both of us.
Conrad Had that HF test in there someplace.
Cooper Yeah, I've already called that out.
Medical data pass on me over CSQ at
03: 11:00. We had an S-7, day 4, 03 hours ,
'AElEN:J:
--- PAGE 116 ---
111
20 minutes and 25 seconds , we got an
C
S- 7, sequence 01 and let's see--and thru
this period was where we both completely
ran out of steam-- here on--we were trying
to get you to sleep so I deleted all of
these tests right in thru here to let
Pete sleep . On day 4, starting at 3
hours and 45 minutes on--
Conrad Deleted the HF tests here--
Cooper Kept adding these tests in here that
were--just weren ' t going to get him
any sleep at all.
Conrad This was this 145 mode this was at D- 6,
D-4, D- 7 and D- 2. It was the 145 mode
for the 01 and 414 .
Cooper That ' s right . At day 4 , 48 hours--
Conrad Yeah, here I have this thing--4th day,
U. S. passes--we started at 11 :00 o!clock.
Cooper What 1 s this 04, 4 hours , 48 minutes a.rid
58 seconds there was a D-2 that we had
no success on,
Conrad Now comment on that . To do any of those
things you have to have the platform on.
--- PAGE 117 ---
112
FCSD r ep . Then the platform wasn ' t on?
Conrad Was not on .
Cooper That ' s right- -see you got to he able
to have an accurate means of pointing
of having yaw and--
Conrad They said pitch up 83 degreeR, yaw 45
degrees left--out of that window. You
don I t have any idea in the wo:dd. I
mean, we didn't even have rat1:! gyros
powered up . You have no idea in the
world where you a.re pointing, just-
Cooper You are wasting your time try:Lng to do
this kind of job without a platform .
FCSD rep. What is this a shot of--what "i.s this
target?
Conrad Well , for any pointing r equiraments ,
especially ones in the sky--
Cooper Where they are going at different angles ,
see.
Conrad You have to have a platform.
Cooper Then along at day 4, 5 hours and 40
minutes , Buzz ' s eX])eriment was placed
in there on a switch--
f
--- PAGE 118 ---
113
Conrad Yeah.
Cooper That was the straw that broke the camel's
back--we didn't do .
Cooper Did MSC- 1, day 4, 5 hours and something
to .6 hours and something. Let ' s see--
then on down to day 4 , 11 hours and 5 minutes
Conrad Powered up.
Cooper Then it ' s powered up platform, had a
medical data pass , 11 hours and 25 minutes
aligned SEF--11 hours and 40, powered
up the rate gyro and computer on--11 :51
bio-med recorder number 1 off, number 2 on.
Conrad That was half way through the flight .
Cooper 11 : 55:55 we had a D- 6, the recovery ship,
and that wa$ ~he one we saw.
Conrad No , we didn ' t get it . I got no joy on
that one .
Cooper OK .
Conrad We got them the next time around I think.
Cooper 11 : 55:55 , 134 sequence zero A.
Conrad Yeah, we got them the next rev .
Cooper OK .
Conrad OK--I 1 ve got the D- 6 at 12:24:02 was done-
--- PAGE 119 ---
114
that was the sequence 091 or W:~atever
it was.
Cooper Right .
Conrad The platform aligned SEF, for t he command
pilot we got- -
Cooper Purged the fuel cells at day 4 , 12 hours
and 50 minutes .
Conrad Yeah, SA D- 13 on Laredo at 13 : :?3 : 39-
what happened?
Cooper Neither one of us saw the target --on
that one.
Conrad I'm not sure I 1ve got anything written
down. I don ' t . Why don ' t I ? Huh.
I don ' t know what happened. Then we had
a D-6 089-what the heck was 085'?
Cooper Day 4, 13:58:50 , D- 6 in F.a.st .Af'rica- -
Conrad 0h yeah, that was Blantyre Aercdrome and
Malawi. I don't think we got that one.
Cooper Yes we did.
Conrad Did we?
Cooper Malawi airport--remember?
Conrad Maybe we did- -I don't have a done written
on it for some reason.
--- PAGE 120 ---
115
Cooper Yeah, I remember we had the picture of
"
it you know and it was out there on
that little point--or wa s that the one
by Ka.no that we couldn' t find because
of the weather.
Conrad There's one in there where we did 089-
let's see what it looked like .
Cooper Look up 089--that 1 s the one wher e we
had all the weather on it by Ka.no ,
wasn ' t it?
Conrad Yeah, well , we saw these lakes but-
Cooper We saw the lakes but that was in under
a big deck of clouds .
Conrad Did we or didn't we get the aerodrome. I
guess we didn ' t get the aerodrome.
Cooper No , we didn't get it. Because remember
we saw the lake and saw the river come
out and then there was this whole deck
of clouds over there so we couldn ' t get
that because of the cloud cover .
Conrad That's right.
Cooper We saw the general area-- where it was
at--but we couldn' t get on it at all .
--- PAGE 121 ---
116
Let ' s see at 14:15, day 4, D- 4, D- 7 ,
410c.
Conrad D- 4 , D- 7 , 410c was--that•s one of the
ones where we were supposed to track
a star or something--yeah , we were
supposed to track Nunki and we never
could find it because it was--
Cooper It was up in first, early--
Conrad It was up early-- we had troubln with
that . That ' s another thing I could have
recommended those gu:ys--we got enough
to do in the spacecraft not to worry
about setting up the star chart and
figuring out from the- -somethir..g you
can ' t do from the star chart is figure
out a pitch and yaw angle and the
grormd ' s got that information up the
kazoo, so on any of these ones where
they want you to photograph some stars
or anything else-you' ve got to platform
up again - the easiest thing to do is
send up a pitch and yaw with it and
that just takes all the work out of it
--- PAGE 122 ---
117
in the spacecr aft. Gosh, we ' re messing
around with the star charts- - still don ' t
.:: tell you how much to pitch up or yaw
around to find the darn thing.
Cooper They tell you where it would be on yaw
path.
Conrad You just sort of got to figure it out
it •s over to the left or the right and
go over and look for it . Well , that ' s
not the way to do it . Heck, we never
navigated that way in the Navy. You
go into star chart with local hour angle
and it gives you the elevation and azimuth
to the star, from North, and that ' s
essentially what you need here . You
need the elevation and azimuth angle off
the orbital plane.
Cooper OK , let's see--at day 4, 14:56:50 we had
a D- 4, D- 7 White Sands Sled Run which
was successful .
Conrad And then we got the ship.
Cooper An then we got the D- 6 424a r ight after
that. At 14: 57 : 31 we got D-6 sequence 134 .
--- PAGE 123 ---
118
Conrad Which we did photograph the Lake Champlain.
FCSD rep. Did you see this thing-- how dii you
pick this thing up--did you us: a tele
scope or-
Cooper We saw him visually - found h~n visually
and then
FCSD rep. From the wake--
Cooper Put the pipper on him and Pete took
pictures with the big camera. Then we
got a D- 6 15:04:40 series 134. What
was that?
Conrad That ' s the ship .
Cooper Well, what was the 424a?
Conrad That was the White Sands MissiJe Run.
Cooper Oh, OK, We got a D-4, D-7 at 15:19:00
that was the 419--
Conrad The 419 was the ascension calibration.
We did that darn thing again for them-
remember that over Australia or something
I don't know what the heck we did it
for because I told them we got that
thing once. Anyhow, then we did a platform
aline.
--- PAGE 124 ---
~FIDE~TIA 119
Cooper All right - 15 hours 40 minutes-
Conrad Then D- 4, D- 7 was the second Minuteman
which we saw but we didn't track.
Cooper 16 hours 28 minutes, 423b - we did the
HF tests 4 at 17 hours.
Conrad Wait a minute- I got a - we had an S- 7
at 16:37 and it was the thunderstorms in
southern Florida. I think we got those.
Cooper We got that one. All right -
Conrad We had a D- 6 at 16: 51:25 which was an 065 -
Cooper Right
Conrad And if I ' m not mistaken that was that
Island off Brazil and we photographed
the wrong island - then we found out
our mistake in time and -
Cooper Just as we were going over we shifted
over to the other island -
Conrad And we photographed the right island -
it lookeQ. like there was only one island
out there and we found out there were
two i s lands out there so we did get the
right pictures .
Cooper There again, the maps we had just weren ' t
--- PAGE 125 ---
120
big enough in their overall look at
things to give you a clue as to what -
Conrad I ' ll show you this - This is the kind of
thing that you just can•t have-that was
065- now what you need to help you find
an island is some clue as to Khere it
is located in the world- well, t hat ' s
what we had--
Cooper Yeah, there was the island--
Conrad Now it turns out that right up about here
there ' s another island--laught er--and
man we took all kinds of -- sE!e fortunately
it was far enough away - you •• look 15
seconds up there is 15 x 8 is 120 miles-
and 120 miles is a lot of dist ance but
you are covering that in 15 snconds - well
fortunately this was about 15 or 20
seconds - we·were pitched down and we
were at least at the 90 and Wt:! got the
second island a little bit pa::Jt the nadir ,
because we already had been t :cack.ing t his
first island see and thlm here we came
drifting along feeling how great we were
--- PAGE 126 ---
Q©~fNTtAE, 121
getting the picture but we really dirui 1 t
think it quite looked like the right
island but because we didn ' t see an air
field on it - well here came the island
with the air field - it was a good 200
miles down the pike but you need a little
more -
Cooper A little more help as to where it ' s at.
Let ' s see 17 hours was HF test 4 -
we did that,
Conrad Yeah, we powered down .
Cooper 17 :40 - Medical data - we did that.
Conrad Yeah, now here is a good time for a comment
on this thing. Every time we went thru
these state- side passes now a - to operate
on a state- side passes - they start out
two orbits before you hit the state- side
passes- you started getting chatter--the
first time you hit Carnavon and then well-
no , I take that back - the first thing
that happened is we come by that low sweep
up thru Central America liliere we got
Canaveral and Antigua and we get Houston
--- PAGE 127 ---
122
remote from there and it would be Dave
Scott and Elliot ,a.nd they would start
giving us a little poop about what was
going to go on that day see--and heck
they'd tell us a little bit acout the
latest hydrogen calculations er something
(laughter) and that was - we 1 ci. sort of
get an idea of what was going on, then
the next t~ip around is the first time
you pick up Carnavon and then he'd sta.xrt
to give you an update and he'd get about
half way through what you wern going to
do in those state- side passes and we ' d
pick up Dave Scott again at Canton and
he I d finish it and then we'd come by that
fringe pass by the states and that ' s when
they changed the watch and we'd say hello
to everybody that was going off and coming
on and then we'd have all the stuff and
the next trip around - that would start
the three revs over the states see and
then it was just go--you had gear all
over the spacecraft - gee we had everything
--- PAGE 128 ---
123
we owned out and we ' d be going through
books and writing and flight plan and
then we ' d leave the states and it says
pilot ' s nap period and Gordo was supposed
t o do something else and that was imposs
ible - it would take two more revs to
clean up the spacecraft before we ever
got to do anything else so we never got
on that part of the flight plan. This
pilot nap period - that was a big joke -
Cooper Now pilot's eat period and nap period
and all -
Conrad Always cleaning the spacecraft and we
had to clean up the whole thing - it was
a good time to do it -- we ' d have meal
garbage out and we ' d have all the experi
ments out so we ' d -- up to the states on
that last one .
Cooper It was handier to eat together too -
because you had to get the stuff out
anyway--so it was handier for us just to
eat together so we just always ate at
the same time .
•
--- PAGE 129 ---
124
Conrad And we would be in the procesH of cleaning
up when we'd come by and we ' d have that
Guaymas pass where we'd come ·1:iy and have
California acq. and Guaymas acq. and
we ' d go right down the side of Mexico ,
the west side, and then cross the isthmus
and go down Brazil and then fI'Om there
on you - that was your last contact with
the states and you'd stay out there with
the CSQ RKV cycle through the rest of
the night and that time we got all the
way around there and picked up the CSQ
the first time and we ' d have Hawaii once
more -
Cooper Then we were already through my s l eep
period and that ' s supposed to be Pete ' s
sleep period - that was the not:'lllal sleep
period.
Conrad We worked our tail off that wh:>le time -
Cooper That was the normal sleep peri,:,d and we
just barely have things all sq·.lared away
so then we both powered down - ·-
Conrad Go thru this terrible 50 minut,:s with both
of us like this - we ' d uh- uh, oh, yeah - hi
--- PAGE 130 ---
125
there - laughter .
Cooper Yeah, ok, everything 1 s fine (snoring)
(1a,1g~+.er) .
Conrad Talk about lonely--that •s when it really
got bad. You really knew you were out
in the no place.
Cooper We just discussed one thing while you
were out, was this window situation. You
couldn't even begin to see out of Pete' s
window when we launched. It was really
terrible and it was in between those
outside panes and glass . And my window
between the outside sealed units and the
inside unit of glass there was a bee -
Conrad Oh, yeah , yeah, that stuff is on the
inside of the outer pane. I ·don' t know
how that got there.
Cooper And inside these two outside units on my
side in between those and the inside pane
of glass there was a little bee and a
fly and a whole bunch of flecks of dirt
and odds and ends in there. And my
window wasn ' t as frosted over as his.
--- PAGE 131 ---
126
Over the period of time, they both got
a certain amount of little frosty scum
on the outside of them and when we fired
the scanner covers there were about foUT
or five little gray flecks of etuff and
debris just flew everywhere right in that
period of time and four or five· little
gray flecks came on the window.
Conrad Heck, that's before launch isn't it?
Oh, I didn ' t know that.
FCSD rep . Did it ever clear up?
Cooper No . I think it was just unforg:i.v eable.
I think if they can I t do bette1· on windows
than that they ought to just qt.it trying.
I could see maybe having some El.lllount of
debris-and then when you use the thruster s
the debris would all show up again. We
were on--here we are up here--t his med
data. Day 4, 16 hours and that data -
did .
Cooper 16 hours 28 minutes - D-4, D- 7 , D-6 , 423b.
i'
Conrad Yeah that was the second missi:.e - which
we didn I t get any track on -- ue saw -
--- PAGE 132 ---
ONFl0ENTIA[ 127
Cooper HF test 4 then at 417 , 4:17:40 med
data was done. HF test 4 ended on -
down there - OK, day 4, 19 hours 44 minutes
was S- 7 which was completed .
Conrad Yeah, both the ·s- 71 s were completed.
Cooper Then there's an S- 7b, 21 hours , 9 minutes
and 50 seconds storm Doreen - we completed,
Time of closest approach was at 21:09:30,
They had us tracking this storm - you
see
Conrad Oh, yeah.
Cooper We estimated the eye was approximately
250 miles left of course -
Conrad Have you got the orbits - yeah, here it
is . This thing is the greatest thing in
the whole world . It 1 s the simplest -
cheapest thing in the spacecraft and -
Cooper It is - it is great.
Conrad We would have been lost without this
thing. This orbital update map. Boy,
it really- well, the orbit was really
good as far as -
Cooper You really don't know where ~ou are at-
--- PAGE 133 ---
,,,
128
Conrad But this is a good little map t oo . It
really has the right things on it.
There wasn't anytime we didn ' t Look
down and know exactly where we ·Here.
This thing is really great. Probably the
cheapest thing in the spacecraft.
Cooper That 1 s one Jerry Jones made up. We tried
out a long time ago and I said I liked
it and I wanted to take one like that
rather than this big elaborate one -
Conrad Yeah, it really worked great.
Conrad Yeah, I just saw all these map star updates
we had here.
Cooper Yeah. One thing they could do . They
could put about 3 or 4 more orbi ts on it
and not have t o update it so often . Might
be a little handier. Just a tr.ought -
but it 1 s good the way i t is. CK, l et's
see , we ' re on day 4, 22 hours en d 20
minutes - we did a cabin l ighting survey.
Conrad We did the radar test 10 . Cabi n lighting
S-7 , MSC-1.
Cooper And med data.
~tf>fNT=IAL
--- PAGE 134 ---
~ ffDffiTIA[ 129
Conrad Apollo landmark 207- that was at 07 :14:25
must be day 5 ,
Cooper No , not that far along - We did UHF 6
we did at 2 hours , day 5, 2 hours and
something.
Conrad You said you had an S-7 that was again
during my sleep cycle and you said missed
while discussing Cryos with CSQ.
Cooper Right.
Conrad And then you had an MSC 1 at 05 :40 and you
got that done.
Cooper Now you're ahead of me--hold up just a
minute . We 're down here now - let~ see -
here's the S-7. 05 :40 MSC- 1 that was done .
Conrad You got your Apollo landmark -
Cooper Apollo landmark at sequence 207 at 7 hours
and 14 minutes.
Conrad What was 207?
Cooper Lake Titicaca
Conrad That was the Canaries -
Cooper Oh, yeah , all right. Then we had SAD- 13 -
vision tests on both of us which we did
together instead of separately. And then
--- PAGE 135 ---
130 NFl0Etsl:TIAt '4
at 5 day , 10 hours and 20 mim:.tes we
had Apollo No. 208 , which we g'Ot . We
had S- 502 which we got . We had D- 4,
D- 7, sequence 414 which we got and we
had the platform tests which ·Ke did .
Conrad Yeah then we got the radar teet run -
Cooper And Pete has a note here "Get serious,"
it really starts getti ng thick and
heavy.--
Conrad Well , I don't know--they were really getting
wild -
Cooper We had a platform aline - plat form test,
radar test , this is day 5, 11 hours and
35 minutes - We had D- 6 , D- 4, D- 7 , platform
aline, radar test -
Conrad That ' s where they were off the·ir rocker.
Cooper But we got them. Those were s.ll in the
day 5, 11 to 12 hours -
Conrad Listen, there ' s a lot of sloppy things
in there - I mean we got thine:s done but
we missed little subtleties -· like we
were supposed to run the 16mm camera
along with some part of the I R gear and
I wouldn I t get that on - and E. bunch of
.Iii
0NF-IDENT.IAL
--- PAGE 136 ---
G0MF-IDFiNTl~"t 131
little things . Again, we were always
man, they had stuff thrown at us as fast
as you could say Jack Robinson,
Cooper Let ' s see--S-B , D-13 at Laredo--do you have
one of those right in that period- day 5,
13 hours -
Conrad Day 5, 13 hours - no .
Cooper I don ' t have it either .
Conrad I have this all scratched out for some
reason ,
Cooper D- 6 - This is where we really began to
have trouble with something -- what was
it we were really having trouble with?
Conrad The O.AMS systems cut out.
Cooper That ' s right. The O.AMS systems pooped
out . Day 5, at about 11 hours when we
were cranking up for this is when we found
that our OAMS systems was really getting
bad, and we already had discovered that
we had one thruster out and a partial
otrer one out but this is the time when
we found out we had about 3 others that
were just about out.
Conrad Yeah, I have a little note here - report
- ~ NFIDENilAl
--- PAGE 137 ---
132
•
to fl ight ~oi ce tape out - num·oer 7 yaw
left thruster out and OAMS heat er light
turned ba ck on again.
Conrad And so we were supposed to ask 7 Keywest
and D- 8 S- 13, SAD- 13 about 6 : 22:50 -
Cooper OK - From ther e on for a while things
just got scrubbed i n the flight plan on
that day five , the l atter part of the
time on entries there .
Conrad Yeah, that ' s when they got us into this
minimum power down - voice cont~ol - 1
suit f an - 2 coolant pumps , 1 a,Jq_. aid ,
UHF r eceiver, DOS receiver , PCM -
Cooper That ' s when they decided the hydrogen
wasn I t going to l ast at the preoent
electri cal rate .
Conrad That ' s what I wrote down - Houston hot
dope - drift for three days - r icky, tieky.
(Laughter) Sorry -
Cooper But at day 5, 19 hours and 25 minutes we
did get a fix on Doreen - wher e she was
ther e .
Conrad Yeah, everything happened that day. That
--- PAGE 138 ---
IDE1'1TIA - 133
was when the PC02 started to read for
some reason.
Cooper PC02 came off the scale and was reading
way up there for a while. We broke out
one of the co tapes, and it showed that
2
we were still all right . We figured the
gage was its usual reliability.
Conrad Okay, now, I think this is good for the
recorder right here. At that time, as
of 5 days 21 hours 00 minutes they
wanted to know what our experiment status
was. So on the UHF , we had completed
tests 1, 2, 3 and I said 6 just so that
if they were still trying to keep that
number under their lid. That's what it
sounded like because they kept mentioning
it. We ' d done D- 1 , 1, ~, and 3 which
had completed D- 1. D- 2 we had done
nothing, because we didn ' t get the REP.
D-6 we'd taken 72 pictures . D- 4 , D- 7 we ' d
had completed 405, 408, 409, 410, 410a,
410b , 411, 414 , 420 , 422 , 423a, 423b , 424a ,
425a. We had 16 minutes and 8 seconds of
Jeo~~f6i~tW on. ~
--- PAGE 139 ---
134
Conrad On S-8, D-13 we completed all tests although we
didn ' t see the targets several times. On S- 1 we
completed it. S-5 and S-6 we'd taken three maga
zines for a total of 210+ pictures . S-7 we had
23 pictures or 8 groups that they had ~anted plus
we had taken cal card picture. The M-1 broke at
4 days and some odd hours, and I don ' t know the
exact time . M-3 didn't make any difference. MSC-1
we did on day one , three, and four. Apollo-we got
Landmarks 207, 8, 12 1 and 13. We'd done 4 cabin
lighting surveys. The humidity sensor we read at
least once a day, and the 16mm film we had one and
a quarter magazines shot up which is general stuff.
That was what we had completed in 5 days. Then
from there on, we went through this big drill of
sending up of all kinds of experiments but don't
expend any fuel on them. An so we were pretty well
restricted to S-5, S-6, and S-7 type phJtographs
which was about all we got.
Cooper Catch as catch can.
Conrad We marked down all this other stuff. W1~ did catch
a D-4/D-7 occasionally if it was the ri1sht sort of
thing-if we were sort of pointed in the right
--- PAGE 140 ---
FJD~TIAL ~ 135
direction. Like I got a--in drifting flight I
got 417 and 418 at 6 days 8 hours 41 minutes .
I don ' t remember what that is .
Cooper From here on , we just-- we drifted through this
period of time and the only time we ever powered
anything up was when the drift rates got up pretty
high. We would power up, damp the rates , and power
right back down , and hope we- - and did manage to
keep somewhat attitude so we could get occasionally
some pictures . For instance on--we did continue
doing MSC-1 experiments which incidentally-- even in
times of minimum power when they wanted us powered
right down to our eyeballs they still left MSC- 1
on. I don ' t know how much fuel i t takes , but it
always erks me if we had to have everything off
why could they manage to leave that one on. Day
6 , 8 hours, 41 minutes we got D-4/D-7 417 , 418 , and
414 .
Conrad Yes , on that one day, Day 6 , when they had the HF
tests in Houston--0roadcast HF- - we had Houston on
HF till 15 hours 59 minutes 00 seconds and this
included the remoting through Ascension,and the
remoting through Ascension was beautiful . That
--- PAGE 141 ---
was really good recepti on. And then tl:.ey were
playing 'Never on Sunday' and that faded out at
15 hours 08 minutes.
Cooper That was the best HF test we had .
Conrad Yes , and we started receiving the music again
coming around the other side of the wo1·ld at
15 hours 49 minutes. This must be 16::9. 14 : 59?
14 : 59, I got the wrong number in here J think . I'll
just make a note to check it. No, thi~ is 15:08,
15:49 which is about right half way arcund the world
and this number may be wrong.
Cooper Is that day 6?
Conrad Yes, check it and see if we got a note in the Flight
Plan. Day 6 at 1400, almost 1500. Then we did
some of these radar tests and for the 1ikes of
me to underst and do you know what was ~ome of the
discussion on why the radar didn't work after that .
Gee, it locked up so beautifully the first day on
the REP down there.
Cooper The one REP pass we had, man, things Jt;.s t worked
like a charm.
Conrad And it just never did work after that. We always
got a lock on.
--- PAGE 142 ---
137
•
Cooper And I read analog. My analog read beautiful , but
he couldn ' t read out digital and that ' s impossible
because the analog data comes from the di gital da ta .
I could even tell where it was . It was s i tting
out on Meritt Island, wasn't it? I ' ll bet--it wa s
accurate enough--I ' ll bet you that you could almost
t ell what building it was in. It looked like it
was r ight out here in the south part of the complex
here .
Conrad Where wer e we receiving music f r om?
Cooper We got a little Chinese HF br oadcast every now and
then. Peoples program.
Conrad We went through these radar tests just drif ting
around out there .
Cooper Oh, yes , they were trying to jam our r adios .
Everytime we went over the China area .
Conrad I had the decided impression that they were t r ying
to jam our UHF. So it was either that or--oh, yes ,
where was it where we heard the radar on the r adio .
Cooper China.
Conrad No , we were along the fringes of Russia , but we
went over China. We were over something like Indi a .
Cooper We wer e coming right over the Tibet- - the hi gh Tibet
QWflO
--- PAGE 143 ---
138
area there , and we were just on the south edge of
China.
Conxad Have you ever t axied close by radar? You can hear
i t on radio , i t goes "beep , beep, beep, beep,"
and you can even clock the antenna sweep , and
you can get about three pulses . . . . "Beep ,beep ,beep,"
and then , "beep, beep , beep" , and you can see that
old antenna down there on the ground going around
and we could hear the UHF as big as heck and we
were way up in the middle of no place, and I know
darn well it must have been--Russian radar.
Cooper We were up on the high of southern China. High
plains area.
Conxad Okay, then we ran another eXPeriment summary, and
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