This document is a preliminary transcript derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 7 flight crew debriefing conducted December 19-21, 1965, at the Cr…
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I
Authority:
NW 91526
\
GEMINI VII
TECHNICAL DEBRIEFING
December 23, 1965
NOTICE: This document may be exempt from
public disclosure under the Freedom of lnfor•
mation Act (5 U.S.C. 552). Requests for its re
lease to persons outside the U. S. Government
should be handled under the provisions of
NASA Policy Directive 1382.2.
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PREFACE
This preliminary transcript was made from voice
tape recordings of the Gemini 7 flight crew debriefing
conducted December 19 through December 21 , 1965 at the
Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida.
Although all the material contained in this transcript
has been rough edited, the urgent need for the preliminary
t ranscript by mission analysis personnel precluded a final
edit prior to its publication.
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- - - - - - - - - -- - - -- - - --
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Paragraph Page Number
1.0 COUNTDOWN
1.1 Crew Insertion . ...................... ............. . 1
1.2 Comm:un.ications . .......•.•.. .......•...........•..• . 1
l.3 Crew Participation in Countdown ....................l
l.4 Comfort . .................. .......................• . 1
l.5 Environmental Control System...............•..•.... 2
l.6 Sounds . ..•...•••.••..•.••• •••..•••••••••••••••••••• 2
l.7 Vibrations ........................ ................. 2
1.8 Visual . .................... ........................ 2
l.9 Crew Station Controls and Displays ................. 3
2.0 POWERED FLIGHT
2.1 Lift-Off cues·••·••••••••••••••••• •••••••••••••••••3
2.2 Roll Program . .................. .................... 4
2.3 Pitch Program. . .........•............. .............. 4
2.4 Aerod.y"namics • ••••••••••••.•.• •••••••••••••• •••• •••• 5
2.5 Environmental Control System ....... .•...........••. 5
2.6 Maximum q . ........................... .............. 5
2.7 Windsheaz- ......•......•.....••......• •....•...••.•• 6
2.8 DCS Upd.ates • •••.•.••..•......••.. ••.•••.•••••••. • •• 6
2.9 :Engine 1 Operation . . . ........... ................... 6
2.10 :Engine 2 Status . ..................... ...... ..... ... 7
2.11 Acceleration g's••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••••••••••7
2.12POG0 .......•........•...•.. •.....•...••.•...•.•..•. 7
2.13 Guidance Initiation............. ... .. .............. 7
2 .14 BECO • •.•.•••..••...•..•...........•...••..•. •...••. 8
2 .15 Stagi.ng' . ..... . .......... . ,. ... o • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 8
2 . 16 E]ngin.e 2 Ignition . ................ ................. 9
2.17 RGS Initiate.•••••••••••••••••• ••••••••• •••••• •••• • 9
e
2.18 GO/NO GO e1 • •• • • •• •• • • •• • •••••••••••• • • ••••••••••••••9
2.19 Systems Status•••••••••••••••• •••••••••••••••••••••9
2.20 Acceleration o• •••••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••••lO
2.21 Fairing Jettison •••• • •• • ~••••·•••••••••••• ••• •• ·••10
INSERTION
3.1 Post-SEC0 ...............•.... ..................... 10
3.2 SECO plus 30 seconds ....•..•.. ••.................• 11
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14.0 TRAINI NG
14.1 Gemini Missi on Simulator ...........•••••••185
14. 2 DCPS (Launch abort simulat or) ....•.••••••• 191
14. 3 MAC Engineering Simulator ........••.••.••• 191
14.4 Translation and Docking Tr ainer ...•.•••••• 192
14 . 5 Planet ari um. . ........................••••• •193
14. 6 Systems Brief inga ...............•.•••••••• 194
14 . 7 Flight Experiments .............••.•••••••• 198
14.8 Spacecra f t syst ems tests .......••.•••••••• 202
14.9 Egress t r aining....................••.•••• 204
14.10 Parachute Tr a ining..•.........•...•.•••••• 205
14.11 Launch simulationa .................••••••• 206
14.12 Reentry simulations ..........•........•••. 206
14.13 Simul ated net work simulations ...•..••••••• 206
14.14 Ne t work s imula tions .............•..••••••• 206
14.15 Fl ight Plan t r a i ning...............••.••.• 207
15.0 CONCLUDING COMMENTS ...•....••........•........... 208
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LANDING AND RECOVERY
7.1 Impact . ........... ... . ...••.•. •. •.•••••• • • • • • • • • • 54
7.2 Checklists . ....... ....................... • • • • • • • • 55
7.3 Communicatione ..••......•••••••••.••.•.••••.•.••• 55
7.4 Systems Configuration.•••••··••••••••••••••••••••58
7.5 Spacecraft Status.••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••59
7.6 Postlanding Activity..............•.............. 62
7.7 Comi•ort . ...•............•..••••• •.•.••.••••...••• 63
7.e Recovery Force Personnel ..•.....•...•..•.......... 63
7.9 F.g"ress • .••.•. • •••••••••• ••••••••••••••••••••••••• 63
7.10 S1.lrVival Gear . ..•............•....... .........•.. 63
7.11 Crew Pick UP••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••••••••64
8.0 SYSTEMS OPERATION
8.1 Plat form ...... . •....... .......................... 64
8.2 O.AMS • .• ••••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••••••••••• 65
0.3 RCS . ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• • • ••• • • • • ••• • • 73
e.4 ECS . ..........•.••..•..... ..•................ • ... 75
0.5 Commun.ications . .............................. ....91
8.6 Electrical . ..................................... . 95
0.7 Onboard Computer..•.........•••••••.....•••...• .• 99
0.0 Crew Station ...•.............•..•.. ..•..........101
0.9 Biomedical ....•••••••...•.••.••.••.•• .••.•....•. 115
OPERATIONAL CHECKS
9.1 Apollo Landmark Investigation •••.•..•.•.....•... 122
9.2 Cabin Lighting Survey.••• •••• •••••••••••••••••••130
9.3 HF' Test .•• •••• ••.••.•••• •• •••·••••••••.•••••• •.. 130
1O.O VISUAL SIGHTINGS
10.1 Cou.ntdo"Wll • •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• • 131
10 .2 Powered Flight••••• ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••l31
10.3 Orbital Flight.••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••132
10.4 Reentry . ...•••.•.•..•..• ••...•..•..•.......... . 138
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Insertion Act ivities ............................15
Post Station Keeping...........•................17
ORBI TAL FLIGHT . ..............••.•................... . 18
5.0 RETROFIRE
5.1 TR-2: 00 Power Up and Alignment Checklists ....... 32
5. 2 TR-26 Events ............•.....•..••..•.......•.. 33
5.3 TR-5 GMT Stop Clock.........•................... 34
5.4 TR- 256 .................... • • • • •. • • •. • •. • .. •. • • • .34
5. 5 TR- 1 . •• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •• • .34
5. 6 TR-0. • • ••• • • •. • • •• •. • • •• • • • • •• •. • • •••• • • • • • •• • • • 35
5. 7 Retropack Jettison .............................. 40
5.8 Commwiicatione .................................. 41
5.9 Upda ting........................................ 41
5.10 Post Retro Jettison Checklist ................... 42
6.0 REENTRY
6.1 Reentry Parameters Update ....................... 42
6.2 400 K . ••••••.•••.••••••••••• • • • • • • • • • • • •••••••• • 43
6.3 Acceleration Profile ...•..•...•.................47
6.4 Spacecraft Control .••.....•.....................47
6.5 100 K . ....••.•.•....•..•............•... ~ ....... 48
6.6 50 K . ...••..............••...•••................48
6.7 35 K Checklist .••.•..•..•..•.•..••..•.•......... 49
6.8 Comm'W'l.icationa ••.•.•••••.••..••••••••••...•.•... 49
6.9 26 K Checklist •• •••••·••••••••••••••••••••••••••49
6.10 10.6 K Barostat .................•.....•......... 50
6.11 Main Check Deployment •...............•.......... 51
6.12 Post Main Checklist ............................. 51
6.13 Single Point Release •...•••.••.•..•...••••...... 51
6.14 2 K Checklist .•........•........................ 52
6 .15 LBlldiilg . ..........•...•......................... 52
6.16 Postlanding Checklist ..•..•....••....•....•..•.• 52
6.17 Blood Pressure Measurement ..•.•...•..•........••53
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11.0 EXPERIMENTS
11.1 Celestial, Space, and Terrestrial Radiometry
(D-4/D-7)•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••140
11.2 Star Occulation Measurement (D-5) •...•.....•146
11.3 Simple Navigation (D-9) .....................148
11.4 Visual Acuity and Astronaut Visibility
and Vision Test (M-9 ) .......................154
11.5 Synoptic terrain (S-5) and weather (s-6)
photograph.y••••..••.••.•••....••••.•••••••••158
11.6 Proton Electron Spectrometer and Tri-Axis
Flux-Gate Magnetometer (MSC-2 and MSC-3) ...•160
11.7 Optical communications (MSC-4 ) ..............161
11.8 Landmark Contrast ..•....•........•..........165
11.9 Cardiovascular reflex conditioning (M-1 ) ....166
11.10 In-flight exercises (M-3) ...................167
11.11 In-flight phonocardiogram (M-4) and
In-flight sleep analysis (M-8) ..............167
11.12 Bioassay body fluids (M-5) and
calcium balance study (M-7) .................168
11.13 Miscellaneous ......•.......................•172
12.0 PREMISSION PLANNING
12.l Mission Plan (trajectory) ...........•.......175
12.2 Flight Plan.••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••175
12.3 Spacecraft Changes •..•...................... 176
12.4 Mission Rules ............. .. ......•. .. ......177
12,5 Experiments ••.•..•••••.•...•......•...•....•177
13 .0 MISSION CONTROL
13.1 GO/NO GO' s ••••••••.••.••.•••••.•••....••...•179
13,2 PLA and CLA updat es•••••••••••••••••••••••••l79
13 . 3 Consuma.bles .............•.•...•..........••.180
13.4 Flight Plan changes.••••••••••••••••••••••••181
13. 5 Systems . ....................•.............. . 182
13.6 Experiments real-time updatea ...•......••.••184
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....
1.0 COUNTDOWN
1.1 Crew Insertion
Borman I have no comment. I thought it went ve~y well.
Lovell Likewise, no comment on crew insertion. I think we got
quite a. bit done. It was very orderly.
Borman Timing was good and it was done properly.
1.2 Communications
Borman Communications were good. I had no troubl e at al l.
Lovell I had no trouble with communications in the cockpit or the
spacecraft, but the communications in the va.n from the
suiting area t o the other area a.re rather poor. Maybe we
should try to get that improved sometime.
1.3 Crew Participation in Countdown
Borman Again, I think they have been used on 4 or 5 l aunches, and
I thought they were fine.
Lovell Right. Countdown procedure and crew participation is just
what you expect now.
1.4 Comfort
Borma.n Comfort was fine. No problems?
Lovell No problems for comfort , but I was surprised when I got in
the cockP i t, because there was a lot more there than there
was when I got in it for the stowage review. But, it a ll
turned out for t he best. No problems.
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2
1.5 ECS
Borman ECS worked fine. We had no trouble with ECS at all during
prelaunch or launch.
Lovell That is true. The purge was a lot slower and it was just
perfect for the final countdown. It was too fast for the
SIM Flight, which we went through, a.nd I got an ee.:r block
age. For the countdown, it was ju.st r ight. Very slow.
1.6 Sounds
Borman We had been well briefed on a ll the soundsz the gimbaling,
pre- valve, a.nd erector. As a matter of fact, when the erec
tor started down there was no sound. We had been told that
probably there might be a clanking or something. I hes.rd
nothing.
Lovell All I saw was the sky.
1.7 Vibrations
Borm8ll Vibrations. No comment. I had no problems.
Lovell Is this liftoff vibrations?
Borman No, this is countdown. Vibrations of the spacecraft during
coun tdown.
Lovell No, nothing we had not heard before.
1 .8 Visual
Lovell The windows were perfeot. We had no fogging.
Borman No fogging.
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Lovell The windows were heated previousl y as a result of 51 s pro
bl ems, and our windows, I t hought , were perfectly clean.
Didn 1 t you?
Borm8J'l Right.
1.9 Crew Stati on Control s a.nd Displays
Lovel l No comment . Exactly how we had pl anned it for months.
Borma.n Exactl y t he way that we had seen it, and no probl ems.
2 .0 POWERED FLIGHT
2.1 Liftoff Cues
Borman Stoney came in loud e.nd c l ea.r, counting the countdown.
Lovell Cs.me in loud and c l ear.
:Borman We lmew exactly when i t was, and I for one had absolutely
no question in my mind when we lifted off. It felt like I
had been t ied back, a.nd someone cut the string a.nd there
was a slow but definite acceleration at lift-off.
Lovell I thought you could just about put 01P COMM, V1bration, and
noise together, because the motion, vibrati on , and noise all
contributed to a definite knowledge that you were going
somepl ace.
Borman In other words, what you are saying is that you had no pro
blems determining lift-off.
Lovell No, it went.
Borma.n Okay vibration wa.s nominal during l ift-off. Again, perhaps
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4
it is because we were so well briefed on the simulations
we have run, but I had no problems.
Lovell There was a little more noise than I expected, but a little
less vibration.
Borman Jim said there was a little more noise than he expected.
Even so,, it was not oppressive, or a problem at all. Visual.
I did not have any visual cues. I was watching the instru
ments. 1What about you, Jim. Did you pick up any?
Lovell I had the clouds, end there was a visual cue. Just normal
cloud cues .
Borman Cockpit displays were good. The fuel pressure and oxidizer
pressure were nominal the whole flight. Just perfect.
2.2 Roll Program
Borman The roll program, was so short it was almost like a spike•
We hardly even noticed the roll program. Did you Jim?
Lovell I did not notice it at all. I heard you call it out, but I
did not notice it.
Borman I called it out , but we only rolled,I think,about 2 or 3°.
2.3 Pitch Program
Borman The pitch program started just as in the simulator, which
is very accurate on this. It looked exactly the same on the
ball, and there wae no problem.
Lovell The pitch program for the RGS followed exactly what the IGS
-~
' ..... --
-... , .
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5
was giving for the entire l aunch. The needles were just
matched perfectly--nulled. I did not see any unusual
attitudes that some of the other people commented on.
2.4 Aerodynamic
Borman Age.in, we had had this described to us ma.ny times, and it
seemed to follow right along. In the maximum q region we
got some vibration and noise, but after we got through
maximum q it was just like going supersonic in a fighter.
You just slip through, and from then on it was just l ike
riding on a train.
Lovell I don't think it was bad either.
2.5 :ms
Lovell Pressure went up to 5.5 in the initial stoppage, and it
slowly leaked down to 5.1, and stayed there.
Borman I was cool during lift-off.
Lovell I was too. Comfortable.
Borman Comfortable. I mean cool in the sense that it means comfor
table. Of course we can not very well comment on the cabin
atmosphere because we were sealed.
2. 6 Maximum q
Borman We ha.ve already discussed this. There was some noise build
up and some vibration, but nothing to worry at all about or
even discuss .
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2.7 Wind shear
Borman Wind s hear. I did not notice any.
Lovell I did not notice a:ny wind shear either.
Borman You could not see any on you attitude gauges either, could
you?
Lovell No, that is what I mean.
Borman The a tti tude gauges stayed pegged. Right?
Lovell They stayed nulled throughout the entire flight. I was
a.ma.zed a t the accuracy with which the RGS was following the
IGS program.
2.8 DCS Updates
Lovell Ca.me through on schedule .
Borman No problem?
Lovell No trouble.
Borman Have any trouble punching the light ?
Lovell After the second upda.te, about 2:23 ,the g 1 s are too ~igh
to let you punch off the l ight. So , you have to wai t for
staging, and t hen punch the l ight.
2.9 Engine 1 Operation
Borman Engine 1 opera tion, I thought, was norma.l. But I did noti ce
a s l ight hint of a POGO a.round a.bout, I would esti mate, two
minutes. The slightest, faintest hint. I do not think J im
even noticed it.
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7
Lovell I did not notice any POGO.
2,10 Engine 2 Status
Borman It seemed to me that from about 3 minutes and 30 seconds to
a.round 4 minutes, the noise and the feel was a little bit
different than it was a.fter that, as if it was vibrating &
little bit more. But this was sort of, a.gain, a sensing
type thing, The inatrwnents were all nominal, a.nd it may
have just been me, I certainly ca.n not complain about the
operation,
2.11 Acceleration g's
Borman J.ny- problems, Jim?
Lovell No problems. They were pretty nominal, weren I t they? I
could not see the g meter.
Borma.n They were right on the money. And, of course, the g's we
ha.ve are all experienced in the centri.fuge , and so on. One
thing, when the g's dropped a t staging and at SECO I had
no sensation of tumbling and no sensation of disorientation.
Nothing at all.
2.12 POGO
Borman I 've mentioned that I detected a slight hint of one tha.t was
so smal l we cannot even really discuss it.
2.13 Guidance Initiation
Lovell We had a guidance initiation. It was in the form of booster
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8
yaw deflecting downward, more so than booster pitch deflec
ting. Booster pitch deflected sl i ght ly t o the right, indi
cating, at guidance initiation, a booster-high trajectory.
But, they both came right back to null just after guidance
initiation, and that was it.
Borman We did not have the feeling that we were lofted, and then
a sudden pitch down.
Lovell No , th9re was no change of booster performance at all. It
was just t hat the needles deflected a t guidance initiation
to say that we had gui dance initiation, and after that they
nulled and stayed that W83' from there on.
2.14 BECO
Borman At BECO, the whole spacecraft was engulfed in a red flame .
I noticed that out of the corner of my eyes. Jim, you
probably had a better view than I did.
Lovell Yes . Flames came up thP. side there to the window .
Borman There was a definite, very brief instant of it, probably
in the order of milliseconds , but it did envelope the space
craft and I, in my own mind, wonder if this is not the place
where we are picking up some of the smudge on t he window.
2.15 Stagins-
Lovell Well, I did not notice any smudge at the time of staging.
Slayton You did not notice any?
Lovell I did not notice any . Of course, things were going pret ty
fast. I did notice it after we got into o=bit, but not at
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9
that particul ar time.
2.16 Engine 2 Ignition
Eorma.n Again, it is so well simulated that-
Lovell It is very smooth.
:Borman It is ve:ry smooth, a.nd away you go.
2.17 RGS Initiate
:Borman We l l, we have talked about that.
Lovell Yes, that is what I was talking about back p.!'eviously.
2.18 GO/NO GO
:Borman GO/NO GO. Houston, on the ground, came through great. We
got a GO/NO GO before the 30 seconds we were waiting £or
spacecraft separate. So, we knew we were in good shape
before we ever had the possibility we would have to burn.
Of course, we also had the IVI's onboa.rd and they are very
good also.
2.19 Systems Status
Borman The systems were all great. No problem, during powered
flight. We got two delt a Plights.
Lovell Oh, yes, that is right.
:Borman We are talking about spacecraft systems. We got delta P
light on BECO in the first stage that went off at staging,
then came back on during second stage flight, and then the
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10
:::action 2 delta Plight did not go out a.nd it was •••
Lovell No, J:ection 1 went on and out again during the £light. It
went out a t, I think it went out at SECO.
Borman That is right.
Lovell But 'Section 2 came on and we saw that one £or the next 14
days.
2.20 Acceleration
Borman Acceleration during stage 2 was right on the money, right on
the program. I read of£, I think i t was about six a.nd a
I
half g a maximum. We read this off after SECO.
2.21 Fairing Jettison
Borman Fairing Jettison, I did not even hear it. I was concentra
ting on the horizon , trying to get set for turning around.
Jim j ettisoned the fairing and punched the Spacecraft SEP.
I did not see a.nything or hear a.nything.
Lovell I saw debris and heard it and had a definite knowledge that
a squib had gone off. There had been an explosion.
3.0 INSERTION
3.1 Post SECO
Borman Maneuver controller was easy to reach. I had it out, and
there was no problem. It came out and was ready to go.
Attitudes and rates, there were none. The thing was as
solid a.a a rock as far as I could determine. I was watching
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11
the horizon, and the attitude remained constant a.nd the
rates were so minimal you could not even pick them up. I
noticed no transients, we experienced no·•·•••••~•• as
far as I know that was discernible.
Lovell Did you try to damp out the ..
Borman There was nothing to damp out.
Lovell Okay.
:Borman In fact, I did not use the thrusters at all for that. It
just sat there.
3.2 SECO pl us 30 seconds
Lovell I have the IVI readings on a. ca.rd. Do you have those- cards
that we took off?
:Borman Yes.
Lovell I am sorry. We did not get forward-aft, left-right, u.p or
down because they were so quick, and I was trying to get the
camera. But it was 17 1n the fore and a.ft wmdow, 13 in the
left-right, and up and down was 20.
Borman What do you mean. you did not get them? They a.re there.
Lovell No, I did not know a.ft or forwa.rd, or left or right, or up
or down.
:Borman Oh, I see.
Lovell I just saw th&t they were so small tha.t I just wrote down
the numbers as a ...
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12
Borman 17, 30, and 20. There might have been a 13, 17, a.nd 20...
Lovell About what the numbers ca.me up with.
Borman Spacecraft separation. We separated with minimum delay be
tween thrusting and Spacecraft SEP. Jim actuated the space
craft separation. I did not hear the thrusters firing. I
could not hear them; and I did not even helU' spacecraft
separation, but --
Lovell I heard Spacecraft SEP, but I o·o uld not hear the thrusters
firing. But you told me you were firing the thrusters--
Borman I ea.id th.rusting a.nd SEIP Spacecraft a.nd we did it and away
we went. I thrusted for about 2 seconds. Almost immedi
ately, as soon as we had £inished thrusting, I started a
yaw right 180°, and the rates were right around, I think
a.round --Of course, you should be able to pick this up off
telemetry, but I would estimate they were 3° to 4° per
second turning around. As soon as I ha.d the booster in
sight, I thrueted be.ck 5 seconds. This is the way we tried
in silllulations, The simulations in St. Louis were excell ent.
Lovell Turned out that was the best technique to use, 2 seconds
for the 2 seconds forward a.nd a 5 second return.
Borman We turned around a.nd there it was, bigger than the devil!
Lovell At that distance there was no problem staying in there.
Borman Now, I did have some problem because the booster was bending
--- PAGE 23 ---
13
so rapidl y. It wa.s tremendous. It looked like one of the
autogenous lines ha.d been cut. I guess it was cut with a
pyro, a.nd it was really bending and this was causing it to
translate as well as rotate. And in order to stay with it,
I was having to use quite a bit of fuel; although it was
certainly a nominal task. I also went through severa l con
trol modes switchings. I sta:rted out in PULSE and I could
not get around fast enough, so I went to DIRECT a.nd then
slowed it up in RA.TE COMMAND. Slowed up the direct rate I
was using with RATE COMMAND, a.nd left it in RATE COMMAND
without using the h&nd controller for a while. Finally
went to l'LATFOBM. When I went to PLA.'f.E'OHM~ we had been off
to one side of the booster. ~ . L went to PLATFORM, · it
yawed me back around, and I lost sight of the booster . .SO
we went out of PLATFORM· and flew t he rest of it in PULSE
Mo~e using the reticle on the horizon for stabilization and
using the maneuver controller for thrust. This is all on
onboard tape,incidentally. The air to ground communications,
throughout the f light were superior.
Lovell I was really a.mazed a.t the communications, especially the
primary station. The UHF was outstanding.
Borman We have already discussed GO/NO GO. They came through loud
and clear before we ever SEP spacecraft. We had no need for
--- PAGE 24 ---
14
a velocity correction.
Lovell As a matter of fact, right now would be a good time to men
tion that address 72 read --
Borman Nominal was 25 804 and address 72 read 25 804.
Lovell Can you imagine that? Right t o th~ · foot! 25 804. I could
not believe it when I punched it up.
Borman The orbit quantities were given to us, I think,by Bermuda..
0£ course, at this time we really were not interested in
them , although they were sort of nice in.formation. We had
a GO/NO GO.
Lovell It was 87-178 the initial forward quantity that was
ca lled up to ue.
Borman Tha l'!1JU readouts : Jim read 72 and when he saw it was 25, 804,
we had a GO/NO GO from the ground. I do not believe you
even rea4 the rest of them out, did you?
Lovell No, I did not bother reading out the rest of the addresses
94, 97, 52, or 73, because I saw the 72 nominal. I saw the
IVI's were right in there so we did not bother reading out
anything else.
Borman Debris • I did not notice a:ny debris.
Lovell I noti-od debris. I was looking out at Spacecraft SEP and
Jet Fairing, and noticed debris. I also noticed debris be
t ween the spacecraft and booster when we first turned around.
--- PAGE 25 ---
15
Borman Could you identify any type of the debris?
Lovell No, pieces.That is all I could tell.
3.3 Insertion activities
Lovell We followed the regular procedure.
Borman We did not have s;ny problem with safing our switches.
No problem. I did not even stow my D-ring at insertion. I
was too busy trying to stay on the booster, and I did not
get it stowed for the first orbit,I guess,or half an orbit.
Lovell What we planned on doing was getting pictures of the D-ring.
I got the br&cket up at staging, and I actually had a minute
after guidance initiate to reach back there and get the
bracket and stick it up. It worked out very nicely before
the g's started building up again on second stage. The
bracket was up and in place s;nd no problem a t all. Then at
SECO, I went around to pick up the camera, because we had
the camera. stowed where the Agena control bq..x ie l ~oated.,
I managed to get the camera up, and it was already plugged
into the electric&l wire. ill I had to do was turn the
auxiliary switch on, put it on the bracket, and push the
button, and it started taking pictures. Just about that
time, Frank mentioned be was going to start thrusting pretty
soon so I had to go back and punch off the spacecraft. Then
I read up address 72. So , I hope the pictures come out.
--- PAGE 26 ---
16
:Borman We were looking right into the sun; I hope they do too. The
drogu.e pins were no problem. Jim got them, but again, not
until well into the first orbit. As a matter of fact, I
pulled my own yesterd.a.y morning there. The problem is
solved; I think they a.re easy to get to.
Lovell Yes. They a.re easy to pull out.
Borman I think that we have covered station keeping wi th stage II
booater,partially. I will mention that the booster, being
without attitude control, translating also with this im
pul se it was picking up from the venting, is definitely an
order of magnitude more difficult than station keeping with
a stabl e vehicle like Spacecraft 6.
First of a ll, you do not have. anyone control ling the thing;
you do not exactly know where it is going to go, and it
might translate because it is venting and ha.a a slight
thrust.
Borma.n I know a couple of times we got in a little too close and
I backed out, because you just do not da.re get as close as
you do the way this thing is spewing. We got a real good
picture, a good l ook at the nozzle. I thought that it
looked like the nozzle was bent in on two places on the
booster engine. It l ooked like the nozzle, the ablative
skirt had been bent in. But then, it may have been just a
--- PAGE 27 ---
17
shadow, because the next time I looked at it, it looked just
like a new engine. The booster itself had no apparent da
mage. The only thing we could see was this big spewing
where the venting was coming from. I did not see any vent~
ing from the roll nozzle at all. Did you?
Lovell No, the venting ca.me from some line right along the bottom
edge, near the engine section of the booster.
Borman That is right.
Lovell It was a line of some sort that was open, and fuel was
spewing out of it.
Borman I hope they got the data they wanted on the D-4 and D-7
Experiments. It wa.s,again,a very uncomplicated maneuver, one
that we practiced many times, and it worked just lik~ it
does in simulation. Had no difficulty at all. Toe lights
on the booster worked fine.
3.4 Post station-keeping
Borman We did not do anything with stowage on the first orbit at
al l . D-ring, pins I have already mentioned, we did not
get those in at all.
Lovell Arm restraints went down at 55 seconds. Belts- We did not
even loosen them until after we had done D-4, D-7. The life
vests we left right on the harness for the entire flight,
but the ha.mess did not stay on us for the entire flight.
--- PAGE 28 ---
18
The sequence light test. This was done after the first orbit.
We really had this insertion checklist in two phases, one
at insertion and then one after D-4, D-7.
4.0 ORBITAL FLIGHT
Borma.n We have already disou.ased the station-keeping. That is no
problem. I think the situation that we used,going off with
about 2 seconds--2 to 3 seconds--a.nd thrusting back with 5
seconds while you a.re still on your side getting back to the
booster as quickly as "POssible ,solves the problem and takes
a lot of the orbital mechanics out of the situation. I
hope the film comes out. The one thing that did make it &
little difficult on this one is when we looked back, we
were looking back into the sun, and the booster was right in
line with the sun. It was ju.at like flying formation when
the leader makes a. turn, a.nd you are down,..sun. It is dif
ficult to see, and I tried to move off to one side and
swing around and look a little bit more to the north. I
think it was north. I guess I was trying to look to the
south where I could get the sun out of my line of sight. I
also had a cut-off on the booster at station-keeping at 88%
fuel, so that at 88% fuel we were already in darkness, al
though we had not reached the time for the D-4, D-7 separa
tion which we.a to ooour a.too, 25.I think it was about '00: 23 or
--- PAGE 29 ---
19
00,21. So when we reached this limit and we were in darkness,
I ~~nt ahead and separated, thrustil:lg dawn.
Lovell We actually separated earlier than 00: 25. We actv.ally separa
ted at 00:-21.
:Borman That is right. So we separated because we were in da.rlmess
and because we had reached the limit on fuel. We had been
in darlmess for awhile. One thing I di d notice was that the
docking light was not particularly helpful on that stage of
the business. I guess it is because we were not close
enough to the booster.
Lovell We tried but the docking light just did not work.
:Borman I suppose because,a.gain,we were looking at a lighted horizon
with the docking light , and it did not work as well as it
did l ater on with Spacecraft b, The booster measurements
went off. We got indications on the needle ,on the measure
ment needle ..
Lovell The recorder did not get on until 27 minutes. That is a
guess. I am not too sure, but as I understand it, they had
live transmissi ons up until th.at time, to Bermuda, 8Jld An
t i gua., wherever it is, so we were okay there.
Borman The booster measurements were normal. Again, the simulator
was perfect for that. The lights. Jim McDivitt had made
some comment about not being able to judge distance because
--- PAGE 30 ---
20
they only had two l ights on there. We had four lights
on and I will be darned if I will try to judge distance
by four lights or fifty lights. You have got to have
illumination or you have to have a stable vehicle.
Lovell You have to have something tha t illuminates the vehicle,
not a light that flashes because you cannot tell from a
flashing light.
Borman Especially on vehicles rotating. I do not think that i t is
possible to control them. You have to have a controlled
vehicle before you can judge distance from it, as far
as I am concerned. The GO/NO GO, 17-1 TR were no
problem. We ran through the platform-off post station
keeping checklist just the way it is listed.
Lovell Yes, that is where we caught most of the things.
Borman That is where we caught most of the things like putting
the D-ring away and the drogue pins and so on. Only one
time in flight did we require attitude control fuel to
change attitude for critical delay time playback. There
was no problem. Communications, as always, were superior.
The D-4/D-7 Void Measurement was again no problem;
just lined up on the black and ran for t wo minutes.
Purging of the fuel cells. This is the first of a long--
--- PAGE 31 ---
21
Lovell Yes , but we did not do it then,did we? Did not we wait
until we powered down and then waited two hours?
:Borman Tha t is right . This is one of the things t h&t they
had in the f light plan that we asked them to change
because
Lovell Yes, we did not purge the f'uel cells then.
:Borman Originally, this came right after power down e.nd all
of the f'uel cell people recommended that you purge
before power down , or wait until two hours after power
down . So we did not do it at this t i me in the flight.
This was changed. D-4, D-7 star measurements. There
was no probl em. The eta.rs were well selected, and we
were right on them. Right Jim? Jim copied down, on
the procedures book, a check where we got the maximum
return on the needle.
Lovell D-4 , D- 7 was a well organized experiment as far as
:Brentnall keeping us hopping about what to do . I will
have to admit th.at .
--- PAGE 32 ---
22
:Sor:ma.n Re did a very good job. We knew just what to do. W& had
all the equip,nent with us and everything went very smoothly.
MS0--2 ana,..3 turned out to be not :much of a problem because
at about the seventh dq we turned it on and left it on for
the rest of the flight. The Berigee Adjust :tv1.a neuver 0 Jim
ma.de the ~erigee Aijust Manuever. We did it on stars with
out a platform. I was timing for Jim and I think I fouled
up. We planned to use a perigee to 102 miles, and I think
we wotmd up with about 15 feet per second too much. It
seemed like about 117 miles. One of the reasons that was
causing this was we had come back into the vicinity of the
booster, and just about midwny through the burn the booster
venting that was still occurring suddenly lit up, became
lit up. It looked like we were flying through a lot of
foreign objects or debris. I was afraid that we were going
to hit so.m ething. At the same time this trailing wire came
forward and slapped the spacecraft.
Lovell That is where I stopped.
:Sor.man Yes. After we had stopped and it nit us, I looked down
and got confused and s aid, "No, we haven't burned enough",.
·&> we burned for about five seconds :more. We had a trail
ing primer cord that would flop around and we didn 't know
what it was at the time, but it came forward when Jim
stopped burning and flopped on the spacecraft. It ,nade a
--- PAGE 33 ---
23
noise and I thought we had hit some of the stuff t~t was
spewing out of the booster. I wasn't sure that it was just
fuel.
Lovell I think the ground people thought that this wire came for
ward because it had gotten in the way of the thruster fire.
It definitely came forward after I stopped burning,because
I stopped burning and this wire came slapping forward. It
still had the momentum, you know. It slapped right in
front of the window. I think the people got the impression
that the thing had hit a. thruster. It hit in front of us,
then we stopped bu.ming. But we stopped' mm -taen-·ths:t thing
hit a.nd we added some more because we were still at ~ ogee.
Borman The first a:f many powerdowns was no problem1o We went right by
the check list. Some of these switch functions in the space
craft, particularly toward the latter pa.rt of the flight,
toward the 12th or 13th da.y--we were getting, I won't say
la.r in making the.m ,but it see.med more of a chore to make
these things right to the minute. Things like the ~!OJ.VIED
recorder and so on--we lost interest in having them turned
off on the second. We knew what they needed to be turned
on and off for. We didn't do as good a job from about the
10th day on as we did the first pa.rt as far as making those
right to the minute.
--- PAGE 34 ---
24
Lovell As a .matter of fact, why don't we get out the flight plan.
I think we might have a lot of comments on it.
Borman Let's start from the beginning.
Lovell The recorder was on at 27 .m inutes. D-4/D-7 measure.m ents.
The GET of .measurement that the COLD IR was outside the
two degree field of view of the booster was at 30 ,13.
Borman At 40s58 we had 84 %fuel left. We were right on the flight
pla.n there.
Lovell There was another GET of measure.ment where the spacecraft
was lined outside the field of view or the booster at 38:00.
Borman We saw the booster for 2 or 3 revolutions after tl:at. The
lights were still working. We called it out and t~ ground
got readings on this.
Lovell The moon and booster were in view at 43:00. The booster
and .moon were in view and we might get an erroneous read:tn.g
because we were almost on the .moon.
Borman Here we have a note that at 2z32 the fuel cell Delta P
l i ght blinked off at 2 ftours and 30 minutes and then came
back on. That is t he section 2 dalta Plight .
Lovell Okay , then as far as stowage goes, the · M-1 cuff was t urned on
at 3z03,
:Borman We put the bypass hoses on at this time also-- the ECS
bypass hoses, Incidentally, they turned out to be not too
.m.uch of a problem, They were very handy for the type or
--- PAGE 35 ---
25
work we did without suits on.
Lovell Right. We took the s/c out of the horizon at 2:08 to get
some measurements,as requested fro.m DOD,after we measured
the stars. This is after we powered down the equipment.
We connected the bypass hoses at 2:32. This was 2 hours
plus 32 minutes.
Lovell Crew status reports. We bad 3 or 4 a day.
Borman 5:20,we started unpacking the meals. This is one thing
that we had trouble with• lbth left and right food boxes
were jam packed. Fortunately ,we changed the lanyards. v,e
changed this during our stowage review , &l though it was
difficult we got them out. Several of the meals had lost
vacuum.
Lovell Which .made them more difficult to get out.
Borman Really you can't co.mplain about this. The people did the
best they could. We had an awful lot of food to store
and we were able to get them out.
Lovell We had several blinkinge of the Delta Plight during this
period. It went out at 6 hours, a littleleas t han 6 hours,
then came back on again at 6:27.
Borman One thing that I wanted to find out a.bout,and I still don't
understand,is why we turned on the crossfeed valve right
after l&:w\oh. The FC o pressure was just on the minit11.Um
2
--- PAGE 36 ---
26
or 150 pai at launch. I called up Houston and said I
would like to leave the gauge in the FC02 position
rather than the ECS o2 positlon. Chris said, "No, unless
we really felt strongly about it, they would rather have it
in the ECS o position". So we left it there and after we
2
were inserted and we were still with the booster, they
came in with a recommendation that we open the cross feed.
When we did, this immediately raised the pressure to 250
psi. The thing that was bad was that we had over 100%
o:xygen and we were down to about 100 lbs. on the FC0 2 •
We agreed that we would fly at least 50 lbs. above the do.me,
So, I really didn't see the need for opening that valve
although it didn't cause a:n:y problems.
Lovell They wanted to pump up and make sure.
Borman It worked fine and we got right back up to 250 lbs.
Lovell That is one syste.m that did work fine.
Borman The first 7 hours was pretty no.m inal. All throughout the
flight plan we have notes that the Delta Plight went out
and came back on and so on.
Bor:man At 16,40 we sighted a satellite .much lower and
on a slightly higher inclination path than we were. It
passed underneath us. It was so fe:r awa::, it looked like
a sighting from the earth. It was just a refiection. We
were very religious about the exercise periods. We s-ot
--- PAGE 37 ---
27
thos e t hree times a day wi th the excepti on of the last day
and one other day when we got only two. I think this is a
very good idea . I t is difficult and requir es discipline
because the last thing in your mind i s the desire to exer
cise. You get lazy very easily. We di d a very extens i ve
operation with t he bungee and also i sometrics three times
a day.
Borman They were programmed 10 minutes. I think a more realistic
one would be about five .m inutes , three times a day. I did
60 pulls on t he bungee cord with both hands, 20 wi t h each
leg, and then ended up with 10 with each ar.m on the bungee
cord in addition to the few f or the crew status reports.
Lovell I did 60 pulls on the arms and 60 on each leg and it didn't
.make any differ ence. I could have done 20 on each leg and
would have proba bly been better off.
Borman At 45 hours J im started taking off his suit. During that
first 45 hours our noses were clogged end stuffy, our eyes
were i rritated, t he cabin was hot ; it was miserable. As
s oon as Jim started taking off his suit, the cabin even
though he was out of the suit and I was in, got better than
it was with both of us in our suits.
Lovell I didn't real i ze it was that long. We were almost up there
two full days befor e I started taking the suit off.
--- PAGE 38 ---
28
Borman At 49t53 we got a picture of Houston with the 250 .mm l ens.
I hope it comes out. Okay at 69t40 we did a Perigee Adjust
Maneuver, Delta V 12.4, 16.5 seconds, and came right on the
money, using the stars, no platform. I don't think that
there is any problem at all with the proper stars in .m aking
a gross adjustment.
Lovell I think it was an excellent idea to do it without a platform,
it takes two people. One person times and the other person
burns on the star fro.m attitude. Both people check the
attitudes by looking at the star charts and getting the
updates. Then ma.king sure that the s/c is alined right
and the reticle is up to get the accuracy pretty good. After
that, once you get it s et in your mind what you are aiming
at, one guy is in the cockpit with the watch or event
timer and clocks it. The other guy bas to look out the
window because you can't go back and forth. If you look
in the cockpit at the watch, you can't adjust to look out
f or the stars. So it takes two people for that. I think
you can do a good job without a platform.
Bor:ma.n I do too .
Bor:ma.n There is one thing that was a pain in the neck, and I hope
they get some good out of them, were UHF and the RF tests.
That was an hour and a half transmitting every five minutes
--- PAGE 39 ---
29
and having the HF/DF on. I'.m not sure what kind of data
they got but I hope they got so.m ething. The first one we
had to do on the lKJRIZ.AN SC.AN; it took so.me fuel and I
wonder really if it was worth it.
Borman At about 166,40 we noted our drift rate picking up and we
finally determined this was from the water boiler venting.
It resulted in a left yaw rate and this continued periodi
cally throughout the mission. It certainly would not be
objectiona.l if we had fuel to counteract it. During a
night period, in which we didn't do any attitude control
at all, I timed the rates during the 13th day, and when we
woke up they were about 7 degrees per second. I timed
them around the horizon and came up with 7 degrees per
second. About the only thing you can say about it is that
it requires fuel to stop it.
It occurs primarily in left yaw and left roll.
Lovell There are two things in the s/c that causes the yaw left
for so.me reason. Gus first noticed it and I think it is
characteristic of the s/c. One is the water boiler and the
other is,every tie you turn off the power it fires two
thrusters that give it a left yaw. The same two all the
time.
Borman We tried to beat that ever way we could. Every time we
--- PAGE 40 ---
30
shut down 1 we put it in a different control mode and it
still fired t he same t wo t hrusters.
Every time you turn off ACME bias power it would go"boop, "
11 boop~ just like that. Every time we were without attitude
control for extended periods we ended up with a left yaw
and a left roll.
Finally a.t 191>48 we got both crewmen suitless. That was
the best decision in the whole flight. The perfor:m.e.nce of
the Cryo bottles was fantastic.
Lovell That was one thing we were worried about. The eyd.rogen
bottle I thought was never going to last. Forty per cent
of the eyd.rogen bottle was still left at the end of 14 days.
One thing I wanted to try was to blow the squib. Remember
they said t1Did you blow the squi b?" I forgot about it. Just
prior to retro, I wanted to go over there and blow that squib
that opened up into a vacuum.
:Borman It would have taken several hours for it to do a:n:y good.
Lovell Yes, I know, I just thought :maybe we could hear it or
so.mething.
:Borman One thing that cropped up more and more as the mission
progressed, it seemed to get worse as it went along was the
fa.ct that things were cm celled because of weather. We
picked up large areas of clouds over the U. S •·and over s .
--- PAGE 41 ---
31
Ameri ca. About the only area that stayed clear was North
west Africa. A lot of the experiments a.nd a lot of the
Apollo landmarks were shot because of clouds.
Borman On the 6 l auncht the second ti.met we were abl e t o track
it. We were not able to pick up lift-off because of c l ouds
again, but whe.n i t got t o the con l evel t above the cl ouds,
we were able to pick i t up a.nd we tracked it using IR until
we coul dn't see anymore. Even above the con l evel I
think we were tracking the exhaust from the stage two en
gines using PULSE mode. I hope we got some good data on
that.
Borman At 2661 16 we really got col d; the sui t i nl et t emperature
dropped below 40 degrees a.nd we started squirting.water
out of t he sui t inlet hoses. We informed Houston about thi s
a.nd they determined that the water boi l er had frozen up
a.nd they recommended a procedure t o cl ear it. We did thi s
with Gemi ni 6 watching; esse.n tially i t involved putting the
radi ator t o BYPASS and changing some switches.
Lovell Evaporator heat on.
Borman Put the evaporator heat on and setti ng up t o 10 degree per
second r ol l rate.
Lovel l That's the picture you saw i n the movies.
Borman It actual l y threw a lot of fue l out a.nd a lot of water out.
It l eft a g lob of ice on the side of the S/ C, about 10
--- PAGE 42 ---
32
inches in diameter at the exit from the water boiler vent.
Lovell There were only two problems that we really had. There
were the Fuel Cella and the two thrusters. We a lso had a
cold Spacecraft.
Borman Yes, that is when we had that water boiler problem.
Lovell Before that; the first time we woke up, it was 20 degrees
oolder inside.
Borma.n Oh yes, I'm sure what had happened du.ri ng the night was
that we vented the water boiler, used the water boiler.
This is the day when we woke up and had such high rates
o.n the S/C. We have all that in the cabin temperature
survey. The wall temperature was 20 degrees lower.
Lovell It was just freezing in there.
5.0 REIBOFIRE
5.1 TR-2:00 Power Up and Alignment Checklist
Borman We had a slightl y different procedure as far as retrofire
goes. Powering up for i t took two hours. The power up
and alignment checklist was called up from the ground
since we had open circuited two stacks. We turned our
ma.in batteries on and the squib batteries back on at TR
minus two hours.
Lovell During the flight they had powered us down on the squib
batteries and put in the bus ties about the l ast week of the
--- PAGE 43 ---
33
fl i ght.
Borman We were flying with bus ties and tu.el cells and no squib
batteries.
Lovell To conserve the squib batteries for the r etrofire period.
Borman Right.
Lovell Because of that configuration, and because of the f act that
we lost two stacks, we had to modify our power up procedure.
Borman Right . Incidentally because of the f a.ct that we bad two
degraded thrusters, 3 and 4, we didn't use t h e ~
mode at all for this alisnment. We aliened it all manually.
The thrusters were degraded, but there was still enough in
them to allow you to get i'ine maneuvers, fine control. I
used less control by turning off the circuit breaker for
thruster No . 12 and used 11, giving back t hrust and this
would give you right yaw•
.5.2 TR-26 events
Borman At T- 26 the event timer was set, we didn't read anybody
because of our orbit , and we weren't able to start our
event timer counting down until T-20.
Lovell T-20
Bor.ma.n Read ou.t fro.m Carna.rvon.
--- PAGE 44 ---
. 34
5.3 TR-5 GMT Stop Cl ock
:Borman At TR-5 Jim got the bug on the ei ght minutes , no probl em.
Lovell Yes , I got tha t okay.
5 ,4 TR-256
;;,
:Borman TR-256 Sequence light came on exa.ctl y on schedul e.
Lovell The digital clock never lost a second during the entire
fl i ght.
:Sorms..n We didn't touch it.
Lovel l We di dn't touch that digital cl ock one time during the
enti re f l ight. That i s the best instrument i n the whol e
s/c, especial ly f or this type of f l i ght when you have a
lot of updates a.nd everything.
:Borm&n Electri ca l was no problem. Control system, the RCS worked
perfectly. It just worked beautifull y.
5.5 .Tii::1.
:Sorman Retro a ttitude minus 20 degrees pi tch. The ball had been
a l igned for two revolutions and it was perfect. I f we
had not had the bal l , I would have been happier if we
had retro fired in the dayl i ght. SEP OAMS , as advertised.
You hear i t.
Lovell Yes!
:Sorman You feel it sli ghtl y.
Lovell That is right, a.nd you even f eel SEP ELECT.
--- PAGE 45 ---
35
Borman Yes, and you really fee l SEP ADAP'l '. It felt like I had put
in f orward thrust at t hat time.
Lovell Yes .
Borman It was really a good thud when we separated the adapter.
Retrorocket squibs were armed a t TR-30 . Arm AUTO-RS1I1RO was
actually done at about TR- 10 .
Lovell We did that a littl e bit early.
Borman The event timer was perfect. MDU, Jim got all the readouts
and they were exactly what ha d been called up.
Lovell Yes . There was one or two that the last digit was one nu..n
ber off, but that is nominal. We didn't bother that.
5.6 TR-0
Borman From the time we got the countdown at Carnarvon we really
didn 1 t talk to a..~ybody a t all until we heard Houston at
TR- 10 seconds come in with a count through Canton.
Lovell We didn' t think tha t they were going to come in, as a.
matter of fac t .
Borman No, we were wondering...
Lovell That is a very poor place to retrofire. Canton had p oor
communications co~pared with the rest of it.
Borman But they ca.me through t hat time.
LoYell Yes, they ca.me through.
Borman We really didn 1 t need them because we had every indication
--- PAGE 46 ---
that our timing was good on-board. They did come through
but not until TR-10 seconds. At TR equals zero the s/c
attitude was 20 degrees down. s/c rates were easy to con
trol, but I thought that the thrust fro.m those retro-rockets
was high. I really had a sensation of being accelerated.
Didn't you Jim?
Lovell Well, it was different from what I had expected because we
were so used to zero g fl i ght.
Borman The only thing I could do was fly instruments, the needles
and the ball. Trying to hold it right on the ball.
I was vecy glad that I was in RATE COMMAND. I had to con
trol it in RATE COMMAND a. little bit,particularly on the
fourth retro rocket. The first three went bing, bing, bing.
Then there was a pause of about ½ a second and the fourth
one went. The fourth one seemed like it was a little mis
aligned, I think it was left yaw. I had to bring it back.
I would like to emphasize this. I thought those retros were
really powerful, and that you were holding on to something
that if you really didn't have good control it could get
away from you pretty easily.
Lovell But, I was sure happy to hear them go.
--- PAGE 47 ---
37
Borman Control mode was RRte Command , ano the I VI readouts• there
did you write those down?
•
Lovell I have them here.
BormA.n Fe cal led them off and we h?ve them .
Lovell This is whr,t I've been usins-. It was 29P , and. 112 .
Borman And '.i 1e f t .
Lovell Yes , an:i ) l eft.
'B orman 1
·.'hat were the nomil:.a.J s'? Let ' s .iust r.iake a not e of what the
nominals were.
Lovel 1 This is usua.llJ about ....
Borman They called up the nominP l s .
Sheparn. ':'he~' were 113 and 296 .
Lovell Yes . ~At was 2 off from nominal , I recPll that .... 298
actual , and 112 actuA.l , 298 aft and 112 down as the a.ctua1 s·.
l3omP.n And 3 right.
Lovell An<i 3 right .
'Boman So we got in 01 ose t o the nominril , A.nd when you figure this
out on our onboard che.rt s you come up with a bank angl e
of 50 decrees .
Lovell That ' s why I cou 1. dn ' t unrlers tand the ~ 5--we11 , maybe I ' m
wrong but let 's take a look at this thing again. Le t ' s
go through it.
Donnan All right .
--- PAGE 48 ---
Lovell That ' s a minus 1 error here, r ight? And a pJus 2 error
there, right?
Bonnan Right.
Lovell Okay , so I went in here and got to a plus 2 error here,
right ?
Bom"'n fl ight .
J,ove) 1 Wp..nt up here to a minus , here ' s the zero mark right her e,
to a minus one error ; where this thing crossed this thing
right np to here , plus 2, and by eosh, it came right out to
50 degrees or s3 degrees .
Borman They gave ue 55 degrees roll l eft, which is what the nomi
nal l evel was . ..
Lovell I ' ve got i t right here . Fi fty degrees and 60 deGrees is
what they gave us . Bank l eft 50 degrees and bank right
60 deerees.
"'B orman Yes .
T,ove ll ~n~ so I looked up the ch~rt and it said 50 QeP,rees as t~e
b~ck uu angl es--everything was working just l ike a charm
anrt then I went back here to the ban k contonr line to get
out our down range defl ection , and it was 1 or 2 miles , I ·
think it was , no , 5 mil es overshoot ; which w~s just ahout
as cl ose as you can hack it . And I t hought oh boy, this
t■ realJy , talk about nominRl reentry , this is the one
--- PAGE 49 ---
that's eoinc to be it , and then the? came up wi th 35
degrees , 45 deerees, and I rni sinter~reted it ; I was
a rgui ng with Prank e.fter r e t ro fire ann he says no , that ' s
30 degrees-- 50 deerees.
:3orr.ian 50 degrees .
Love ll 53 decrees is what he ' s sayin[j . !-re ,ius t wan t s to ge t it
down to a l ittle finer line . J\nd then Prank called bnck
again An•i SR.id , "!'To , it wr-ts -i5 de£7ee s , " so I non ' t know
what t he s t or;y w?. s there.
Borman 'P.;e :-'D I as .fA.r as the r e trofire r,-oes , i t was r.o rrohlem .
.
It worked out t:'ine , ano I jus t l ike to have 1. ' ' I t h:ink .
If you ren. 1 ly were forced into it you cot>ld <io i t on rate
neerll.es , but you ' d have to have a lo t of confiiience in
your ability to hold i t . T wou ldn ' t. want t o do it with
out r:ate Command; and again , I did it in ;:ate r.omrnRnd .
T' m not e ven sure how nuch the t hr usters we r e flrjnc -ivrinc
ret rofire . DU you riotice? I was watchinc the b,·l l , f'.r rl
I dUn ' t noti ce .
Di d it light up the horizon pretty hadl~r?
Lovell H WfW real ly r.ot too b~d . But ac t ua lly ; yeo , it ,iir1 , it
lit i t up ouite a bi t .
;i'CSD !leo Okay .
Lovell There was a point in the flight plan that they wanted the
--- PAGE 50 ---
40
Pilot to evaluate the horizon for a night, no pl atform,
retro. And the thing is this: you can turn out all the
lights , you can get lined up for BEF retrofire, without a
plat£orm if you get the stars and everything. But once you
start firing, you &re going to have to use the ra.te needles,
if' they are working, to hold position, because you can't see
the horizon 8J1Y longer, because the thrusters do blank out
8J1Y sight outside. And also, if you've got the lights
turned up in the cockpit, so that you can see thingeJ that
means that you can't see outside. So, you have to go either
outside to get cues, or you have to turn the lights out in
the cockpit. And if you're going to use stu£f inside, then
you have the lights on. I would be hesitant to make a night
retrofire without platform too. I think I would probably
wait £or a. da.y one.
5.7 Retro Pack Jettison
::Bonnan The retro pack jettison - Jim fired ••• the one thing here on
manual f ire , Jim fired the manual retros the wa;y we alwqs
have. We fired in the wa;y we a.lwa;ys h&ve, one second a..fter
TR equals zero, but we go t an auto retrofire .
Lovell Yeah, because the first one fired before I pushed the
button.
--- PAGE 51 ---
41
Borman That was right on the money. The retro pack jettison was
accomplished 45 seconds after, when the amber light came
on, and you could feel and hear this one going; of course,
it was pitch black so we couldn't see a thing. This was
one of the things that we didn 't see, the REI'RO ADAPrER ,
the ADAPI'ER , or the RETROPACK .
Lovell No , I didn't see any of that stuff go at all.
Bor:ma.n Total darkness.
Lovell Besides that, the thrusters blank out anything you could
possibly see.
5.a Communications and 5.9 updat ing
Bor:ma.n Com.unmications were rather sketchy there. I was very glad
though, that we were able to get through to Houston. I
think it was over Guaym.as when they came up and told us to
change in retro angle, and bank angle; I don 't know who did
that but that was good work on the ground following up that
computing, and getting us real time updates, I guess they
must have done it after tracking.
Lovell Yes, That 's probably what it was.
Borman That's probably how they did it. And that was darn good.
Lovell Yes.
Borman Because the 35 degrees, I was flying right between 35 de
grees and O degrees most of the time , and if we'd have
followed the 50 degrees, we'd have ended up way short.
--- PAGE 52 ---
42
So that was very good work on the gro-.md ' s part.
Lovell It looks like the initial computation of retrofire time
was off, and they already had a good o~bit on us.
Borman I don't kno~ what it was, but they corrected it when we
came in.
5.10 Post Retro Jettison Checklist
Borman The post retro jettison checklist was accomplished with no
problem. Oh, I'm thinking; we did have some discussion about
as far as the retro goes. With the--we ' ll cover this more
fully under su.i.ts. The question was whether to leave those
hoods on or off for retrofire. We found th,'3-t the noise and
the--I don't know why ~e didn't notice this at launch, but we
did during reentry , the noise from the air blowing in the G5C
suits was an impediment to crew discussion.
Lovell It would go on the mikes and make a lot of noise on th;
mikes. The mikes picked up a lot of whistle.
Borman. Plus the fact that the vision out of that thing certainly
needs to be imporved. So, we didn't kno,1 what to do--·,.;e
finally decided to leave them on for retro.fire.
6.0 REENTRY
6.1 Reen-gz Parameters '[:edate
Borman Reentry. 400,000 feet, we had that time updated; and at
400,000 feet I rolled left 55 degrees, because this ... or
fif ty degrees, the value of the backup angles at tha t time .
--- PAGE 53 ---
43
6.2 400K
Borma.n Spacecraft attitude a.t 400,000 feet wa.s difficult to deter
mine. We di dn't h.a.ve & horizon until we were below 350,000
feet, a.nd I was having & lot of trouble trying to find it.
Jim, you got the horizon first on your side.
Lovell Yes, the horizon ca.me up first on my side. Well, we did not
have it right at 350 ,000 feet, but we coul d look out be
tween RCS firings and see the air glow, if you'd stuck your
face right up there and l ook out. But when you're doing the
reentry on the instruments you have the lights up so, one
guy ca.n't do it, you have to have two guys; one to look out
and find out where the horizon is and- -
Borman That was a heck of a thing. I'd like to be a.ble to cross
check between the balls and the horizon once in a while t o
make sure that I knew exactly where we were. As it tu.med
out this was a completely instrument reentry. We fina.lly
found the horizon &nd Jim would tell me yes, it's about in
t he right pl&ce. But I just watched the ball. And I think
that it would be vecy difficult t o back up a reentry by
watching out the window. One person could provide backup
guidance for you, and tell
--- PAGE 54 ---
44
you where you a.re and what the ba.nk angle looks like with
the horizon. But, I don't think tha.t a person that i s fly
ing the reentry ca.n. cross check between the ball a.nd the
horizon. I think you have to ma.ke your choice and l ive with
it. Okay, roll commands were just like the s imula.torJ t ime
correlation was good. The guidance initiate came right on
the money, and the needles jumped indicating an undershoot,
a slight undershoot. From then on we just flew it the way
we 'd flown them a hundred times in St. Louie and in the sim
ulator. I think we were ve-ry well prepared for t his . I
tried to fly it so that we took i t down.range, and we got a
slight overshoot indication on downrange of about 1 needle
width, 1 dot. Then as we got down to a.round 2 g's or 2½- g's,
I tri ed to start zeroing it out , so then when 3 g's oameJ
the downra.nge was pegged right on the money. And we were
indicating zero on the cross range. And at 3 g's I switched
to flying the roll bug, and. just zeroing the roll bug; and
a.s we came on down further and further the do'Nnrange stayed
zero, but the cross range started going off full scale.
Well, this really doesn' t mean anything because all the
cross ra.nge is indicating is
--- PAGE 55 ---
45
your per cent or miss verses per cent of capa.bili ty. And
down on that range what it was really doing was, we were
coming in a little bit sho~t, and it was sacrificing the
cross range in order to get the down range cleared up, be
cause the cross ra.nge wu vecy sm.e.11 ~ •
Lovell There -was a bias in the dow ra.nge needles between his ball
and m:y ball, a.nd I think, th.&t fortunately,~ ball -wa.s the
one that was out. Because when he was right on.
:Borman You said we were overshooting &11 the time.
Lovell Yes. Re was right on - I said you were overshooting, it wa.s
about a needle and a half width bias.
:Borman Okay. The initial indication of g's, I remember Jim called
over and sa.id, "how ma.ny g's a.re we on now." I said l ess
than one" and you said "get serious." I think you coul dn't
believe it. The first onset you feel like you ha.ve about a
ton on you, but then as it builds up it never seems to get
mu.oh worse. It's almost u if it were a. step function. As
soon as you get the g you rea.lly notice it, and then you
don't notice it much more. And the ma.rlmum g's th.at we
pulled during the reentry were 3.9.
Lovell Yes, that a.ma.zed me. I actu&lly thought we did pull more
g's.
:Borman 3.9 g's. So, it was a long extended time.
--- PAGE 56 ---
Lovell Yes.
Borman During the later part of it I started out in PULSE Mode and
:rolled over the 55 degrees in PULSE Mode, and. then when we
eot Guidance Initiate I went to DIRECT. I was finding that
in order to keep the cros11 range zeroed, and we had been
told that Wally had trouble with his cross range, I was
banking back and forth quite frequently maneuvering the
spacecraft around the full lift point, from one side to the
other and I was overshooting a little bit in DIRECT. I was
also starting to pick up some pitch and yaw oscillations, so
then I went to single ring RATE COMMAND. And boy, this was
really a great control mode, it "'8.S steady as a :rock. You
could put it right where you wanted and it st~ed there.
But pretty soon we eot dow a:round, I guess it was when the
g's were coming off, after 3.9 g•s. I started losing it in
single ring RATE COMMAND so I threw two rings on and it held
it like a rock. :But they were sure firing.
Lovell Oh, yes.
Borman Boh, those thrusters were really firing. And we started
getting abla.tion off the heat shield. It was coming back in
and hitting the nose of the spacecraft, and that was pretty
--- PAGE 57 ---
47
sensational. Jim was giving vivid descriptions on what was
happening, a.nd I was watching the ba.11.
Lovell That's one thing that no one had ever told us before. I was
a.ma.zed. Maybe it was peculiar to the spacec.raft.
Borman No, Tom and Wally h.a.d mentioned it.
Lovell Oh, is that r i ght? That ablative material went back and hit
the forward end near the recovery section, rather the RCS
secti on; and I thought well, I never heard of this before,
and I was a little worri ed that maybe we were too fa:r off,
a.nd the stuff was going to start getting into recovery
sections. But it tiirned out to be okay.
Borman Another thing was that the windows really got scrounged up
on that ree.ntry; that's something else. I could hardly see
out of my window. Stu.ff was coming over from the heat
shield and hitting it. It was really gunky.
6. 3 Aceelera.tio!!,_Pro.file
Borman Okay. The acceleration profile was very smallo It was a
very high 11.ft reentry, and of course, this results in a
low g and long duration build up. No problem at all.
604 Spacecr&ft Control
Borman Spacecra.ft control was excellent until we g'Ot down to
100,000 .feet or even below 100,000 .feet. We turned on
--- PAGE 58 ---
48
the LANDING SQUI:B a.t 100,000 feet and sat th.ere and watched.
it.
6.5 lOOK Feet
Borman I started losing it; I think we may have run out of RCS fuel
between 100,000 feet a.nd 50,000 feetJ at lea.st I thought we
had.
6.6 50K Feet
Lovel l Wel l, didn't you turn off the RCS?
Borm8Jl I didn't turn th&t off until a.fter we got on the drogue. We
were starting to build up the yaw and pitch rates. Then at
50,000 feet, I was anxiously a.wa.i t :l ng the drogue, because
these rates were building up a little. They weren't very
bad yet, though. I pushed t he drogue expecting it to de
crease, and all it did wa..s a.m.plify th.em. And we got a. .real
ride on the drogue for a. whil e, sounded like the one Jim and
Ed discussed. It was r e&ll y going pretty bad.
Lovel l Our angles were what? About 70 degrees. We pitched up?
Borman Oh no, I estima.te we were oscillating back and forth maybe
20 degrees.
Lo<rell From the drogue here pitching up we were rolling back a.:nd
forth more than 20 de.grees on that initial pa.rt.
--- PAGE 59 ---
49
Borman We'll have to see. We don't have readings on that .
Lovell Okay, because I'm sure we did more than 20 degrees.
:Borman Then I t hrew the motor valves back open age.in on the thrus
ters, and that seemed to stop it. So I left them open a
while and finally turned them on again and it stopped, and
it settled out, and it was pretty smooth on the drogue. As
a matter of fact, when we got dow to ma.in chute, it we.a
steady as a rock on the drogue.
Lovell Yes.
6.7 35K Checklist
Borman I turned off the RCS motor valves a.nd blipped t he thrusters
to clear the lines between 30,000 feet to 26,000 feet. And
Jim then opened--The 40K ba.rostat worked fine.
6.8 Communicatiol_!!!
Borman And we gave the reentry status report. I 'm not sure th&t
Houston heard it, but we told them the drogue was all risht
and okay.
6.9 26K Checklist
Borman Jim, at 26,000 feet you opened the vent air snorkel
--- PAGE 60 ---
50
and we got a cabin full of I don't know what it was.
Lovel 1 You had your hood off. Why?
Borman I took my hood off to try to find the horizon , so I made
the reentry with the hood off .
Lovell Okay, I had my hood on, and I think when we opened up the
snorkl e; the way that works, the snorkl e draws air through
t he suit compressor, and then into the suit circuit•
I had my hood on ; and the flow comes out of an opening
back here in the hood, and flows down . I got an eye
ful l of something that was an acid.
Borman Acid, eh?
Lovell Yes. Really burned my eyes. My eyes were watering when I
finP,lly got the hood off.
Borman We 11 , we accomplished all t he checklists, and we had no
problems; as a matter of f act, i t went pretty smooth in
the time between the drogue deploy and the 10.6 barostat.
6.10 10 . 6 K Barostat
Borman It was just like the s i mul a t or. One th i ng I did notice,
initially, when we were on the drogue, t he altimeter was
completely inaccurate. You couldn't even read it. We
were oscillating so bad l y that it was jumping in thousands
of f eet per second· , oh maybe not thousands, but the needles
were going a l l over the place; and I remember thinking boy ,
--- PAGE 61 ---
51
if this oscillation doesn' t s top, I' ll have to punch the
main chute on the amber l ight, rather than the altime ter .
But the oscil l~tions did stop.
6. 11 Hain Chute Deployment
Boman I punched the main chute at 10 , 600 f eet as indicated on
the altimeter , and just a millisecond. aft er that, the
yellow l i ght came on the 10.6 baros tat l ight . The
thing deployed immedia t e ly into a reefed condit ion , and we
examined it in the reefed condition and it l ooked very good_
LoveJl Frank thought it was in the reef ed con<lition for 3 months .
Borman It seemed like it s tayed reefed for a long time , then it
unreefe<l , and I couldn ' t find one gore or one pane l that
was ripped or frayed or anything .
Love ll It was a good chl1te .
Borman Perf e ct chute.
6. 12 Post Main Checklist
Rorman We accompl ished the post main checklist, anrl then we
braced oursel ves very well and wen t to the single point. of
a ttitun e .
6.13 Single Point Re l ease
Bormim When we went to the s ingle point attitude it was exac tly
the same as we had had it at St . Louie--where they ' d
rigged--they had a test after John and Gus ' s fl ight . They
put a test capsul e suspens ion at St . Louis, and this was
--- PAGE 62 ---
52
e:x:actly the same. You get a. good whack and then you sit
there and vibra.te ba.ck a.nd forth for a little bit.
6.14 2X Checklist
Borman 2,000 foot checklist we accomplished with no problem. About
this time, at 2,000 feet, I heard Air Boss calling and we
started communicating with Air Boss. I saw him flying around
while we were still on the chute. Houston came throU8h
a.bout this time and wanted to lmow if we had a. main chute.
I'd ca.lled a.11 these things off, but I guess th.at the com
xmmica.tions-maybe the Auto Cats weren't working or some
thing.
Lovell Air Boss should have called back a.nd said•••
Borman But I called back and confirmed main chute.
6.15 Landing
Borman We hit the water with a. pretty good thud, and your window
went under water, didn't it? Jim's window went under watero
We hit in a drift. We were drifting to the right rear, and
there was a 14 knot wind, and when we hit the sp&eecra.ft
rolled to the right, and your window went under the W&ter,
and mine eticy-ed up. Nothing serious tho'U8h,.
Lo-vell Nothi.n g serious.
6.16 Postlanding Checklist
Borman We extended the .RF antenna. to get e. test for them &nd went
on HF-DF; I hope that somebody heard it. But they had
--- PAGE 63 ---
53
swimmers there in a.bout 4 minutes, and so I put the HF
antenna back down to keep it from getting da.maged. And we
conducted the electrical check. I musts~ that I'm gl ad
that the electrical check was simple, because it was hot in
there, and we were tired. I was worried about this before
and I would never have been able to sit there Blld go t hrough
this complicated, long check.
Lovell We had both pl8l'llled, that what we were going to do was take
off our suits in the spacecraft, and wear our orbital flight
suits. And I think that we probably would never have gotten
out of the suits, because we were just too hot and too beat .
:Borman It was even hot in the spacecraft, so Jim came through with
the idea of opening the :repress valve, and this wa.s great.
We bad a.11 that oxygen and you weren't going to use it. It
blew all that cool oxygen out and we had o2 HI RATE and the
snorkel on. So we stqed pretty cool when you get right
down to it. So it was a. good idea. I don't know if you got
the blood pressure measurements or not, did you?
6.17 Blood pressure measurement
Lovell I took them, I don't know whether they came out or not. I
put the reprogre.mmer on in the water and started ta.king blood
--- PAGE 64 ---
54
pressure measurements a.nd--but that ' s harrl to do. I
ought to comment on that. Because to take a blood
pressure measurement you had to pump up the thing and
leave your handsstill, and leave your arms still until
it bleerts down ; we ll it takes a little while for it to
bleed down. Meanwhile , Frank ' s got the checklist out and
the guys out there are putting on the collar, and we're
trying t o throw switches and take this and t hat; I ,just.
thought I might as well start doing it with my other ~a.r.n.
Ilorman Same way with the blood pressure they requested over
Guayrnas during reentry, I make a comp1ete testimonial here ;
I think once the reentry starts that everything e lse cets
l eft aside, and you <lon ' t nP-ss around with blood pressures,
or experiments or anything else. From then on it ' s sort
of a case of surviving the darri thing . I didn't wan t rim
messing a.round looking for a bl ood pressure ; so we diiln 1 t
do it. About thA.t time we cou ldn ' t find the horizon any
way.
Lovell We got called up from the MCC
Borman But , anyway, we didn ' t do it. So it didn ' t bother us .
Lovel] That ' s the first I 'd heard of it when they cal l up.
7.0 .LANDING AN]) RECOVERY
7.1 Impact
Borman We were drifting backwards, blunt end forwar d , rather, as
--- PAGE 65 ---
55
we hit the water, Although it was a good jolt, I wouldn't
say it WR.S anything outstanding. We hit , and Jim, your
window went under water, right?
Lovell The snacecraft rolled to the right, I believe .
Borman Yes. We hit, rolled to the right, and you went uncier water
and bobbed right up.
Lovell Right
Borman I released the parachute and it fl oated in front of us for
several minutes.
Lovell I saw part of it on the left hand side there, or rather on
the right hand s ide as i t fl oated by my window,
BoI'J'llan It stayed there for several minutes . It ' s just the way
it 's been described before.
Love11 There was an awful lot of fog on the window, though. I
noticed tha t the humidity was such that you could hardly
see out. Very foggy .
Borman I'm not sure that was humidity or that was f rom reentry .
Lovell Might have been from reentry, I don ' t know.
Borman I did see the S2F on the chute. We saw it whi le we were
sti Jl on the chute coming down,
7 .2 Checklists
Love ll The onl y thing I had about the checklists; during the
recovery phase, I had a hard t ime doing the checkl ist, in
fact, I had to give it to you, because I couldn't move my
--- PAGE 66 ---
56
ann doing the blood pressure work. And that compl icates
the recovery phase of it quite a bit .
Bonnan Yes .
Lovel l I think it also compromised the blood pressures that way
too.
Borman We didn't feel like running foot races when we finally hit
the water. We had planned to get out of our pressure
suits into that orbital flight suit, but the effort was
just too great . So,we jus t opened t he repress valve to get
some more cooling in there and sat .
Love l 1 That ' s right . We opened up t he repress valve; di d we have
the cabin fan on?
Borman No, we didn ' t have t he cabin f an on . He had the snorkle
val ve with the suit fans and t he o HI HATE and the re
2
press valve open.
Borman The checklists were all right then as far as you 're con-
cerned?
Lovell Yes. I thought the recovery phase was very good. I t hink
I missed one or t wo. I know I didn ' t turn all the s tack
switches off, but the power and control switches were off
during the reentry phase; so, there was no problem there .
7 , 3 Communications
Boman UHF . We had communicat ions with Air Boss whi l e we were
still on the chute, and we had very good communications
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57
with them in the wa ter. The communications with Houston
via UHF were poor. Once we were on the drogue they kept
calling us asking us to confirm main chute. I' m not sure
they ever hea r d us conf irm main chute.
Lovell I've often wondered about t ha t . Watching the other apace
craft come in, why they don't call; and I found ou t that
they do call but they ca..~•t get through. Must be the
rel ay pl anet troubl e or something.
Borman Communi cations wi t h recovery forces on UHF was excel lent.
HF: we ext en<ied t he HT<' ant enna, put out HF- DF t one for
awhil e. Again I am not sure if anyone picked it up or not .
We retracted it af ter i t had been up only 8 minutes , be
cause of the f act that we did not want to get the HF
antenna broken of f during the recovery operation.
Lovell There was no need for HF communications since we vere so
close to the recovery group.
Bonnan The chopper was over us about 5 or 6 minutes after landi ng .
We had much better UHF communications, so, we di d not use
HF.
On point of impact, onboard data. Within t he l i mits
of the readability of that scal e, it was excellent . Down
range and cross range needles were fine. We actua lly
ended up about 8 or 9 miles from the carrier. You just
can't get much finer infomation out of the down range and
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58
cross range .
Lovell Did you have any kind of a mal function in the acceler
ometer?
Boman No, but Spacecraft 6 did . I don 't remember that being
a condition of the be t.
J.ovel l I didn ' t either.
Boman Ground Information . The ground gave us excellent inforl!la
tion, as f ar as everything we needed to know, inc l uding
recomputing the guidance angles after retro . The ground
did an exce llent job. Tracking data, I don ' t remember
receiving that . When Spacecra ft 6 was ent ering, they
kept tell ing them that they were fine, a.nrl they wer e goi.ng
right down the s l ot anti everything. J do not remember
ever hP.aring from the ground on anything Jike that on ours,
do you? Perhaps we did and we were s o engrossed in flyi ng
it, t hRt we did not notice it.
Love Jl We ll , we had good communications pri or to b l ackout over
GuayrnRs . After we started guiding, going into th e atmos
phere, communications went t o pot.
Boman Status of recovery. I <lo not think recovery cou1d have
been any better .
Lovell Very smooth .
7. 4 Systems Configuration
Borman The ECS, as we said before, we had o2 HI RATF. with both
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59
suit fans, snorkel valve open, and the vent valve open .
We a]so opened the repress valve. Electrical: We per
formed a simple electrical check. We turned off 3 and 4J
l eft 1 anrl 2 on, and watched for the variation in voltage
on the main buses. The bus that is fed by land 2 bat
teries varied with wave action.
Lovell That is right. But 3 and 4 dirl not move from zero.
Borman And then you turned off squib batteries land 2 also didn't
you?
Lovell I left squib battery 3 on.
Borman Squib battery 3 was the only one that was on.
Lovell Control: We turned off the platform, the computer,
the circuit hreakers to the thrusters, and the RCS
thrusters.
Borman He l eft the comput er in PRELAUNCH for 48 seconds or more,
before we turned it off. Aeromedical, no comment. Except
blood pressure being a nuisance, anrl perhaps even a
hindrance when we were trying to go around the cockpit
with the switches and you had to ho 1d one arm stil 1.
7.5 Spacecraft Status
Boman RCS fumes: When you open the snorkel at around 26,000
feet you get a good load of them.
Lovell I am not sure what kind of fumes they were. They were not
familiar to me. I have smelled the results of fuel in the
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60
RCS system,and I know what that smells l i ke i t . It did not
sme l l that way . I got a burning sensation in my eyes ,
which was diff erent . Now, I might have got a mor e con
centrated one . I still had my helmet on , and zipped up ,
You had your helmet off . I be1ieve, t hat witr. the snorke l
open , the compressor ~u1Jed the ambient air through the
snorkel through the compressors and into the suit circuit .
That i s why I got a concentrated rlose of whatever was on
the outside, which causert my eyes to wa t er ann to burn .
Whether it was the ablative material , the shing1 es , or
the RCS f umes , I do not know.
Borman The main chute was perf e ct .
Lovell Looked beaut iful .
Borr.tan I coul d not see a rip or a t ear or any fraying or any
thing ; i t wa.s just perfec t . The windows were fo(!gy in
flight . I thought they fogged over and the visibi lity
out of them during the hot part of the re entry , was very
poor a l so .
Love11 They started to burn a little bit . Started to peel off
on the outs ide. I do no t know what i t was .
Rorman When we eot on the wa ter t hey were fog~ed over with hu
midity and salt spray . I guess you have to expec t that ,
Leaks: There were none , that I know of . Conldn ' t se e
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61
any or hear any.
Lovell I did not see a:ny leaks.
Borman Electrical Power: We mentioned we had 1 and 2 main
batteries on, and when we evacuated the spacecraft, we
turned all four of them on per the checkl ist. Turned off
everything but the rescue beacon. F.lectrical power was
ampl e, very good. We were running both suit fans.
Lovell Oxygen: Went to repress valve open.
Borman We went through that swiftly, as a matter of fact , to
keep cool.
Love ll 'vie noticed before we got out that both the bottle pressures
were down to zero.
Borman Hatches: After one of the swimmers said we were clear to
open the hatches, I unlocked mine. It operated very
freely and easily. I could budge it about 2 i nches, but
I could not lift it. I probab ly could have if I had
exerted a l ot of effort, and gotten my Jegs up under me.
However, the swimmer was right outside, and I asked him
to he l p. Ile helped and it came right open, worked very
wel l . We had the suit on and left them on.
Lovell We were warm, undoubtedly. Getting out of the spacecraft
as quickly as we did helped us.
Borman That was the smart thing to do.
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62
Lovel l I wouldn 't want to sit in there with our suits on.
13onnan Plus , I thought the visibility of that suit during re
entry left a l ot to be desired. That is why I had to
pu1 1 my hood back to find out where we were end what
position we were in. I think the suit is an exceJ.lent one ,
but i t is going t o have to be improved. We be tter grab it
and start working, modifying it ; to make it acceptab l e for
Apoll o. The sea condition was very goon ; 2 to ,1. foot
waves . We bobbed around, although I got a 1itt l e queasy,
I did not get nauseated, Jim didn't either.
Lovell The sea condition was outstanding for landing.
7. 6 Postlanding Activity
Borman Postlanding act ivity was well organized. We were a li t t l e
busy. We did not get t hru until about 10 o'clock that
night. Is that right ?
Lovell Yes, that is right .
Borman He harl a little misunderstanding about riding a bicycl e.
We understood we were not supposed to rirle until 18 hours
after impact. They wanted us to ride it thA.t night after
we had been through a full day of medical exams, and
finally had a good supper. So , we told them they would
have to hold off until 18 hours after impact.
FCSD Rep You are still in the spacecraft for this part.
--- PAGE 73 ---
Borman Okay. On :postland.1nc we just sat there .
Lovell We l l, we went through the check-off list. That took al1
the time . I saw the swimmers, checked the electrical
system, that they wanted us to do for postl anding. By
that time the swimmer had the collar up. I couJrl see the
collar going up, and then he got the jacket on .
Borman We ha.d good commun i cation with t he swir:uner through thA.t
jack .
Lovell Excellent communicati ons with the swimmer.
7 . 7 Com f ort
Borman It gets pretty wa rm in that sp~cecraft. I would hate tn
spend any great deal of time in there without any F.C:i .
Lovell I can speak as an authority on that.
7.8 Recovery Poree Personnel
Borman We covered communications, it was exce llent . Flotation
co1Ja.r was fine, wor ked good.
7 ,9 F.gress
Borman Egress was normal, just as we practiced in Galveston Day
several times. These helicopters did a fine ~oh. I
think someone said it was about 23 minutes after we landed
that we were on our way back.
7.10 Survival Gear
Bom an Even the underarm life pr eservers inflated this time .
Wonder of wonders. No prob1em .
--- PAGE 74 ---
64
7.11 Crew Pick Up
Boman The crew pick up was nominal.
Lovell Nothing else. Everything was fine .
8.0 SYSTEMS OPERATION
8 .1 Ple.tfom
Borman We aligned the platform 3 t imes. W:ach time it worked
just as advertised. Daytime alignrnent,of course,was no
prob] em. We got very ample yaw reference out the window.
Lovell Caging, for fast heat dropout took approximately 23
minutes.
Boman Night time, the initial alignment is a litt1e difficult i f
you do not have a full moon. With a fu 1 1 moon it is al
most as easy at night as it is in the daytime. It rea 1.ly
lit the terrain up.
Lovell To get your initial spacecraft attitude, the full moon
is very nice .
Borman Right, without a full moon, I think it woul d take you a
little whi le to align to get your Spacecraft BEF, so that
you would not have to torque the platfom too far for
alignment.
Lovell You get to know the stars.
"!3orman Yes, you have to use the stars . It would be difficult
to pick up the ground and track it. Platform Morl es: CAGE.
Jim ~aid that took 23 minutes for a fast heat drop out.
--- PAGE 75 ---
65
SF.F worked perfectly. BEF worked perfectly. ORB RATE
s eemed to be fine , We used it preparing for the rendezvous
with Spacecraft 6. After running OP.BRATS fo r
approximately an hour , and then going back to align S P.P ,
we did not notice a great amount of misalignment. ?he
only time it was on F'RF:E was during reentry, I cuess the
FREF. worked fine .
Lovell No probl em about displays , were there ?
Boman lfo , not at all ,
Lovell Been using- them for a couple of years now.
'B orman No prob l em about contro l s . ~'h~ PLATFORM mode worked
well , During our last alienment, we had degraried opera....ion
in thrusters~ and 4; so we aliened it manually f or 2
orbits . It was very easy to no , ann it worked fine .
We had eJ l the confidP-nce in the worl ri as far A. S atti tude
reference is concerned,
8 . 2 OAJIS
'Rorinan OAMS operational che ck, Pad: I tr.ink we went arnunn
the horn about~ times before they were satisfieri.
Lovel 1 It took three circuits to s et them ,
Borman Ri gr t , Inflight O~J~S : The on ly ooerati0nal er.eek we harl
is when we lost the complete authority in yaw richt,
thrusters 3 and 4, We noticed this first 1n PULSE mode;
•
--- PAGE 76 ---
66
we switched to DIRECT and in DIRECT we did not e;et. a.ny
ignition at all as far as I could tell . In t he OAHS PULSE
yaw righ c, we were getting slight little pops . It seemed
we had about { control authority that we had before we
experience~ the probl em. We went to DIRECT, to see what
effect DIREC11 ha<l on it and we got some thrust, but i t was
a. '1•hishing. We weren't getting any sound of the
thrusters. It was a whishing sound . T think we were only
getting an impulse either from the oxi<lizer or the fuel
escaping.
Lovell We couJd hear a cJicking of the solenoids or the operation
of the va l ves, whatever they were back there . They were
worki ng all r ight, but we were not eetting any resuJtant
thrust.
Borman Right. Systems Monitoring : Source pressure was fine .
Went right down t he predicted sche<lule .
Lovell As a mRtter of fact, the s ource pressure dropped, just a r
pre<licted , when we ran out of initial 0.Al18 fuel before we
went to the re serve tank. Tt came back in at;air. when we
actuated the squib.
Ilorman ?To , that wasn't the source pressure, that was the regul ated
pressure.
Lovel l I mean the regulated pressure, I'm sorry.
Borman The source temper ature worked fine throughout the flight.
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67
The regul a t ed pressure stayed at 300 , r ight on the money,
throughout the ent ire flight until the auxiliary tank was
actuated . We ot:>erated the auxiliary tank when the nressure
dr opped about 30 psi .
Love l l Yes . It went down to about 260 or 270 .
IlonnAn Right . It crune right ba ck up , and the system worked just
exactly as advertised. The prope1.1ant ouantity gauge
worked fine. Por most of the flight it was right in
ae-reement with the ground comt:>utations.
Love] J :/hat wa.s the final pro"9e lJ ant quantity reading?
1
Borman About 2 percent to 3 percent .
Lovell And we s ti ll had 300 psi r egulated pressure .
Borman Source pressure remained about 1,000 psi . Monitoring of
OAMS propellant remaining: On board in fomat ion I thought .
was good. The OAMS propellant quantity gauge, wor ked fine .
Lovell At least it was on the s i de favoring us .
:Sorman Yes. The ground in.formation was excellent. At the end of
every da,y they gave us ground r undown of how much O.AMS fue l
we had remaining. It worked out fine. We were short on
O.&MS fuel. Any time we di dn't have a s~ecific assi gnment,
we were in drif t ing f l ight. That's one thing we want men
tioned. Every time we powered down we' d turn off the ACME
bias power and the ACME inverter, and invariably t h i s would
--- PAGE 78 ---
68
• two pulses of
end up in ti bump, II "bump,
ti tha t would tend to
yaw left and roll left. And the natural tendency of
the spacecraft to yaw left due to water boiler venting,
I guess, and perhaps ECS venting, was aggravated by this
added impulse of two blips when we shut down the ACME.
How about the selector controls and switches i n the
cockpit?
Lovell No comments t here.
Borman I don't have any either. The attitude controller, I thought,
was fine. No problems. Maneuver controllers were fine.
Lovell The right hand maneuver controller was a very nice operating
controller and it was very handy. Very easy to operate.
Borman As far as inflight malfunctions or irregularities, we lost
aut hority on thrusters 3 and 4. We got some of our yaw
righ t capability back by turning off the circuit breaker for
Thruster 12 and then thrusting backwards with the maneuver
controller in order to give us yaw right. This wor~ed very
well and enabled us to check yaw right drift rates and
enabled us to make yaw right maneuvers. The only thing-
you couldn't get very small control inputs with this mode.
Lovell And you used a lot of gas.
Borman And you used a lot of gas. I was very happy when we finally
--- PAGE 79 ---
··-◄ - ..-... 'ii
.;J,, ... , : · - - L. :-... .. •-t ._~ 69
aligned the platform for reentry that we were able to get
enough control out of 3 and 4 to align the platform. 'When
we did this, of course, in order to get yaw control we went
to roll jets - pitch, and that worked fine. I don't have
anything to add to that malfunction. We heard the solenoids
working. When we went to DIRECT we could feel we did get an
impulse, but we did not seem to get ignition. It sounded
more like a swishing noise. The ground ana.lyzed it and
seemed to think it we.s a problem with the valve seats. I 'm
not certain what it wa.s. I do know that we also tri ed s econ
dary drivers and that didn't help. I coul d tell that wasn't
the problem when we f i rst heard it.
Lovell We tried different modes--PULSE, DIRECT, a.nd RATE COMMAND ,
but tb.a.t didn't help. I think it was mechanica l problem.
Borman RATE COMMAND is a very tight control mode. I'm very glad i t
was there. I think it is very important to have that for
retrofire. We also used it for reentry. I think it is a
very good mode. Of course, it is expensive in .f'uel . We
used it also for all our thrusting when we were making orbi t
adjust maneuvers.
Lovell Let me ask a question. When did you go to RATE COMMAND
during the reentry?
Borman I went to RATE COMMAND during reentry Lfte:r guidance initi-
--- PAGE 80 ---
70
ate and after I started f lying the needles.
Lovell Because you were overshooting with DIRECT?
:Borman Right. I was not able to get the fine control I wanted.
It would not stay in there. It seemed like the spacecraf't
was picking up a torque in roll also, and I was having to
watch it too close.
Lovell And this was different th&n what we had in the simulation.
:Borma.n Yes. REENTRY RATE COMMAND we never used. DIREC'l! we used
once for tracking the Reentry Minuteman in order to catch
it. It was moving so swiftly. We a l so used it in the ini
tial phases of reentry, and it worked fine. The PULSB mode,
of course, was the one we lived with most throughout the 14
days. I thought it was an excellent mode.
Lovell It is a gas saver and even when you do have a platform the
PULSE mode is adequate for mos t of the work you can do-- for
any attitude control, ground terrain observations-except
for rapid rotations where you need a faster authority.
:Borman Right. All ground tracking, PULSi was adequate. We did
not have any problem at a l l. We were able to track the
Polaris using PULSE. Everything except the reentry~ we
could use PULSE mode. The IlORIZON SCAN mode was fine. The
only thing I noticed there was at sunrise and sunset some
times, we were driven to a 30 or 40• nosedown pitch attitude
--- PAGE 81 ---
71
by the thrusters . The scanners worked great except at sun
rise and sunset.
Lovel l They woul d l ose lock•••
Borman Sometimes they wouldn't lose lock but, remember, they drove
the spacecraft nose down. About 40° pitch down.
Lovell The one big thing, which wa.s the question in all our minds,
actually b• PP4D•d, Another spacecraft nearby will interrupt
the HORIZON SCAN mode.
Borman Right.
Lovell It does effect the scanner operation, so it i s something you
have to take in consideration.
Borman That ' s right. When 6 got between us a.nd tha aun, the scan
ners were inoperative and lost lock. PLA'Tlt'ORM mode worked
excellently when we had it, and we 'll.lled it to align the
first two time ■ we had the platform. I think that you can
do a finer job, and, you can a lign the platform more closely
manually. Thie is becau se the deadband on the PLA.TFOlffl mode
i a l arger than you can control manually. But it certainly
i a a worthwhile mode and for station keepin&' it is a super
ior type of operation. Tra.nal&tion maneuver• at apacecr&ft
aepa.ra.tion at SECO + 30--I did not hear the thrusters. I
jwst thrwsted. Jim hit the SEP spacecraft. Did you hear
the thru.aters?
--- PAGE 82 ---
72
Lovell No. I did not hear the thrust ers. One reason why we didn't
hea.r the thrusters in t h.at particular case, whereas we did
later on, was the fact t ha.t we ha.d our hoods on and the air
was blowing in and making a l ot of noise. It Wl!.S strictly
by feel and by sight. No sound.
Borman Right. Peri gee Adjuat Translati on. Accel erometer bias was
what they thought it was prelaunch, and it remained that way
throughout the f light. This was a. no platform Perigee
Adjust, so, really that doesn' t have any meaning there. The
timing on the first Peri get Adjust Maneuver was off, thanks
to me. Jim ma.de the maneuver. We did it without a platform
on a. star. And, as I mentioned earlier, about this time we
were in cl ose proximity to the booster, and we started fly
ing through some particles, but I wa.s not sure exactly what
it was, so I told him to stop thrusting as we approached
this. Then, when we got in there, when we stopped th.rusting,
this wire came forward, hi t the hatch, and I lost the timing
again. We thrusted, I guess , a little too l ong. I a.m not
sure exactl y how l ong i t was. I think we were aiming for a.
perigee of about 102, and ended up with about 120. M.&¥be
they changed their minds and went for a perigee of 120. I
don't know.
Lovell Well, that time which they gave us was not consistent with
--- PAGE 83 ---
73
the flight plan. They e;a.ve us one minute and 16 or 17 sec
onds, &nd the flight plan called for 46, I think.
Borman Well, we may get that cleared up when we talk to the ground.
But, it was greater than I thought we had planned to do.
Updating throughout the flight was excellent. Checklist
wa.s fine and, of course, we did not use the computer.
Lovell We might mention here that both Frank and I think making
adjust maneuvers without a platform is very feasible. You
can use the reticle for alignment and use the stars a.s a
reference. Since you a.re usu.a.lly using the aft thrusters,
you do not have thruster light to worry about. You can
turn down the lights. It takes two people thoughf one per
son to burn, hold attitude on the star, and watch the star
reference and the other person to time. It required two
people, but it is & very feasible method of doing it. I
think you get some very good accuraciea with it, because we
found out from the second burn.
8.3 RCS
Borman RCS operational checks were nominal. We had no problems at
all with the RCS. System monitoring was perfect and it did
not drop one bit during the 14 da.ys. After we actuated it,
it vent from 3,000 to about 2,600 to 2,500 psi on the source
pressure. No problems. Control mode-s, RATE COMMAND. .AJJ I
--- PAGE 84 ---
74
have said, it is a very tight and fine mode. We used it
during most of the reentry. REENTRY RATE COMMAND we did
not use. DIREC~ I used for the first part of the reentry,
and it seemed that we were picking up rolling torques , and
I was also starting to pick up pitch and yaw oscillations
as the gs were coming on. They were slight ones but I
really wanted to get the spacecraft steady, end I was real ly
trying to lock it in on the attitude indicator, so we went
to RAT~ COMMAND. I didn't see any reason to bring back a
lot of RCS fuel anyway. REENTRY RATE COMMAND we did not use.
The PUISE mode wa.s used in the reentry prior to guidance
initiate, and it worked fine. Retrofire attitude control
was excellent and I'm gl ad we bad RATE COMMAND there because
we had no outside reference at all. Retrofire was done on
the ball with the rate needles, and I thought the rockets
were outstanding. Yes.h, outstanding, I thought they were a
little more powerful than I had anticipated.
Lovell Q;uite all right.
Borman Reentry attitude control deadbands and rate damping was
fine. The only thing, I guess, that was wrong with RATE
COMMAND was the fact that it uses an awful lot of fuel.
But, it certainly holds that spacecraft steady as a rock.
The heater lights - we solved that problem very easily. We
--- PAGE 85 ---
75
turned on the RCS Heaters on the second dtcy and left them
on through the entire £light. They sequenced and went on
and of£, I am sure, but we did not know about it. We never
saw the light, and we did not have to worry about it .
Lovell The temperatures kept right around 80° a ll the time.
Borman No comments on thruster f iring, worked fine. We shut the
RCS system down initially around 35,000 feet, shut off the
motor valves and then the oscillation on the drogue built
up even greater than it was. So we turned them back on
again, and I'm not sure if it is my imagination or not but
it seemed like this had some effect on damping the oscilla
tions. It may have been just the position in the reentry,
though. I had the feeling that perhaps we had run out of
RCS fuel prior to drogue depl oy. I am not certain, but if
we di dn't then the RCS didn't have the authority, because
we were oscillating before drogue deploy. I didn't notice
any RCS fumes after impact. Did you, Jim?
Lovell After impact? No. I think that our system of turning the
Repress on and getting the ..•
8.4 ECS
Borman Why don't you comment on suit mobility?
Lovell This was a flight that actually did some evaluation on the
suit. We had the new light weight suit. Mobility is better
--- PAGE 86 ---
than the 4-C suit, but mobility in the Gemini cockpit with
the 5-C suit still restricts the person such that it de
grades his performance for long duration missions. It is
still quite inunobile in the 5-C suit. We still have a lot
of trouble with it. The suits checked out all right prior
to the flight. We did not do any integrity checks with the
light weight suits during the flight. The air flow
through the suit was adequate where the flow got to the
body. However, there were many pockets where the &ir became
stagna.nt, especially in the crotch area.. It would heat up
in local areas of the body and would not provide adequate
cooling. Humidity goes right a.long with temperature. The
areas where the air flow did not go across the body, was
very humid. We also noticed that it gave you sort of a wet
clammy feeling when the cool air went in there. It gave you
sort of a. cold, clammy feeling where the flow went th.rough.
Places where the air did not res.ch were hot and clammy.
:Sorman Also, the humidity in the ca.bin was very, very low when we
were in the suits. The ca.bin was dry and hot. Very, very
poor.
Lovell The humidity dew point was between 52 and 58 most of the
time. We have some accurate figures on that. I don't recall
any instance of even seeing the CO2 gauge move other than
--- PAGE 87 ---
77
during tape dumps. We h&d no evidence of co 2 • Com.fort in
~ pressure suit is compromised. It restricts mobility
and the Gemini cockpit is just not th.at big for long dura
tion flights where you can live with the suit. Suit con
trols were very a.dequate. no problems there. We bad abso
lutely no problems with the o2 demand regulator. The elec
trical umbilical is unga.inly a.nd heavy. The connection
right angle sticks out in the cockpit. It could be better
designed. We did not have fingertip lights. Our mode of
operation. with the suit on, was pr:1.ma.rily with the hood
off, the cover visor on, and the gloves off. Maey' times we
also unzipped the big zipper through the crotch and up the
back, and left that zipper open. We found that the big
opening in the neck, with the crotch zipper closed, most of .
the air would go out through the neck and would not adequate
ly vent the lower stoma.ch area. We had planned in our flighl;
plan to try going suitless. As per plan, about the second
cl&y, I got out of my suit and found after settling down to
the environment that the skin became drier. There were no
wet spots or dampness in the underwear area. I put my suit
inlet hose along side of me on the center stowage area with
the opening facing aft blowing air do-wn alongside the seat
blowing &ft. The exhaust hose was put back into its stowage
--- PAGE 88 ---
78
position, with the screen on, a long the lower right hand
footwell e.rea. This provided adequate ventilation du.ring
most of the time. When we exercised we found out we built
up quite a bit of extra heat. I would then move the inlet
hose to a position along side of me, along my left leg,
and tie it down along the side pedestal with the opening
facing upward. This would provide more cooling into the
basic cockpit area and woul d actually keep me a lot cooler
then I had been before. We found out that without suits on,
the cockpit actually became bigger. There was more oppor
tunity to move a.round. You could move the body, there was
lees hesitancy to exercise, less resistance to exercise,
you could get to things easier. You actually had more con
trol and more comfort without the suit on. We stowed the
suit on the seat, putting the visor a.long the outer part of
the top of the seat rest a.nd doubling the legs back against
the back of the seat. We stowed the harness in the juncture
of the back and the seat of the ejection seat. During zero
g we were floating up and we never touched the back pa.rt of
the seat.
Borman I have some flight notes tha.t I will just read out for the
record. Ventilation without suits, The bypass hoses on the
Gemini provide excellent return ducts for the suit compres-
--- PAGE 89 ---
79
sors. They were mounted with the inlet on the outside wa.11
near the individual crewma.ns outboard knee. The suit inlet
hose wa.s then positioned to secure different !low patterns.
]ecause no provision had been made for special inlet hoses,
only two positions were tried. The one most often used was
the suit inlet hose located near the inboard shoulder point
ing forwa.rd. This produced a flow pattern from righ.t to
left down across the body. The body was never really in the
flow but a very comfortable circulation pattern was set up.
The other primary pattern consisted of leaving the suit out
let hose in the same place, but putting the inlet hose nea.r
the outboard lrnee, pointing 90• from the direction of the
outlet hose. This pattern a l so produced a comfortable flow
pattern. In truth, I believe the cabin is so small in
volume compared to the amount of air introduced by the suit
circuit that almost any- arra.ngement would provide enough
&ir to provide efficient cooling. We also have some sketch
es of how this went.
Lovell We also believe, after spending several dteys without suits
on that the theory that at zero g there would be no con•
vec'Ji.on cooling•••
:Borma.n I am sure that there isn't a:riy, due to oha.nge in the heating
condition.
--- PAGE 90 ---
80 ..
Lovell The mass of the air being pushed out by the compressors is
enough to give adequate flow throughout the entire Gemini
cockl)it. We had no problems with air flow.
:Borman It would have been a very, very difficult task to stay in
those suits for 14 days, i f not impossible . We cer t ain
ly woul d have been in much worse shape when we got down.
Lovell I believe so. We were requested from Houston to try the
hose position evaluation where by the inlet and outlet hoses
we.re together.
:Borman Yes.
Lovell We tried it and to be perfectly honest, with the small cock
pit and the 8.lllount of flow out of the inlet hose, we did not
find much difference, it was adequate, but it was awkward
to use it that way. We di d find out that if my exhaust hose
was put on Frank 's side t hat we would ge t stagnant spots on
my side of the cockpit where although I wasn't uncomforta-
ble...
:Borman •.. that is with yo~ inl et hose being turned off. So all
these flows were introduced on my side and both the return
hoses were on my side.
Lovell That is right, they were on your side. I found stagnant
areas, I wasn't uncomfortable, but I did find stagnant area.a
where there was no flow going on on my side. You have to
--- PAGE 91 ---
81
have adequate positioning of the exhaust and inlet hoses.
Borman I think really to solve the whole problem, if you want to
design efficient cooling for suits off operation in space
craft, design it the same as you would on the ground.
Lovell Right, I think you are right.
Borman You would have no problem. For instance, in J110st 0£ the
airplanes now that are pressure cooled the flow is so great
across them that you have a continuous flow patte:r.n 1n there,
coming out usually .f.'.rom one inlet located up around you:r
right shoulder a.nd a couple 1n around your feet. I don't
think you have to worr:, about the bll88,boo of no convection
in zero g because it is overshadowed by the large kinetic
energy input through the l arge amount of air.
Lovell Cabin pressure was 5.5 on lift-off, came dow.n to 5.1 and
st!cy-ed there exactly 5.1 for 14 dqs . It did not move when
we jettisoned the ad&pter and went on the bottles, it stqed
exactly 5.1. The only time I saw it move was on the water
when we used all the o:zyge. up and it went to ze:ro.
Borman Well, i t was below 5.1 when we opened the :Inlet Snorkle.
Lovell Inlet Snorkle.. yes, that is right.
Borman You were talking about the inlet bottle pressure.
Lovell Yea, tb&t•s right , the bottle pressure.
--- PAGE 92 ---
82
:Borman The temperature va.ried with the suits on and the suits off
operation. I have gone through my notes here, and I note
that it says when we both had suits on and we were just
barely cool enough with both suits on and the :B pumps run
ning. On the other hand, when we were both out of the suits,
the :B pumps only running, we were very comfortable. When
we were up working and opera.ting, we noticed that the temp
erature level in the cockpit was just right. We were run
ning most of the time with the suits full cold, the heat
exchanger full cold, and maximum air flow on both controls.
Then for several days when we went to bed, we left the con
trols that way, a.nd we would wake up very cool.
Lovell Well, there a.re several factors . I think the size of the
Gemini cockpit and the fact of & completely closed loop
system is very dependent on 2 factors. One was the heat
output of the people and two was the amount of heat you get
in through the windows due to the sun. At night our heat
output decreased, we put up shields on the windows, includ
ing some aluminiz~d foil to reflect the sun, and I think
the combination of both these things with the systems we had
during the day time really dropped the heat in the cockpit.
Then, during the day when we were active and had the windows
open a.gs.in, the temperature increa.aed inside the cockpit so
--- PAGE 93 ---
it was very com.fortable.
Borman That is right but the last couple of dqs we turned dollll the
suit flow at night and it helped out.
Lovell To compensate for this thing we turned down the suit flow.
Borman There's a lot of inertia in the cooling system and it takes
& long time from the time you make a move on the oontrols
before you can feel it.
Lovell Just to regress here one minute. When I was out of the suit
and Frank was in it, we put my suit flow to .i'ull decrease
&nd his to full increase to give him ma.rlmum cooling in the
suit. I was not uncomfortable with the full decrease flow
in the cockpit.
Borman The humidity in the ca.bin was higher with the suits off.
It W&s a much more comfortable cabin. Your skin di dn't get
dry, and the nose problems we ha.d the first 3 or 4 cla3"s went
awa::,. I am not sure that we ca.n contribute this solely to
beina' out of the suits or whether it was the fact we were
becoming more acclimated to the 100 per cent o:r:ygen.
Lovell We have some accurate figures. I believe thou&h, that with
suits on the humidity-temperature ra.nge w&s &bout 20 degrees
difference. With the suite off they went a.round 10 degrees,
I suapect.
:Bo:rman We have them &11 there. The onl y time the CO jumped at &11
2
--- PAGE 94 ---
84
was dlll."ing t ape dumps, it would go up a.nd then come b&ok
down but we lrnew this before flight though. Comfort dq
a.nd night, with and without suits .. .There is just no com
parison.. I have the notes that I wrote down while we were
still up there. There is no comparison between suit on and
suit off operation. The suit off is 1,000 per cent better.
I think I may have been conservative. It wa.s ma.ybe a lot
better than tha.t. Comfort without the suits was by and
large very good. We used the cabin fan only once in the
entire mission during one of the checks with the suit off.
This was when we had Jim's ■uit inlet hose blocked off &nd
my inl et hose operating in my side &nd the two suit outlet
hoses in my side of the spacecraft. As we already mentioned
here, Jim noticed some stagnant areas in the ap&oecra.ft, and •
we turned on the cabin fan to see if this aleviated the pro
blem, and it did help. There was a definite circulation
with the cabin fan on. The only problem is the cabin £an
draws a cons iderable electrical load, and we did not have
the power to run it continually. The cabin pressure r egu
lator worked perfectly, it never worked at all .
Lovell That is right, never heard it, thank goodness.
:Borman That's the pressure relief valve. Right, never hea.rd it.
It never actuated. The cabin pressure regulator was ae
--- PAGE 95 ---
85
steady as a rock . AB Jim ha.a already mentioned it st~ed
5.1 the whole flight, a.nd•I never saw it budge at a.11, until
you opened the snorkel.
Lovell Right.
~SD :rep Cabin vent va.lve.
Lovell We had a double vent valve with the tip bent up to protect
t he stop. We never used tha.t until we got down to the
checkl ist during the reentry portion of the flight.
Borman The Cabin Repress V~lve was on the entire flight because we
had the M-1 Experiment hooked to it . Then, of course, we
actuated it aga.in when we got on the wa.ter just to get some
cooling oxygen into the spa.oeora.ft. I have no oomments on
i t, we bad no problem with it, the friction had bean in
crea.sed on it so tha.t it worked quite well. It st!cy"ed in
the open posi t i on for the entire flight. The Ca.bin Air In
l et Valve, we used•.•
Lovell Just during the reentry phase•.
Borman Right. Just during the reentry phase.
Lovell •.•with the snorkel valve, th&t is when I t hink I got a
whiff of that stuff through there.
:Borman All the time with the suits off, we were running with the
Cabin Air Reci.rcula.tion Valve closed. The r est of the time
when there was one person in the suit and one person out of
--- PAGE 96 ---
86
the suit we r&n. with it in a 45 degree position. When both
people were m the suits, we ran it in the 45 degree posi
tion.
Lovell I'd like to make one comment· on the C&bin Inlet Valve, I
think a. future procedure woul d be to either open the visor
or unzip the hood prior to using the snorkel va.lve, so you
do not get this concentrated ambient flow into the suit in
a small concentrated area. Okay. Primary o
2 System
Monitoring.
Borme.n Prima:ry o System Monitoring was no problem. The cryogen
2
ics bottle for ECS o orygen did vent •.. I think i t was
2
a.bout the 8th d~ it started venting. Performance of the
cryogenics bottles have been outstanding. The first one,
ECS o , started venting tod~. And we were still adding
2
heat to the other two bottl es. Let's see, this was Sunday
morning so that woul d have been the 8th day that i t started
ventmg. The quantity measuring system worked fine. The
flow rates were adequ&te . I just ca;nnot emphasize enough
the desirabil ity of going without suits. The pressure a.nd
temperature remained just nominal. We had dome plots &boa.rd
the spacecraft, and we checked them out. We had to use the
auto heater on the ~S o bottle perhaps, the first two days
2
or so and then we were able to turn the heater off complete-
--- PAGE 97 ---
87
ly. That bottle had a big enough heat leak so that it main
tained pressure itself. As I said, it started venting on
the 8th day. We never used the manual heater on the E'.JS
o2 bottle.
Lovell As a matter of fact, the prilna.ry o2 helped, rather we util
ized the primary o to pump up the pressure on the ro o2
2
sometime in the early pa.rt of the portion of the flight.
Borman Yes, we used the crossover valve. When you hit the squib
or when you hit the switch to open the solenoids, even
though we had been led to believe that i t takes some time
for that pressure to build up, it looked to me that it went
to about 250 in the FC o2 bottle almost immediately. It
went from 100 to 250 almost immediately. I imagine it will
come down when we talk about the FC o2 problem.
Borman Secondacy o System Monitoring was nothing, we checked it •••
2
all the time, but GO/NO GO decision once a ~ . It stS3"ed
exactly the same throughout the entire flight--5400 and
5300.
Lovell It did not budge at all.
Borman Quanti ty meaauring.•we do not measure except for pressure,
and as we said that stayed constant. Flow rates, pressures,
end controls were nominal in the secondary o2 • You could
not tell when we had gone off the primary onto the seconda.ry
--- PAGE 98 ---
88
o2 . We have already talked about the co 2 partial pressure.
It was below zero the entire flight except during tape dumps
when it jumped up due to a glitch that the tape dump puts in
the TM system. Radiator operation and configuration••• We
ran radiator on all the time except for two checks that were
made. Actually when we opened circuited the fuel cells be
fore we brought them back on the line, we went to RADIATOR
BYPASS twice. Then we went to ·RADIA'IDR BYPASS once when we
wanted to get the water out of the ECS System. One time
during the flight we were picking up water. This might be
a good place to cover that. We were picking up water coming
out of our suit inlet hose, in quite large quantities. We
called the ground, and they suggested that perhaps the vater
boiler was not venting. They called up the procedure that
included putting on evaporator heat, turning off the radia
tor and going to bypass on the radiators and rota.ting the
spa cecraft at 10 degrees per second. This threw out large
amount of water and things got back to normal. Later on in
the flight we noticed the same thing, but we were busy align
ing the platform and other things and we did not want to
setup rol l -rates. All we did was put the suit coolant to
warm and put both suit fans on and blew the water out of
t he system, and that worked also. We did notice that during
--- PAGE 99 ---
89
the flight, down in the vicinity of my right foot in the
center pedestal lower area there, around the cabin heat
exchanger, we got a lot of condensation. It was very wet
on the walls a.nd the blotter paper was sopping wet, a radius
of about 12 inches on the lower right pedestal, on my side.
I do not know how it was on your side.
Lovell It started getting wet on my side, the inboard.
Borman Yes, inboard side. That is the only place in the spacecraft
that I noticed any condensation. As far as I know the evap
orator only operated during l aunch and the first orbit. We
also had one other day when we woke up and were tumbling
quite badly and the wall temperatures were 16 degrees to 20
degrees lower th.an we ever recorded tb1;!m before. I suspect
that the evaporator might have worked that night. We men
tioned this to the ground and••. let's see, I have some notes
on that.
Lovell It probably got filled up from the moisture going into the
system.
Borman This was noted in the data for the cabin temperature surveys
also. I don't remember exactly what day it was, where we
noticed this big change in temperature.
Lovell It was &bout 5 or 6 days after the mission started, wasn't
it?
--- PAGE 100 ---
90
" orma.n Yes ..here it is here••• it was 158 hours a.nd 27 minutes when
we got up, a.nd we had a. wall temperature of 64 degrees and
a. pilot ha.tch temperature of 66 degrees. Comparing this
with 144 hours and 5~ minutes, the hatch temperature had
been 84 degrees, so there was a. 20 degrees drop du.ring this
one evening. ~ I attributed this, plus the fact th.at we no
ticed la.:rge drift rates when we woke up, to the fact that
the water boiler must have been opera.ting during the night.
It was the only time during the flight that we noticed these
large drops in tempera.ture.•. the very cold wall tempera.tures.
We were on double loop, B pumps most of the time. Finally,
went to A pump twice in the flight when people were in the
suits in order to at~ cool. We went to double A pumps, of
course, when we were powered up.
Lovell We bad one time when we bad one A pump on.
:Borman Twice we had it on.
Lovell Twice, but just one primary pump. We did not go to two A
pumps.
l3orma.n No. A pump in the primary loop was on twice to keep cool.
Lovell Right. The second.a.ry loop A pump was not on.
Borman Never on except during periods when the platform we.a running.
Lovell Right.
Borman Now, as I mentioned before, when we were running both B
--- PAGE 101 ---
91
pumps with the suits off, it was comfortable. When we got
the suits on, &nd both B pumps going, it was not enough to
handle the load.
Lovell It was .m arginal.
Borman That is right. Normal mode was all we used on water manage
ment.
Lovell Never touched the---
Borman Never touch the condensator.
Lovell The drink gun worked as advertised.
Borman One thing I would mention is the fact that this logging
every ounce you drink was an operational nightmare.
Lovell I think the gun is adequate for flights if all you want to
do is to know the total quantity of water that is going out
for balliet purposes or CG purposes. I do not think there
is a requirement to know just how much each crewman is drink
ing as long as it is adequate. There is no need to log, all
you have to do is report counter readings once a da,y for the
guidance people and .fuel cell people to know just how much
water is being consumed.
Borman Right. It says flush mode. We never used the Flush mode or
Evapora tor Fill mode.
8.5 Communications
Lovell The interphone Operation and Quality was okay, without the
--- PAGE 102 ---
92
hood on. The G5C suit ma.de communications poor, because of
the flow of the air to the hood. Other than that I thought
the interphone was pretty good.
Borman Yes, we should mention the fact th.at the G5C suit with the
hood zipped did introduce a lot of noise.
Lovell Yes, a feed back into those two mikes and there was a lot of
noise.
Borman The quality of the interPhone was excellent. With the suits
off we didn't use them most of the time, just like t alking
in a room, so we didn't need it. My UHF was a little fuzzy
during countdown.
Lovell Mine was good.
:Sorman Yes, yours was good and mine was a little fuzzy. I could
hear people all right but they claimed that I was a little
weak. In orbit, I just can't say enough nice things about
the UHF.
Lovell UHF was excellent in orbit for the entire 14 da;ys. v~~~
little static. High quality reproduction.
Borman With the squelch on zero.
Lovell Right, the s~uelch on zero.
Borman The UHF performance during recovery wa.s excellent. No peo
blems with that at all.
Lovell We did have trouble getting back to Houston.
--- PAGE 103 ---
93
:Borman I was very pleased with the entire Voice procedure operation
a.round the world. I thought they did 8J1 excellent job. We
didn 1 t have a:ny problems at all. They were quiet when they
were requested to be during our sleep period.
Lovell They were outstanding.
:Borman They were outst&nding, yes.
Lovell The voice tape recorder operation was fine. There were
no hitches as far as operating the voice recorder. It was
easy to, well , that's three feet of change. We used mostly
the CONTINUOUS mode rather than the MOMEN111A.RYa I used
MOMENTA.RY when we just wa.nted to m&ke a comment. As a. mat
ter of fact, I think the MOMENTARY position does save a lot
of voice tape, because you dontt have it on and forge t it.
However, we had a procedure with the voice tape that was
going to record the quantity of urine that was dumped. And
this led us to leave the voice tape on quite a long time
when we weren't doing anything or saying anythin~-and using
quite a bit or tape. I think that i t would be helpful if
we had some sort or a little light of some sort to let you
know that t he tapes on. When we have a flow meter which was
being eval uated for future flights and might be a standard
piece of equi pment then it would certainly be nice to have
--- PAGE 104 ---
94
some indication if the tape is on. On long flights you
can't ha.ve the tape on all the time like the short flights-
you ha.veto conserve tape. Cartridge change was no problem.
The controls were adequate. Data Recording? We tried to
record as much data as we could.
:Borman We didn't indulge in a l uxury many times of recording both
in the log book and on the tape. We only had 20 tapes for
a 14 day mission. If we got a good representation of it in
the log book-we didnJt put it on the tape. Now, we find
out we probably brought back some unused tapes, too.
Lovell We did. It was hard for a 14 day mission to adequately
budget the tape. We would try to budget it so th.at we could
get the in:f'orm&tion on there 'Without leaving long periods of
inactivity on the tape. However, we didn't budget it well
enough, and we left about 1 or 2 tapes without any record
ings.
:Borman Digital Command System updates were good, no problem--every
thing worked fine. Real-time transmitter, and delay-time
transmitter were no problem. As a matter of fact, tb.at
whole system I thought was excellent. The only problem we
had in the area of Digital Command System or the telemetry
was th.at we lost the tape recorder and ••• goofed up the de-
1,cy-ed time. The procedure that we worked up for operating
--- PAGE 105 ---
95
with Spacecraft 6 in the air, I thought went very well. It
posed no problems. Communications Controls &nd Switches
Voice Control Center, Audio modes, Keying and Antenna Selec
tion, were all nominal. We might mention in Sleep Configu
ration--we never used the Sleep switches bees.use we had the
situation where we pretended it was night and went to sleep
every evening and the ground never call ed us. I don't think
they ever violated that for the 14 days. They never called
us during the sleep period.
Lovell So that worked very well.
Borman Beacon Control was no problem. We didn't use the Reentry
C-band Beacon until reentry. The TM controls, tr8Jlsmitter,
and antenna again were no problem. It was operated just a.a
advertised due to all instructions from the ground.
8.6 Electrical
Borman Now we have some interesting things to talk about.
Lovell Well, we monitored the electrical system pretty closely.
Borma.n Yea.h, I guess we did.
Lovell The only thing we can say here is reiterate what we have
probably said before. On lift-off we had delta Plights
come on for fuel cells--both sections. 1 blinked on and
off several times and went off. 2 blinked on and off
several times and stayed on through insertion and stayed on
--- PAGE 106 ---
96
most of the t ime during the 14 days. We have recorded in
the flight book of the flight pla.n--those times th.at it went
off and on to the best of our lmowledge. I'm au.re we missed
several of them.
Borman When we were sleeping particularly.
Lovell When we were sleeping we missed them, but it appears to me
that there are two things now that these fuel cells have &
lot more latitude than we really first realized: 1) We can
oper&te with the fuel cells with delta Plights on more than
we thought we could. .As a matter of fact , we were doing
normal purges with the .t'uel cell delta Plights on whioh the
systems book said flatly not to do. But we had some excel
lent guidance a.nd assistance from the ground in keeping the
sections running.
Borman I think so, too.
Lovell I think that's what kept Stacks 2C and 2A going as l ong as
they did go . The gauge is a little inaccurate to monitor
the system. If we are going to have troubles with fuel cells
as we did on this flight, and if the ground is going to keep
requesting accurate stack a.mp readouts. The gauging system
is poor because it is ha.rd to read accurately the amps when
they are down in the low 1 and 2 amps. Each indicator is
canted a different way-alternately throughout the 6 stack
--- PAGE 107 ---
97
readouts. The ones that are canted inward away from
you are hard to read.
Bor:ma.n The fuel cell, as Jim said, was an interesting thing.
We finally lost stacks 2A and 20 about the 11th or 12th
day. stack 2B re.mained on and I'm sure there is a
whole history written on the ground of the things they
did and tests they ran at McDonnell when we were in the
air to see just what they could do and how far they could
go with these fuel cells. I thought they did a.n excellent
job,and we ended up being able to run them the whole time.
As a matter of fact, we turned on our Squib batteries about
the 10th day-used the Bua Tie switches and were running
entirely on the f'uel cells the latter part of the flight.
--- PAGE 108 ---
98
Borman The onboard cues for monitoring the el ectrical system are
adequate. We found out one thing in this f light , t hat is
the Delt a Plight s really don't mean a lot . We had been
told before the flight never to purge if you had a Delta P
light. We ended up violating every s i ngle one of t he ca.r-
dinal rules that we had.
I think the t hing to note about the entire electrical
syst em was the f ine work done on the ground. They came up
with solutions. They evidently were running s imilar t ype
cel ls a t MAC, St. Louis, and they kept them working
f or l onger than they should have.
Fuel c el l operation, as far as I was concerned , Section 1
was i deal. Section 1 maintained its share of the load the
whole fl ight. Section 2, we lost stacks 2-A and 2-C
event ual l y, I believe on about the 12th day. I was a
little concerned on the 13th day with the sta t us of Secti on 1
because we had had a delta Plight on Section 1 f or t he
firs t time and we had been running almost 24 hours.
But, t he ground came through and read us up a technical
report from St. Louis that explained the whol e thing. It
made me feel a lot easier when they did that. Rather than
having t he ground comment blindly on it, "the fuel cells
are going to be good for 24 hours," I would like t o get a
--- PAGE 109 ---
99
little background information on it. How else could we
know it was going to be good for 24 hours, and what had
they done to prove it would be good for 24 hours? They
read it to us over CS~, it eased my mind a lot because I
wasn ' t anxious to miss the WASP. On the 13th day, I
wanted to be able to go the full 24 hours rather than have
to land in the Pacific. So the whole story of the electri
cal monitoring, as far as I a.m concerned, was great work by
the ground.
The main batteries held constant between 22.5 and 22.7 amps
for the entire mission, and we checked them once a day at
the GO/NO GO stations. When we turned them on · 2 hours
before retrofire they carried their share of the load and
were operating fine when we were i n the water. We turned
off the squib batteries about the 10th day and used the bus
tie switches. We ran entirely on fuel cell power for the
last five days. When t he squibs came back on, the voltage
was 25.5 after they had been turned off for five days.
They operated properly for the last 2 hours of the flight.
s.7 Onboard computer
Borman During t he l aunch it was absolutely a nominal case. The
pitch status, yaw status, and roll status, were zeroed
except for a brief period at guidance initiate when they went
out about 2 to 3 degrees , and then zeroed. We had no violent
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1JO
pitch down at guidance initiate. Attitude indications were
nominal all the way through. At insertion , the nomi nal
velocity on address 72 was 25,804 and when we read it up, i t
read 25,804 . The orbit maneuvers using the computer and
the platform were right on the money. The accelerome ter
1
bias did not vary, and we burned them off on the IVI a by
insert i ng them through the MDIU, and it came out very well .
I did not burn on time , we burned on t he IVI 's.
Borman The updates were all made in the PRELAUNCH mode as agreed on
before fl i ght . There was no problem, no mi sunderstanding,
I think F0D did very well i n this regard. I know t hat in
Gemini 5 t here was a little mix-up, but we had none of that.
Borman Retrofire occurred automatically at the exact second. All
four Retros f ired and the IRS was right on the money. Reentry
guidance was nominal. I t was very s i mi lar to the s i mulat ions
that we had f l o.m. There was one little anomaly in the guid
ance, i n t hat we were gi ven back-up reentry angles of
50 degrees. We computed wi th our onboard char t s a reentry
angle of 50 degrees, back-up angle of 50 degrees. But t hen
after tracking, the ground called up a 35 degrees which proved
to be closer to what we actually f l ew. I am s till not aware
of the reason for change; why it changed from 50 degrees t o
35 degrees. The important t hing i s t hat it did change and the
ground was able to update u s in real time, and it agreed very
well with the a
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101
Borman The MDU worked perfectly the entire flight. Computer modes,
PRELADNCH, ASCENT, CATCH-UP, RENDEZVOUS , REENTRY, were all
perfect , no anomalies in any of those,
8.8 Crew Station
Borman Controls and di splays, The sequent i al tel elights o~erated
exactly as programmed. At minus 2:56, t hey came on to the
second. They a l l turned green when they were punched, no
probl ems there. The event timer was used only intermittantly
throughout the f light for timing, and for the last 20
minutes. It worked f i ne. The IVI's also worked exactly as
planned. The Flight Di rector Indicator was again, a nomi-
nal case. One sli ght difference between the simulator and
the Flight Director Indicator i n the spacecraft, was the
little outer roll gimbal i ndi cator in the simulator always
came up to the top. I'd grown used to flying the reentries
by using that as a lift vect or. In the spacecraft when we
got all set up for reentry, low and behold, the outer roll
gimbal was down at the bottom, so I had to fly the reci
procal of it. But it was just a minor change and I ended
up acclimating to it with no problem. I think it is just a
function of how you happen t o go through zero. If you go
through zero just a little bit to one side, the gimbal goes
to the top, and if you go through the other side, it goes
to the bottom.
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102
Borman GLV fuel and oxidi zer pressure gauges were nominal. The
concept of sticking the decals on the outside of the gauge
is poor at the best. But, we all know this has been done,
and they're not going to change the gauges, and it worked
fine. I would suggest never going this way again. I think
we ought to change the meters in the future.
Borman The alti meter worked fine. The only problems we had with
the altimeter was when we were oscillating violently on the
drogue , it was not indi cat i ng descent. As soon as the
drogue oscillations st eadied out , the alti meter came down
very well. Rate of descent indicator was likewise. As a
matter of fact, I can't tell you what the r ate of descent ·
was after we opened the main chute. The main chute was so
good when we looked at it. We didn't see any gores or
frays. And when we went to s i ngle point release, I didn't
even look at the rate of dascent indicator. Did you?
Lovell I couldn't see it.
Borman Did you even think about it?
Lovell No, you mean to tell me you didn't look at the rate of
I
descent indicator?
Borman We could tell from the altimeter we were going down very
slow. The acceler ometer seemed to give us slightly lower
values thttn the recorded. I think on the reentry the highest
value we got was 3.9 g's. During launch the highest that
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103
was recorded on the a~celerometer was about 6.75 g's. I
understand that the actual value was over 7. On the nominal
profile, it i s.
Lovell Was the reentry a little higher than 3.9?
Borman I don ' t know, I doubt if it was, it was so near ful l lift.
Switches and circuit breaker panels. We had a coupl e of
cases knocking of f circuit breakers. We did have one fuel
cell control ci rcuit breaker pop on us twice .
Lovell I am not real sure i t popped. I don' t know whether I hit
it ina.dvertantly twice.
Borman No, you didn't. The second time I watched it pop.
Other than that, I thought the switches and circuit panel s
were well located. I think it i s very important that we
have those guards on there, particularly with changing suits.
Lovell The fuel cel l switches, the power and control switches,
should be LIFT to move switches. They should be over center
locks that you have to lift to move them up. There was a
guard over i t, but still it was so easy to reach up there
and hit those things . I was a l ways worried about throwi ng
the control switch of f, which would have really foul ed up
the fuel cells.
Borman You mean like the squib switches? ...
Lovell Yes , like the squib switches. I think that is the way they
ought to be ~ecause you never touch them unless deliberately.
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104
Bo·-m.a.n Yes, that is a switch that is never moved unless there is
a failure in the fuel cells.
Lovell They should be a little better type of switch than they are.
Borman Mirrors. Operating without suits on, I found that I seldom
needed the mirror. I don't believe I used it more than
2 or 3 times except to check and see how far m;r beard had
grown. Row about you, did you?
Lovell Well, they were good for things like looking way back in
the corner, and shining a light back there.
Borman I was mobile enough that without a suit on I could turn
around very easily and see all around. There is no question
you need the mirrors. I am not suggesting even remotely
that you take them out. With the suit off it cuts down the
need for them. The swizzle stick we used once to pry up
the center line stowage bracket. When we opened the center
line stowage after launch, the bottom bracket sprung down
about ~/4 inches, and we bad great difficulty to close it.
We only closed it twice during the flight after that. We
just kept it velcroed partially shut.
Lovell I think the boost acceleration sprung it out of position.
Borman Either that, or when they put that fix on there to beef
it up, it resulted in an out-of-tolerance eitua.tion. I hope·
that the people did not fo~ce it shut and then let us take
off that w~. That was a pain in the neck to get it shut.
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105
Lovell We had to use the levers of the swizzle stick to get the
thing back together again. This was bad. We also used the
swizzle stick to keep the manual heater switch down on the
FC H which is a real big pa.in. I t is a very a.m all swit ch
2
and you have to hold it for a long tiine. That gets to be
a lot of trouble.
Borman Lighting, indicators and instruments . There is one
instrument in the spacecraft that should be lit that i s
not. Tba.t is the digital timer. That is the most
valuable instrument onboard. We used it continually, it
never varied one second in 339 hours. We never had to
reset that once. It was exactly on the money. We checked
it periodically and it never gained or lost a second.
Lovell But it had to be lit.
Bor.man It should be lit because it is right on the center panel,
and there is no lighting on it except for the bright l i ght
from the back. Ma.ny times at night and when you are trying
to :maintain dark adaptation you end up having to use the
flashlight on it.
Lovell It should be a red light for night work. In the day time
you don't need it because the cockpit is lit up anyway.
It really ruined night vision to turn on that flashlight
to find out what time it was.
Bor:ma.n The left panel was fine when it was lit up with the display
~
--- PAGE 116 ---
106
light. The center panel and the right panel were all right.
There is no question that the lighting system on the LEM is
superior.
Lovell We used the red lighting more than I thought we would ever
use it. We never used it in simulations. The red lighting
turned out ve-ry nicely when we started looking out the
window, using the stars, getting oriented and things of this
nature.
Borman The pedestal, console and circuit breaker areas just aren't
lit. Same way with the water management panel, when you
wanted to check that,the only thing you could do was use
your flashlight. It was not a big problem. The little
flashlight that CSD developed, and put in, was one of the
most valuable pieces of gear we had. We used it continually
throughout the flight, it is much more valuable than finger
tip lights. I see no reason for fingertip lights because
you're not going to fly with gloves on most of the time.
If we would have had them, they would have been stowed.
This little flashlight turned out to be a little jewel. The
utility light I did not use once in the whole flight.
Lovel l I turned mine on once to see if it worked.
Borman The flashlight was much easier to get to. We velcroed it
right in front of us, and it was very handy. And at the
end of 14 days it seemed as bright as it was before. One
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107
of the serious deficiencies in the flight was the dirty
window.
Lovell I just talked to John Erinkman about the film. He said a
lot of it was good, but a lot of it they could tell the
window was dirty.
Eorman What about the booster film?
Lovell They haven't processed two rolls of film yet and they don't
have the Polaris launch yet. The Houston one turned out
sort of hazy and I thought it was a clear day. He told me
there was haze on the ground.
Borman Did they see Houston all right?
Lovell They could make out the International Airport.
:Borman You took that with the 250 mm. lens .
Lovell The high speed film. They don 't want to process it until
they tal k to us to find out what kind of ex:posures we used.
We had all kinds of ex:posures. I think the picture that was
in the paper was from the 16 mm. camera.
The window was very dirty. And I have a ... a picture was
taken of it. Shows the ...
Borman Jim drew a sketch of the window in the S-8/D-13 log.
Lovell There was a greenish, greasy film over the whole thing right
in the center. Outside of that was a sort of a haze or fog
effect. Right along the outer edge, it was clear. If I
focused on the nose of the spacecraft it would be blurry.
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108
Just off the nose it woul d blurr out. There are two theories,
one group of peopl e sey it's the nose cover that is ablating
on launch, others sey it is staging.
We saw quite a bit of flame at staging and it looked like
there were several streaks there caused by staging. There
is also a general deposit like a stagnat ion point right there
that might have been built up during the entire launch, which
might be the nose cover. So, it might be the combination or
both.
Borman It might have accumulated due to the urine dumps throughout
flight.seve~al times we saw urine crystals come·back e.nd hit
the nose cone. We never saw them actually hit the window.
I am not sure that some of it, that was practically invisible,
might have hit the window. It did seem to get worse with
flight. l-zy- window was not nearly as bad as Jim's.
Lovell Frank's was better than mine. Whenever I could I would
give him the cameras to take a picture. He did a lot of
the Apollo landmark and S-5 and S-6 pictures while I was
controlling the spacecraft.
We have to improve the windows somehow. We've got to have
some sort of cover or get some certain ty:pe of material.
The windows were perfect when we got in the cockpit. The
problem they had on GT-5, where they had fog and humidity
because of the difference in temperature when the White
--- PAGE 119 ---
109
Room was dismantled, was not there this time.
Intensity control was good, no problem. We had two white
lights in the center cockpit, this was our request a long
time ago, and after using it I think we ma.de a mistake. We
never did use the thunderstorm light that we stuck in place
of the red light. Right now Frank and I think we could
have used the red light again because we both did use red
lights a lot more than we thought we were going to, for
night work. It gets your eyes accustomed to the night, and
you can see the airglow and stars a lot better. If you have
bright lights on in the cockpit , at night, with glare off the
window and your eyes adjusted to the white lights, you could
never see out. It ' s just black.
Onboard data: checklist cards preparation, excellent. I
think the people who made them up , Chuck Stough, has to take
a personal bow because I think that he did an outstanding
job of making up all the onboard data books and cards. They
are very, very good. What we did was, tear off the lift-off
cards prior to reentry and just had the reentry section, so
we wouldn't get mixed up. There are several minor things
which we could change to make it a little bit more compatible ,
like getting one card with all the data on it so we didn't
have to flip the cards back and forth when MCC gave it to us.
As a matter of fact that i s exactly what I ended up doing,
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110
I took the core card, and after I read the various cores for
the reentry parameters, I got the nominal IVI's, also the
bank angle updates and things of this nature, all on one
card·. Then I went back to the other section and transposed
them in there .
:Borman One of t he most i mport ant things about the checklist on
this flight was t he fact that we had them about a month
before the fl ight. We used them in training, and the peop l e
responsi ble for that di d a great job, Chuck Stough and Ted
Guillory.
Lovell That is important. On GT-4, because of the newness of the
system, we were still rearranging cards and books just prior
to the f light. Learning from that flight, on GT-7 we really
gained a lot by having the cards and books early in the
game so we could train with them.
Checklist cards useful ness was outstanding.
:Borman The maps and overlays were fine. We carried the larger
orbital display m.e.p. I'm not really sure we needed it. It
was a little cumbersome i n the coclq)it. It was all right,
but general areas would have been just as readily available
on a small map. When we were doing the Apollo landmarks,
particularly those with coastal features, I thought Apollo
landmark • maps were entirely adequate. I did not see any-
reason for photographs. If you really want photographs, the
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111
best way to do it would be to fly over them with an airplane
and then change the scale to whatever you wanted it.
Lovell The photographs were important , but I don ' t think you have
to spend valuable fuel and time to get them. An airplane
can do the same job getting photographs that we need for
Apollo landmarks.
Borman That's right. No questi on about that.
Lovell I found it difficult to move the map overlay.
Borman It got better as the flight went on.
Lovell Yes , because we wore it in. The overlay we have , with
periods , orbits , and the map underneath , I think that can
be improved. We needed a very simple device with two rollers
on the end, or some system a little bit more elaborate, but
a lot easier to handle.
Borman I don't know , it worked all right toward the end, Jim. If
you get it too elaborate, or too easy to roll , then it is
going to change on you.
Lovell It has to have a system where it can ' t change .
Borman It was valuable. You knew where you were all the time.
Lovell We used it more than we used the star charts. Mainly, we -
used the star charts for the no platform burns, for retro
fire posit i on, and for SEF and BEF positions.
Borman By and large the maps and overlays were well prepared. They
were available early to us. We knew how to use them and i t
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112
was a very , very fine job by FCSD people responsible for
them.
Borman Data books: We were using a system that was started in GT-4 ,
furthered in GT-5 and I think it is working out very well.
If there is any derogatory remarks on it at all , it is the
r equired amount of logging you have to do. It is really a
double entry system. But, hopefully this will cut down the
postflight activities and give people a better idea of
what they are looking for. I would not suggest even for a
moment that we change it. We did delete some of the redun
dancy to endeavor to save voice tape. We tried to log
everything in the book, but many of the things we did not
put on voice tape that were already in the book because we
wanted to save the tape. We only had 20 tapes for 14 days.
Everything that was done is in the books. Most of the
critical things that were time significant are on the tape .
Borman Star cha.rte, Polar and Mercator. We used the Mercator almost
exclusively.
Lovell I'm not saying the Polar was not any good, but the Mercator
was very adequate and we knew how to use it. I enjoy that
particular ty:pe of chart a little bit bett er.
Borman It was preference more than anything else. We did check the
Polar out during flight and it was apparently accurate. I
didn ' t see any reason to change those star charts either,
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113
did you?
Lovell No, I think we have enough stars on there. I think they're
adequate.
Borman Stowage at l aunch was a l i ttle gruesome. When we got in we
found all the stuff stuffed on the floor over our feet.
Once we got into orbit and started going through our pre
arranged procedure there was absolutely no problem. We used
the food bags to put the refuge from each meal in. We usually
stored three meals in the front until we were ready to
dispose of them, and then we would put them behind the seat.
We filled the debris guard areas we had behind the seats in
about eight days. A.fter that we stowed the used ones in the
bags we had. For reentry, we placed them over the seats as
we had done before. It worked fine.
Lovel l When we first started training for the flight , there always
seemed to be a de-emphasis on exactly how much we were going
to stow. For instance , the size of the food bags was a lot
smaller than i t turned out. The size of the tissue we used
was a lot smaller. I think that we ought to look at it
realistically early and make sure that we get the right
s i zes. We were led down the path there on that first
stowage revi ew in St. Louis.
Borman Yes . We caught up with it on the third one though. We
doubled the si ze of everything.
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114
Lovell That i s right .
:Sorman We took an actual meal and ate i t and got the refuse .
Lovell It was very fortuna te that we did this . It caused us to l ook
for new places to s tow t hi ngs.
:Sorman As it was it worked out real f i ne. The cockpit was cleaner
when we reeentered t han when we left . Another i t em that
was very helpful from the cockpit cleanliness standpoint
were these by-pass hoses with the screens on them. They
acted as vacumn cleaners on the whole flight. All the gar
bage and refuse would get collected on them. We could clean
them off and put them in the bag and it worked great.
Lovell We never had any l arge amounts of dandruff or anything
floating around.
Borman The harness we took off. All you can say about the harness
i s it is a necessary evil . Once you get it off , it is tough
to st ow. J i m, you sat on yours , didn't you?
Lovell I stowed mine between the seat and the back of the ejection
seat because it was a dead space for me .
:Sorman I stowed mine on the outboard si de of t he seat. We never
took the life vests off the harness.
:Sorman Waste disposal and stowage. We used the aft food boxes for
the defecation gloves and the urine sample bags. J i m filled
up his first and then I started filling up mine. We ended
up putti ng one day of food and s ome other refuse in the
t
--- PAGE 125 ---
115
left- hand food box in addition to the defecation gloves and
the urine sample bags. One thing we :might note is the
horrible odor every time we opened those boxes to put some
thing away.
Lovell It was a necessary evil, Frank.
Borman We were a little concerned when we opened the vents on the
boxes for the reentry that the smell might be with us for a
couple of hours, because we had to open them early before we
put our suits on. But evidently the vent is just fine. It
is large enough that it equalized the pressure, but it is
not large enough that it lets the odors escape into the
cockpit.
e.9 Biomedical
Oral temperature measurements and thermo.m eter, no p:roblem.
Although, it seems strange to .me that we have to have a TM
temperature. That thing got in the way.
Lovell Yes, the tube got in the way and floated around, and you
almost poked your eye a couple of times with the thing. It
is a thin probe. It is very awkward because there are two
of them. One is in the lightweight headset, and i f you do
not have the suit on, you have to stick it down through
here. If you have the helmet on, it is supposed to be
sticking out here, and it gets in the way. If they want
inflight te.m perature , we should take along a regular
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116
thermometer. We had a lot of glass in the cockpit. I do
not see why we cannot carry some sort of a plastic thermo
meter. It seems ridiculous to me to have to TM a temperature,
Borman I must admit I did not even know I had a blood pressure cuff
on except when I filled it up. It did not cause any skin
problems or anything. It is probably as good a way as we
can go.
Lovell It seemed like I pumped up nzy- cuff a lot more inflight than
I had to on the ground for the same measurement. Sometimes
we would not get the comment that, your "cuff is full" from
the ground until after your arm was quite puffed up. Some
times your arm really got to be sore. I do not know what
you can do about it.
Borman We used the M-3 equipment not only for the medical or the
crew status passes, but we used it regularly three times a
day. It is a very valuable piece of equipment. It ca.me in
very handy and it certainly was useful for this reason. I
guess there is some reason for it for medical data. I did
not understand why we could not stow it the last day. We
had already checked and they s ai d, "All right, go ahead and
stow it, you do not need it." Later they said, "You have to
unstow it. We want to get one more pass on you the last
morning of the flight." After 14 days of flight I did not
understand why we needed it, but we did it. Jim left it out,
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117
actually. You left it right over the circuit breaker panel,
didn't you? Did it come out during reentry?
Lovell No. There was no problem.
Borman There is no water problem.
Lovell There might have been a little air in it because we got air
in the food all the time. I do not know how it got in
because the food packages were evacuated. We would put the
gun in and pump it up with water, and yet there was air in
the food 1every time you opened it up. There was probably
some air in the water, but it did not bother us too much.
Borman No . I thought it was a minimum amount , too. The water
tasted good. It was cool• The gun, as we have already
commented, was very adequate. I think it is inconceivable
that we continue to have to log drinks the way we did. I
think if people want to know how much water you drink, you
can read them off the counter on the gun, and that is it.
We went crazy logging these things by numbers and counter
numbers and everything else. It is operationally unacceptable.
Lovell For flights that are not primarily medical all they have to
have is a counter reading once or twice a day for the systems
p~opls, They could just divide it by the number of crew and
come out very close to what the actual consumption per man
is.
Borman The food , I thought , was by and large very good. One
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118
suggestion on the food is that they try to reconfigure the
meals so that Meal A is more like you would think of as a
breakfast, with :maybe SQme toast, cereal bars, and sausage
pattiess rather than fish, potato soup, and clam chowder
for breakfast. The idea of .making our day like a regular
Houston day was a very, very valuable one. I t would also
be rather nice to have the meals correspond to the type of
meal you would eat on the Earth. We ought to have a break
fast that is brea.k fasts a.nd so on with lunch and dinner .
One breakfast we bad shrimp, sauce, peas, and I think
potato soup. This is all right, but it would be more
desirable to have had something like cereal cubes and sau
sage patties and things like that, so.m ething you are more
used to.
Lovell The disinfectant pill crumbles. They would crumble
when we got them out. The pieces would flbat about, and if
they got in your eye they burned because i t i s a chlorine
base pill of some sort. It happened to me once early in the
flight, and it happened to Frank towards the end of the
flight. We had to use the exhaust hoses to vacuum down the
spacecraft to get rid of these things so we wuld not get
the'!D. in our eyes. I think tha.t we can probably go to eo.m e
thing better in the future. There is a lot of roo.m for
i mprovement in food. It was good. It was adequate. We
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119
lasted 14 days. We could have lasted a lot longer on the
food. But that does not mean there is not room for improve-
ment.
Borman The concept, as far as packaging and everything goes, is
good. What is lacking now is really an adequate quality
control for uniformity. If everyone of the food bags had
been as good as the good ones, there would have been no
problem. Some of them did not have velcro on the.m, some
of them burst, and that sort of thing.
Lovell You could get the soups out of the spout very easily, but
trying to get tuna salad and shrimp and sauce out of there
was a real job. We should change the size of the spout
according to the type of food we have. We noticed at the
beginning of the flight that dry solids were especially bad.
Borman Yes . Beef bites and bacon and egg bites are horrible and
should be deleted from the menu.
Lovell GT-5 reported that the beef bites were crumbly. Every
single package of beef bites that I got out was crumbs.
They would float all over the place, and you had to get out
your exhaust hose and gather them all up again and throw
the.m away. If we did not ba.ve that technique, did not have
the screens on the exhaust hoses, they would either go into
the ECS sys te.m or float around. I could see where GT-5
got an awful lot of crumbs floating around.
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120
Borman Sleep periods . This is one of the areas where we really
made a wise decision. We decided that we would sleep simul
taneously on the regular Houston schedule. We did slide it
back every day to correspond with the precession of the
orbit . When we were scheduled for house-keeping and sleep,
we would close up the windows. We found that the polaroid
filters were not adequate t so , we cut up an aluminized food
bag and placed it between the window and the polaroid shield.
Then , it was really dark inside, it cut out the heat, and
this left us with a real simulated night. As far as we were
concerned, it was night time . We would get up the next day ,
go to work , and it kept us regular. It kept ue relatively
on a constant type of schedule. I thought it was very ,
very good.
Love ll We are going to have to go to that for any of the long
flights , any of the lunar missions. For any of the long
flights we are going to need to use a regular Houston or
Cape day and not change the routine .
Borman On Apollo , with three men , you probably will have to stand
a watch.
Lovell True. But still, you are going to have to keep from getting
too irregular. I thought sleeping in zero- g was very com
fortable . I slept like a log that first week.
Borman Yes, I had troubles sleeping. The M-1 was the culprit. It
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121
was a pain in the neck. We decided to leave it on though
on the theory that if we turned it off the first thing the
experimenter would say was, ''Well you turned it off'. It
was not a valid test ." Then some crew in the future would
have to fly with the thing. So, we left it on for two
weeks and listened to it " clank". As far as I know it
didn ' t do any good. Maybe that ' s the end of the M-1.
Invariably, in a state of semi- consciousness it would rouse
me again. I did not like that.
Lovell Sleep configuration was very easy. You just clasp your
.
hands t ogether and hold them there. When you wake up your
bands are still clasped together. There are no pressure
points. You can have a book up there , go to sleep holding
the book, and wake up the next morning and the book is still
right there , still at the same page . It was outstanding.
If mattress companies ever find out how to make a zero-g
mattress they would really have a fortune .
Borman Sleep period mission briefing. It followed the way we were
briefed. Very good.
Lovell Fl ight controll ers were very outstanding. Keeping quiet
during the sleep period. As a matter of fact, they even
called up Wally one time and told him to be quiet. Yes ,
they told him to be quiet . It was our sleep period.
Borman Everything went fine.
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9. 0 OPERATIONAL CHECKS
9.1 Apollo Land.mark Investigation
Borman We should first mention the weather because this casts some
reflection on the whole i dea of Apollo l andmarks as a navi
gational aid. The weather was the big bugaboo i n this
flight as far as achieving any Apollo land.mark photography .
I do not know whether it was the particular t argets we were
trying to get or what. Invariably, there were clouds.
Lovell As can be seen from the map , anything south of 15 degrees
north l atitude in Africa is no good for Apollo landmarks
because it is i nvariably cloudy. South of 15 degrees north
l at i t ude is invari abl y too cloudy for Apollo land.marks .
Borman Right.
Lovell Al l of South Ameri ca is out . As a matter of fact everything.
south of 15 degrees north latitude all the way across the
m~p is no good. We found out that North Africa and South
west United States and parts of Mexico , as previous crews
stated a long time ago, (that includes Saudi Arabia , Paki stan
Va lley) have predominantly clear weather in the morning, but
not in the afternoon .
Borman The Red Sea area was one of the clear areas all the t i me .
Even the South-west U.S. and Mexico were clobbered most of
the time on our flight .
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123
Lovell Right. Weather is the big bugaboo on Apollo landmarks, or
using earth land.marks for Apollo.
Borman The acquisition data was good. The pointing data was good
on all the experiment updates, except for one. They missed
the time on an S-5. We caught it, and did it ourselves be
cause we knew where the a.rea was supposed to be. The point
ing data given was great throughout the flight. The updat
ing wa.s fine. We bad no problem.a at all. Pointing instruc
t ions were good.
Borman Concerning taking acquisiti on photographs for the Apollo
l andmarks, it was pretty dam hard to determine anyt hing
when we pitched 30 degrees down to pick up the landmarks.
We could not pick out the air f i elds or anything. We would
point the camera and take a picture, but we did not lmow
what we were taking pictures of. We could not see it with
the naked eye. I am thinking of the airfield in Brazil.
We took this acquisition picture without any idea of what
we were taking a picture of until we finally got to the
nadir. Then, we looked down and could see the runw~. I
think it was in Belam Province in Brazil . The weather was
a very definite f actor in photographing the Apollo l a.nd
ma.rks, and of course, it wuld be a very definite factor in
using the Apollo landmarks o
Lovell We had to use the sun angl e that we had at the time we got
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124
over the target.
Borma.n Evidently the people who called them up were taking this into
consideration, because the sun angles for a ll the Apollo
l andmark attempts were good as far as photography goes.
Sightings were tough on a lot of them, primarily because
of clouds.
Lovell Apollo l andmarks of i nterior Afri ca, whi ch they gave us
several times, (like islands, lakes, Leopoldville in the
middle of the Congo) , were very difficult because there is
nothing down there but jungle and little streams and things.
Borman By far the best l andmarks a re interfaces of beaches and
water.
Lovell That i s right . Sandy beaches with blue water. There is
no doubt about that.
Borman There i s good contrast, and with a good map you do not need
the photographs . I do not understand the value of the pho
tographs, I do not see why they do not engage the Army Ma.p
Service to aeri a l photograph these areas and print the
pictures accordi.ng t o the see.le they want. It would be a
rel ati vely easy j ob to do and certainly would be much less
expensive than taking the fuel to do it on an operational
mtssion.
Borman The designated targets were clouded over more often than
not. We did take some alternate targets and pointed out
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125
some prominent featu:res along coastlines in Africa. We
have them logged and we will be able to go over them with
t he Apollo landmark people. Even an area like Dakar, which
you would think would be a r elatively clear area, we tried
three times to photograph and each time it was cloudy.
Lovell Mostly in the afternoon.
Borman The maps and Apollo landmark data package was all right.
One of the problems with the maps was it is difficult to
orient the map segments on the page, so that several of the
targets were anywhere near the middle of the map. You might
end up with a map with an Apollo landmark right on the edge
of it. It is then difficult to associate the surrounding
terrain with it . The big map that we had in the front of
the book solved a lot of this problem. We could get the big
picture from the big map and then go to the detailed one for
the detailed pictures.
Borman Photographs, 350 and 352, the Cairo area, you don't need a
photograph of the Nil e River running into the Mediterranean.
That was one of the most prominent features we had. The
Suez Canal , the Red Sea, and the coast of Arabia were loud
and clear the whole flight. The junction of the two rivers,
the white Nile and the blue Nile, were also very prominent.
Again, you did not need a photograph to
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126
determine those.
Lovell The Red Sea and the Gul f of Eden as it goes into the
Arabian Sea were very prominent.
Borman Yes.
Lovell The 90 degree bend was very , very prominent .
Borman We have a difference of opinion here , but I thought the maps
were entirely adequate. Mountains were, as far as we could
tell , adequately portrayed, a l though , we did not have any
landmarks that were in the mountainous area. Most of ours
for some reason were in the tropical areas and they were
cloudy all the time. The cities that we saw were by and
large over the United States .
Lovell We did not really see much in the way of cities. We saw the
Australian cities at night , we could see the lights from
them.
Borman We saw small towns along the coast of Mexico.
Lovell Also South America. I wonder what the difference in alti
tude does to visibility of landmarks? I am sure that your
visibility is going t o really go down . I think that is
what happened.
Borman Maybe , although when we were in an orbit of 120 by 178 , I
could not tell the difference. One difference of course ,
is we were in the darkness at 178 . When we were r eally
looki ng we were around 120 to 140. I never got the feeling
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127
that I was going up hill or going down hill in the elliptical
orbit.
Lovell We saw one good airport. I thought it was Ellington, and it
turned out to be Houston International.
Borma.n We also saw that one in South America very well. I t stood
out loud and clear, that white runway on the Apollo landmark.
When we finally got over it there was a break in the clouds
and at the last minute we got a picture of it.
Lovell Airports in general would stand out.
BOl!l!liBl1 Coastlines are the answer. They are by far the beet land
marks you have. I do not think islands a.re too good for
landmarks unless they are relatively large; small islands
are tough to pick up.
Lovell And they are usually covered by clouds.
Borman Color contrast between land and water was very good, parti
cularly along sandy beaches. We had onboard some photographs
that were taken on GT-5 with the actual scene we were
viewing. We were able to compare the color of these photo
graphs. We found it then to be very, very close. One
strange phenomena is that greens don't come through. The
very green jungles of Brazil and Africa appeared almost a
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