NASA-UAP-D019, Gemini 5 Technical Debriefing, Part I, 1965

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GEMINI V

TECHNICAL DEBRIEFING (U)
Part 1

NOTICE: This document may be exempt from
public disclosure under the Freedom of lnfor•
mation Act (5 U.S.C. 552). Requests for its release to persons outside the U.S. Government
should be handled under the provisions of
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THIS MAT E RIAL CONTAINS INF'ORM.ATION AFl"IECTING
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TO AN UNA UTH ORIZED PERSON IS PR OHIB ITE D av L AW.

GROUP 4
OOWNCiftAOEO AT ) V EA R I NTFRVALS,
OECL ASSI F'IEO AFTER 12 VE ARS

t
" 6 () t JF18Er4TI;\ b

PRELIMINARY
GT- 5 FLIGHT CREW DEBRIEFING TRANSCRIPT
PART I

Prepared By
Spacecraft Operations Branch
Flight Crew Support Division
September 1 , 1965

This material contains informati on affecting the
national defense of the United States within the
meaning of the Espionage Laws , Ti tle 18. U. S. C.
Section 793 and 794, the transmission or revelation of which in any manner to an unauthorized
person is prohibited by law.
Gr oup 4 :

Downgrade at 3 year intervals
Declassified after 12 years

PREFACE
This preliminary transcript was made from voice tape recordings
of the GT-5 flight crew debriefing conducted August 30, 1965 thru
September 1, 1965 at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy , Florida.
Although all the material contained in this transcript has been
edited, the urgent need for the preliminary transcript by mission
analysis personnel precluded a thorough editorial review prior to its
publication.

Errors in this transcript will be corrected as soon as

possible and an official transcript will be published at a later date .
This document contains a transcript of the first part of the
debriefing, during which the crew described the mission generally
from an operational viewpoint .

A preliminary transcript of the re­

mainder of the debriefing will be published by September 3, 1965.

It

will cover systems operations , operational checks, visual sightings,
experiments , pre-mission planning, mission control , and training.

a

i eJ~FIDff:!TIAL

9'0Ni;10 ENTll(t
~

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page Number

Paragraph
1.0

COUNTDOWN
1.1 Crew Insertion.
1.2 Communications .
1. 3 Crew Participation and Countdown .
1.4 Comfort .
1.5 Environmental Control System
1.6 Sounds
1.7 Vibrations
1.8 Visual
1. 9 Crew Station Controls and Displays

. .. .. . .. .. .. .. ..
. .

........ .
..
...........
...........

2. 0

POWER.ED FLIGHT
2.1 Lift- Off Cues
2. 2 Roll Pr ogram
2.3 Pitch Program
2 . 4 Aerodyna.mci.cs.
2 . 5 Environmental Control System .
2 . 6 Maximum q
2 . 7 Windshear
2. 8 DCS Update .
2. 9 Engine 1 Operati on.
2. 10 POGO.
2 . 11 Engine 2 Status
2 . 12 Acceleration g ' s
2 ,13 BEXJO
2 . 14 Staging
2 . 15 Engine 2 Ignition
2. 16 RGS Initia t~
2. 17 Fairing Jettison
2,18 GO/ NO GO
2, 19 Systems Sta tus
2 . 20 SECO
2. 21 Steeri11g ,

,1

. .1
.1
.1

.2
2

....
....

2

3

4

....

.
.

......
.. . .
.....
. .. .
.
.... .
...
..
.
..

.

....
....

6
7
8
8
9

....
....
....
..
.

.
.

9
9
9
9
10
12
12
12
13
13
~4
15
20
21
21
22

I'

......

3.0

4.0

INSERTION
3. 1 Post- SEXJO
3. 2 SEXJO + 20 Seconds
3.3 Inser tion Activities

.....
.......
. . .. . . .

. . 23

26
30
38

ORBITAL FLIGHT

Wf.lE>ENTl~E

5.0

RETROFIRE
5. 1 !R- 36 Events . .
256 Events .
5. 2
~ - 1 Events . . . .
5.3
5 ,4 1R- O Events . . . .
5.5
Retropack Jettison .
5 . 6 Communications .

~R-

6 .0

7. 0

REENTRY
6.1
. . . . . . .
400 K
6 . 2 Acceleration profile .
Spacecr aft control .
6.3
100 000 Feet .
.
6.4
50 000 Feet . . . .
6.5
6.6
35 000 checklist items .
. .
6 . 7 Commtmi cati ons .
6. 8
. . .
10 . 6K barostat .
6 , 9 Main chute deployment
6 . 10 Single point release .
6 . 11 Blood pressure measurements
6 . 12 Postmain checklist items .
LANDING AND RECOVERY
7. 1
Impact. . .
.
Checklists .
.
7,2
7.3
Communications .
Systems Configuration .
7.4
.
7 , 5 Spacecraft Status .
7 . 6 Post- Landing Activities
7, 7 Comfort .
. . . . ..
7. 8
Recovery Force Personnel .
.
7 . 9 Egress .
7 . 10 Survival Gear
7. 11 Crew Pickup

Page Number
.168
. 172
. 173
. . 174
. 182
. 183
. 194
. 196

.197
. 197
. 198
. 202
. 202
. 202
. 203
. 204
. . 204
. 205
.206
. . 210
. 211
. 211

. 212
. 213
. 214
. 214
. 214
. 215
. 215

1

1 .0 COUNTDOWN
1.1 Crew Insertion
Cooper

The crew insertion , I thought, went very well .

Conrad

Yes , we had the suiting thing down on my cuffs and
everything so that we got right ou t t here and, boy,
th& Gunter was ready for us and i n we went .

Cooper

They were all set .

There were no delays and every­

thing went exceedingly well on t he gantry.
1 . 2 Communications
Cooper

Communications , I thought were good and no probl em at
all on communications, and everything went real well.

Conrad

Yes , Stoney handled that whole thing real well .

Cooper

All right, volume was still down on the little comm
sets in the transfer van there .

That ' s Stoney' s

little improvement .
1 . 3 Crew Participation
in Countdown
Cooper

Crew participation in the countdown was good .

I

didn ' t see anything at all wrong.
Conrad

Yes , we weren ' t rushed .

We felt t hat we had enough

time to get the switches in the right position and
just ever ything went real good.
1.4 Comfort

Cooper

Comfort was real fine .

We went on to two suit fans

2

right away.

I thought we felt plenty cool the

whole time.

Cooper

ECS was good.

Never any problem with it .

1.6 Sounds
Cooper

Sounds , I thought the only sounds tha·; we had that
were abnormal we'd been warned about.

When the

prevalves opened, they were fairly loud and when
the engines gimballed they were quite loud , and
both of those we were aware of the fact that they
would cause a lot of noise and vibrat:.on.
Conrad

There is something that really dings t he booster
too when they start .. . .

I don ' t--whet her they

drop a platform away.
Cooper

It ' s before they start moving the gant ry.

Conrad

Just before they start lowering that erector.

Boy,

something really, like it really bangs tha t booster ,
I thought.

I still don't know what it is , but , of

course, we ' d been up there with the erector down
twice before that so we were sort of e~tting used
to those kind of sounds.
1. 7 Vibration

Cooper

Okay , vibrations we already covered tr.at .
vibrations.

Sounds ,

3

,.

1.8 Visual
Cooper

Visual .

Nothing....

Conrad

Oh , yes , wait a minute, I started getting this window fogging .

Cooper

Well, let ' s cover that under the right area .

Conrad

Well, it was actually in the countdown when the
erector went down before liftoff .

Cooper

Well , okay , allright .

Conrad

I mean we still had it later .

Cooper

Well, you want to cover that now then in systems .

Conrad

Well, is that what this means , is visual, or does
that just mean something else?

FCSD REP

Yes, that ' s before liftoff.

Conrad

Yes , well t lri,s-tra-,:5pened 6e:f'1

Cooper

/

Powered flight is next .

Allright , even before liftoff ,
really is completely unforgiveable.
was filthy.

hat this
Each window

Just fogged completely over, and it was

on the inside of the outer pane of glass .

It was
I

within the sealed unit of glass , and it was so
foggy when they lowered the erector that it
it was frozen over solid,

I

d neither could
Conrad

Well, it had fogged over before they lowered the

(j()tqflDENTIA[ ,.

4

erector and then the guys heated it w:.th hot air to
make it go away and that just made th:.ngs wor se when
they lowered the erector .
Cooper

It didn't make it go away all the way.

Conrad

That I s right it made'"it- ~ actually.

Cooper

/

L

my side in my window ~etweer. the inside

pane and the two outside panes of\\8-~s , I had a
sma ll bee , and I had a fly, and I had\several
flecks of things that I had written u~ before and
never got corrected, and they were the whole flight,
and I ' m sure they will show up on all the films
and everything.

Now between the outer sealed panes

of glass there were numerous little specks and
of stuff and throughout the flight as . .. well , we ' ll
cover that later, but that was even 7rore the flight
started .

The windows were not pla/n a nd were not in

good shape to go forthe--f~.
1 . 9 Crew Station Contr ols
and Displa_ys
Conrad

I think the Gemini cockpit is a pretty good cockpit .

Cooper

I think in general that crew stations eontrols and
displays were pretty adequate .

Conrad

I 've got a couple comments on switches and things,
but these are . . . .

~FIDENTIAL -

5

FCSD REP

Okay , how about the time you spent in there on
prelaunch .

Cooper

Do you think that this is about right?

Yes , yes , I think that this is just about right .
I think that if you cut it down too much more
than that you are going to be ....you could cut it
down some more , there's no doubt . .. .

Conrad

It ' s that cabin purge cycles when you ' re not doing
anything really , and that ' s excellent time .

Cooper

... that you can cut it down, but that ' s the thing
that takes the time for both the ground crews ...
and that ' s lost time.

Conrad

I don ' t know . ...

I don ' t think you want to rush the crew and now
our count that second day went by the clock, boy.
We got in there at the right time .

We counted down

and lifted off on, and I didn ' t feel that I was
rushed , and I didn ' t feel that I sat in there for
an excessive amount of time .
Cooper

No , I didn ' t either.

I thought that it went just

about right , time wise .

,.

Conrad

Long as there ' s no holds in the count everything' s
great .

FtE>ENTI L

6
2.0
2.1

POWERED FLIGHT

Lif t Off Cues
Cooper

Okay , lift- off cues , CAP COM .
into the act until later .

CAP CO~ didn ' t come

Stoney counted us down

thru ignition and lift-off and then CAP COM picked
us up at l ift- off .

Motion is an excellent clue .

There ' s doubt in your mind when you ljft- off .

You

know, the second you lift- off that yot .' ve lifted .
Vibration was very low.
Conrad

It had dropped out almost completely a.t lift- off,
felt that shaking was very l i ght.

Cooper

There was very little vibrati on at all .
vibration , very l ow.

Okay,

Noise I thought, was quite

low .
Conrad

I was particularl y aware of the noises of goi ng
through the max Q regionar y thing .

Oh , t his is

lift-off again .

I thought the noises were very

well at l iftoff .

You know the engines were

running from the outside before , you know, and man
they really make a racket , but from where you are
it's pretty quite .

You know there running.

You

can here them , there's no doubt about that , but .. .
Cooper

Okay , on visual I don ' t . . . .
day .

~

We had a very cl ear

There weren't even any clouds in sight on

IDENTI~

C.(&)Hft0ENTI:,\~~

au,

7

!to

our sight as we were lifting off, and I couldn't
tell any visual cues to lift- off, could you?
Conrad

You had the feeling that you were moving visually.
After you get your ro ll program you see it visually
and you can see the pitch program starting visually,

but just at first

l ift-off you don't really have

any visual cues .

Cockpit displays are just l ike

advertised .

The two stage - one lights go out, and

. .. just l ike the simulator.
2 . 2 Roll Program
Conrad

Yes , I watched roll program on the gyro, I was
watching for it to come i n on time and in glancing
up when the roll program started I was still
looking at nothing but blue sky, but I was aware
visually as you say that the booster was rolling.
Yes , you can have a airplane when you are looking
at nothing but blue sky and start a motion and you
may not know exactly what the motion is, but you
know t hat you are moving.

Cooper

Now on this cockpit display, something that I got two
different answers to from different people on how the
gyro and the actual case was going to be set and it
suddenly dawned on me that they actually set the gyro
so that you are launching down the 90 degrees.

You're

8
progressi ng down to 90 degrees line , e. la the
simulator, although the booster sets on 85 degrees
and when you turn to 72 degrees launch azimuth
you are rolling clockwise so far as tr.e crew is
concerned .
Conrad

You roll to zero .

Cooper

But you are rolling to is real ly to O on the gyro
as precessed around so that you are net really
setting on the actual launch azimuth, you are
actually setting so that when you stai§'e on over i n
yaw then pitch over then in your yaw your on the inplane line.

FCSD REP

You ' re coming down the zero line .

Y01.:. 1 re yawing

down the zero l i ne .
Cooper

That 's right , and I kept getting diffe.rent answers
on this and this is in fact the case.

Roll program

was exactly right on time and ended e>:actly on time.
2 . 3 Pitch Program
Cooper
2. 4

Pitch program started exactly on time.

Aerodynamic
Cooper

Aerodynamic was nothing new or differE:nt about it .
It was just standard.

We build up to the noises at

max Q; the noise built up to gradual level and the
vibration and quantity built up to ma>:~ and then
dropped off very rapidly J.1'd:i!Jitely thereafter.

FlDENTIAL

CONFICtleNTIA~ •
2. 5

9

ECS
Conrad

Right on the button.

Cooper

ECS was right on the money , no problem at all .
Max Q we ' ve already stated .

Conr ad

The cabin s ealed a little bit high like they said
it would .

I forget the number.

It was about 5.8.

Cooper

About 5.8 or 9 and just gradually dwindled back down .

Conrad

And just after we got in there by the time I looked
at it again after insertion everything it bled down
on our gage to 4.9, our gage read a little low .

I

think the actual reading , you will pr obably find
the cabin actually was 5.1 1 but the whole rest of
t he flight the gage never budged off the 4.9.
Cooper

The gage stayed right there like it was glued .

2 . 7 Wind Shear

Cooper

The wind shear , we had none and , certainly nothing
that we could

tell , but as I understand we ' ve been

told that for that day anyway we had almost negible
wind shear.
2 . 8 DCS Updates
Cooper

DCS updates were right on time .

FCSD REP

You had two updates?

Conrad

1 plus

45 , 2 plus 25 .

2 , 9 Engine 1 Operat i on
Cooper

The engine 1 operation couldn ' t have been better,

----~~K)ENTIAL

..

10

It was beautiful.

Just now in between engine 1

operation and engine 2 here we have t wo items we
will insert in here .
2, 10 POGO
One was POGO..

Cooper

At 2 mi nutes and 5 seconds we started

picking up POGO and I got a fairly gcod amount of
POGO on through , stopping just at abcut 5 to 7
seconds before staging.

POGO dropped. cl ean out

exactly the same time there that we programmed POGO
on the early days.
Yes, that one surprised me .

Conrad

We ' d he1:.rd and read

tbat both John 8{!.d Gus ' s and Jim and Ed ' s f l i ght
that they were hardly even aware of IDGO and boy
when it came in on us it was loud anc. clear and ,

-------

well Gordon , neither one of us could talk hardly;

(

we were really vibrating with it and I was hard
pressed to read the displays.

By golly , if I had

to re ad
__:-t-;-:h;--e- -num;-er
--:b- _ on
__ _ , e ·a:-i~-s p~r-ays
___ I.,,. think I woul d
have been hard pressed to do it, because we really
had it pretty good.
Cooper

Yes , the rate ... the amplitude of them were such
. . . 11 cps frequency and the ampl itude of them was
such that you were on -- you were on the marginal

11

edge of reading of any large gage and any fine
reading that you had to read, you would never be
able to read any numbers.

It was exactly like

the POGO we did all along on the program up at
Ames and as the exact amplitude , I don ' t lmow, but
i t was , . . . . .
It was no

I think we don ' t want that ~

POGO.

par icu ar y upsetting to me , because I

really was fai rly familiar with POGO having been
through a ll that POGO program, but this thing kind
of t i ckled me that we got it to see that we had
still hadn ' t solved it , but I don ' t think . . .
its something you don ' t want because if you had ot~er
things going wrong during that period of t i me it
would make it vecy difficult to say what you had
wrong or what
Conrad

It didn ' t upset me , but it surprised me , you lmow,
because I just wasn't expecting POGO.

RCSD REP

Wbat g- level would you estimate it to be?

Cooper

Well , we were sneaking right up there .

FCSD REP

I mean the POGO .

Cooper

Oh, it was right at about 5 g ' s .

FCSD REP

Well , I mean plus or minus amplitude .

Cooper

Well I , my estimate on it was that it was something

·\ 1•

12

on the order of maybe three quarters of a g .

Well, I

don I t !mow whether it was that high c,r not .
Conrad

I thought it was at least a half , if not better .
Apparently it wasn't that high .
surprised.

Like I say, we were really getting the

--

ramrod out of it.

Cooper

I ws.s really

s beyond what we selected as we th~ht
should be the cutoff.

It was more tr.an wh~ we

l

had selected at Ames as being max acc 7.
in this.I passed up ver

b •

there one of

the first things that happened immediately about
the time that we got the pitch program was the
IGS Stage 2 fuel needle failed in thE full -max
deflection position.

And it came back on and was

reading after staging briefly and thEn failed again
during staging.

It was intermittent .

2 . 11 Engine 2 Status

Cooper

Engine 2 status stayed ... was perfect .

There was

not anything wrong at al l.
2 .12

Acceleration G' s

Cooper

Acceleration g ' s were right on the piofile , were
certainly very pleasant.

2 . 13 BECO

Nothing wrong at all with them.

13

Cooper

.
2 . 14

BECO was right on the money .

Staging
Conrad

Boy, that staging was smooth too .

Cooper

They told us that BECO was going to occur early , but
it was

Conrad

We did loft a little bit apparently like they said
we woul d because, right a fter staging ....

2. 15

Engine 2 I gnition
Conrad

Well , Engine 2 ignition, I wasn't even hardly aware of
that other than we jus t started to get a little , yc,11
know, we just sort of went off the peg at 6 g's and
Gordo said s t aging OK and Engine 2 is good and I
wasn ' t even aware that Engine 2 had lit .

You

can ' t hear it, to speak of, but you can feel the
acceleration slowly building up .
FCSD REP

Did you see anything visually?

Conrad

No , I didn't see anything.

I heard the other guys

talking about s ee the flash at the brig.

Never

saw a thing and I wasn't aware of any flash out
there either .
I\

Cooper

J didn ' t

see anything at all at BEDO.

The best clue

that I have on my side , is that I see the Fuel
and Oxidizer needles start coming down as the engine

•

14

starts burning.

And then they coming c.own fairly

rapidly at first, I mean you get a very definite
motion on them right at first there and. they kind of settled
out.
2.16

Engine 2 ignition we've already covered.

RGS Initiate
Cooper

RGS initiate right on the money.

Conrad

I was going to mention that we had l of t ed and
that we were expected to pitch down a.nd we did when
it picked up RGS.

Cooper

It smoothed in very smooth, and the fading was
just right.

Conrad

The IGS needle really deflected and I ~as , you know,
I don't think it pitched, it didn't peg- out , but it
did make a large dip and then when the booster
came down just pitched down very smoottly down to
about 75 or 80 degrees, I guess it pitched down
almost 10 degrees.

FCSD REP

What rate did it pitch over?

Conrad

Very slow, but steady, at just

Cooper

It took about 20 seconds I guess to fade it in there .

Conrad

The needle came in and made a big deflection and
right after that the booster started pitching and
the needle started back and boy the needl e was

•

CQ~ElDEhJIJA

15

back and thing was right on the money at about 80
degrees.

It was a very smooth transition and then

do you remember they were telling, us to look
for this one cps oscillation? Well, I didn't have
rate needl e s like Gordo did, but I wasn't aware of
any oscil lations at any time.

That booster was in

pitch and yaw as far as that went
Cooper

Those rate needles were like they were glued .
There was never through boost or second stage was
there ever any rate except that one tiny little
rate , one teensy little rate just at when we were
in POGO we got one tiny little longitudinal rate,
'

just one tiny little fleck on a rate, and was the
only one .

Otherwise it was just smooth as silk,

the whole time, rate wi se .
2.17

Fairing Jettison
Cooper

Fairing jettison.

We jettisoned fairings at 3:25

and man do they ever go .
Conrad

I counted Gordo down to them.

Okay, yes, that ' s

a good point .
Cooper

Beside the scanner fairing and the nose fairing go
and when the nose fairing went it went with all
kinds of debris .

There were pieces flying all

16

over.
Conrad

Yes , and I don't think it went right .

I don't

believe it went right , because the Rand R can
was ripped up in the front , and I can show you on
my side the nose went like that and there was some
tape or fiber glass that goes around t he . . ..
It was fiberglass cloth and it was a ll broken loose
in jagged flaps sticking up t hat, you lmow, had
broken loose from a long in here when i.hat cover
went I had decided impression that the cover went
off askew, that it didn 't jettison t he: way i t should
have.

And this could be a good point of putting

it back to a fter insertion.
Cooper

Well, it ' s supposed to go off askew.

Conrad

Yes , well, it just di dn ' t go off clean .

That 's why

this was ripped up, see .
Cooper

Well , it something somebody might look into , but
you don ' t want to recommend that they put back to
after insertion , because your taking a weight
penalty to carry that all the way up.

Conrad

Yes, I realize that , but . . . .

Cooper

It was designed to go off ... .

Conrad

That was the reason in the first place that they

WIDE

17

moved it up there anyhow, because they weren't ....
Cooper

No , the reason they moved it up there was because
they didn ' t have strong enough propulsion on those
squibs and spring combinations or whatever they use .
We never did get a reading on that, but whatever
the total propulsive expulsion system wasn't kicking, the scanner fairing wide enough but what they
would come back into the booster.

But didn't you

have the distinct impression that the nose fairing
broke into j illions of pieces when it blast .
Conrad

I certainly, I certainly , yes .

That ' s why wh~n

I say askew , I mean something didn't look right.
I can't put my finger on it, but -Cooper

It came off in many pieces anyway.

There were many,

many pieces and the whole area was just filled with

debris .
Conrad

Yes, and then , I 'm not sure that that's when we got
all that gl op on our windshiel d, the spots ...

Cooper

Well, I noted exactly at that time immediately
after the fairing went, I noted about 5 or 6 , I
saw them hit , 5 or 6 gray splots, just small ones ,
very small little gray- type splots and I was
distinctly looking for that and watching for it and

18

they were not there before they were t'nere and I
;

saw them when they hit.

They h it duri:'.l.g all this

debris flying around period .
Conr ad

I think that you can s ti11 f i nd them o:'.l. the
windshields .

Cooper

They didn ' t burn off during reentry.

But they ' re not bad and there are just a few little
scattered ones and I think it might be interesting
t o compare how many you get there vers us and how
many you get when you jettison them in orbit .

It

may wel l be that jettisoni ng in orbit would be preferab l e , but I didn ' t f i nd anything objectionable
t o jettisoning where they went , they wenm fine.
It did add a lot of debris and I agree with Pete
there was a big torn something or other out there
which may just be a fiberglass thing that is kind
of . .. ,.

Conrad

Yes , I want to get down and look at the R and R and
and I can tell you what it was , describe it a lot
better.

We ' ll probably have some pictures of it

too in the camera somewhere.

I know it ' ll show

up in some film .

FCSD REP

How l ong was this visible?
bunch of stuff out there .

ONFIDENTIAL

You say there was a big

19

Cooper

There ' s a whole fly .

Oh, you mean the debris .

It

was gone .
Conrad

It was gone like that, but it just looked like the
whole darn thing exploded.

Cooper

It looked like it just flew into a jillion pieces.
It was all around you for maybe a period of a
second or two .

Conrad

I didn't think it was that much , i t was just gone .

Cooper

But it was a defininite period of time when you
were aware of all this debris all over and then
clear .

Okay, enough for fairing jettison.

20

2 . l8 GO/NO GO
Cooper

GO/NO GO:

We never got a GO/NO GO beeause we lost

our number 1 radio in about 4 minutes s ometime just
prior . . . let see we got a . 8 . . . .
over VR of . 8 .

Wti got a V

We got a GO/NO GO of , ..

FCSD REP

You did get a , 8?

Cooper

We got a .8 .

Conrad

Yes , that comes much later - that com(!S after the
GO/NO GO.

Cooper

Yes, that ' s right , okay, well I don ' t remember
ever getting a ... yea , we did, we go·~ MCC GO.
Right we got a GO/NO GO , okay, but then
immediately after . 8 we never got any·':hing at all
from there on until aft er we were insi~rted and gone
to UHF No . 2.

Conrad

I think it must be in the antenna problem, I really
do .

Cooper

Well , there 's some problem there because the same
thing happened on one of the previous flights and
we definitely and completely lost radio and I
swi tched over just before we inserted,

I switched

over to number 2 and then when I call1~d but the
IVI's we were back with them then .

21

2. 19 Systems Status

Cooper

System Status everything .. . .

Conrad

We did have ...
lights .

Let me describe the delta P

Shortly after liftoff I got the number 1

fuel cell delta Plight and I reported i t and just
about t he time I reported it , then the number 2
fuel cell delta Plight came on .

They s tayed on

all the way through boost and they were on aft er
insertion for ten , fifteen seconds and after that

\

they went right back out again and that) i s it .
It didn't effect anything on the fue y e11 operation,
tn

currents , the voltages , / t h i n g stayed fine

other than

• bein

n----tliere was no other way of

telling the~ was out of tolerance so I don ' t think
it is a problem.
Cooper

We expected it.

I ' m glad that we had them changed to orange rather
than red .

Conrad

Yeah, yeah .

Cooper

Systems status in addition to that I don ' t think we
had any systems that were exactly right , except
the radio and the acceleration as we had expected
it . We were right on the profile.

2. 20 SECO

!Oa!IIAL

SECO was ...

22

Conrad

I think we burned out at, Gordo, 7 anc. 1/4 g's.

Cooper

Right.

SECO was exactly on time, just exactly on

time and IVI's read 002 AFT.
2. 21

Almost ierfect.

Steering
Cooper

Steering was ... there was no steerine· accelerations
or velocities that we could tell.

Steering was

just smooth as silk , apparently they :t.ad us going
right down the slot .

And when we came off, apparently

we were lined up well because there weren ' t any
rates because when we came off and wajted our 20
seconds there were no rates whatsoever and it was
just setting there just . . . . as smootr.. as
Conrad

As stable as a rock .

Cooper

As smooth as silk so that and when we started
thrusting and separating we came off :ust right
straight forward .
or anything.

Conrad

No deviation , no skidding around

Just right straight off,

I thought the IVI's were plus 2 .
written down here.

That ' s what I haVle

Plus 28 right , 3 t.p.

Cooper

I guess that's what it was.

FCSD REP

This velocity you read?

Conrad

I was going to cover that in your ... ,

Cooper

Your right, plus 2, it was -- that's :r·ight .

Plus

~IE>l!NTtAE

23

002 .

3 ,1

Conrad

I have al l the computer readouts .

Cooper

008 right and how many up?

Conrad

3 up .

Post SECO
Cooper

MANEUVER CONTROLLER worked fine .

We went right

through ....
Conrad

Wel l, l et ' s go through t hat.

The way we had practice

SECO, Gordo, got SECO and Gordo unstowed the
CONTROLLER and I armed the BUS ARM Swit ch so that
we get the MSC- 1 doors OFF.
Cooper

Brought the propulsion power ON.

Conrad

Brought the ATTITUDE CONTROL Elect ric Power ON.
Went from RATE COMMAND to DIRECT.
switch and hit the computer.

Armed the

Armed t he sep

spacecraft thing and Gordo and I counted the
seconds down .

I n the meantime , I punched off

address 72 so that it was reading and then in 20
seconds we had SEP s/c . ...
Cooper

In 20 seconds I start ed and I called it out and
started thrusting and Pete would hit the sep
spacecraft ... .

Conrad

The reason we did that was so that we would have

the inertial velocity readout on the ga.ge and that
was ·beautiful 25,808 and nominal was S-.lpposed to be
25,807.

You can't ask for a better calculation

from a computer than that, and a lot of people
don ' t have much faith in that thing but, I think
that I'll bet that the computed MCC figure isn't
more than a foot or two off.

I t couldn ' t be

because everything was nominal for hours and hours
in the past,

Day's it went that way where we

stayed on the flight plan to the minute, to the
second so I know that it was a good computation,
and I have the five address readouts that we read ,
We read out address 72 as 25,808; address 94 which

was R dot for gamma was plus 20 feet which is
pretty darn small so we must have almos t a zero
gamma address 97 which is the forward IVI was plus
2 feet; address 52 was perfect , it was zero.

So

there was no adjustment needed and if there had
been an adjustment needed that would ha:ve come
at 3 , 042 seconds on the computer if tbere had been
an address .

52 correction and nominal 3,008

seconds so the computer computed the nomi nal thing
off only by less than a minute, about a half a

25

minute of what the actual nominal value

/een , s o I think thats pretty darn good
ascent routine in that comput er, and I think hat
(
now that we have Math flow 6 in there t his i

why I

think the guy shouldn't get so darn worried in MCC
underspeeds and giving them burn co/rections
t his Mickey Movse.

I' ve been

t rying to make tbis pein-t-ewe· since we got
associat ed with . . . .
Cooper

I think we had better immediate data avail abl e on
board than people have been giving it credit for .

Conrad

Tha t ' s right , and it really pleased me to see it
come out on the computer this way.

Cooper

And had we never gotten our communications back
we would have known tha t we were i n good shape
because of the data we had on board, we didn ' t
have to worry about the ground readouts and
what to do ; we would have known what to do whether
we had been under or over or anything else .

Cooper

Attitudes and rates , t here weren ' t any rat es .
The thing was steered right down the s lot .
came off smooth .

Conrad

Spacecraft separation

NflD~NTlAk

We

CONF:10ENT-IA

26

Cooper

We separated as smooth as silk just r i ,5ht straight
ahead

Conrad

Well, we counted down and Gordo said h? was
ready and I SEP spacecraft and he thru3ted and I
went back to RATE COMMAND for them and we came
straight off .

I didn't even feel it .

The first

t hing we felt was thrust .
Cooper

And rolled upright and went to 000 00 - 15 which
happened to be right on the horizon.

As it

t urned out that 15 figure was good .

It read out

the IVI•s .
FCSD REP

That's, you know on 4 . . . they thought they came
off the booster.

3.2

Conrad

Yes, that's why I mentioned that because

Cooper

That's what we were looking for, too,

SEGO Plus 20 Seconds
Cooper

We've already mentioned the IVI displays .

Space­

craft separation occurred very smoothly.

Thrusting

was smooth , nothing wrong at all .

Attitude rates

were good.
Conrad

Yes, I don't understand this!

I don't understand

this guy saying that they can't hear them or they
can ' t sense them.

Boy, I was easily aware . . . .

.;;

FHID~Nf lAL
Cooper

1/ than you can hear
You can feel t hem almost mo,-e
them.

..

27

You can feel them vibrate r eally, more than

you can hear them .

I mean , you can hear them

too , but the vibrat ion you can hear them too, but
t he vi bration you can f eel the thrust .
Conrad

Have you ever heard a high speed hose or high speed
water j et.

Shhh ... That 's the impression that I

had.
Cooper

Yes, that ' s right.

FCSD REP

Even from the aft firing thruster?

Cooper

Ever y thruster we had on t here.

Conrad

We heard every thruster on the whol e f l ight

Cooper

It never occurred in my mind when the thrus t ers
were fired.

You can feel them and I can hear them.

I couldn 't hear them in the sense of an expl osive
sound or a roar .

It sounded like wat er swishing.

Conrad

Yes , very definitely, more a Shhh .

Cooper

And I was aware of it again when we made the burns
l ater on, you know , we made the reverse coelliptic
stuff and all that.

FCSD REP

How did these noises , the thruster noises , sound
compared with the way the last crew set the
mission simulator?

'

28

Conrad

Hey, that's another i nteresting point.

Cooper

They're not very close on pulse.

Conrad

Pulse is a ...

Cooper

Pulse is more of a thump .

Conrad

That 's the one sound that does sound like you ' d

•

expect a rocket engine to sound .
Cooper

Here ' s a sound just about like this :

Conrad

Yes , it very definitely sounds like a knock .

(knock)

There is no "shhh" or roar, just a little thud.
Cooper

You can hear it just like somebody knccking at the
back of the spacecraft .

You can hear it go "tap

tap, tap , tap, tap, tap,"
Conrad

Really, the simulator doesn I t sound tl:.e right way.
It ' s a general enough nature and it tl::.e same type
manner

Cooper

Yes, it is close enough to give you a good cue.

Conrad

The platform mode for instance , you krow, when i t
goes shh, shh, shh, shh ... did the same thing i n
the spacecraft except it was all in one thump
and swooshes when it was constantly firing the
thrusters it sounded like the swish.

Cooper

The air-to- ground communications I thought was
excellent the whol e time.

I didn't find anythi ng

,

ONEl0EtslJl~E

29

wrong.

..

Conrad

We really had good comm the whole flight.

Cooper

There was never a time -- the only time

the

only fault we find was one or two times through the
remote site when the MCC was trying to remote to
these sites they would get some fading.
say the HF worked excellent.

I must

When they were

~ r ~ u s i c , broadcasting music to us, my\
gosh they had us practically the world round on
'-----~ T h e music quality was quite _g0od
in most cases.
Conrad

I got times on that we can bring out later so that
they can correlate how far

Cooper

GO/NO GO , there wasn't any problem on that.

They

gave us the GO right away.

FCSD REP

How long did it take them to give this?

Cooper

Oh , heck, immediately.

Conrad

Almost immediately.

.> vveaf

There was no swivel because there was no velocity
~

correction.
Cooper

There was no velocity correction needed.

Orbit

quantitites were good, they had those for us.
It took them quite a while to read us our experiments
but they just said you have a nominal orbit and then
mayb_e . . . .

.

eQNFIE>ENTl~t

I

Conrad

I've got down here the GMT of liftoff .

I wrote down

...

13 plus 59 plus 59 which they l ater change to 14
plus 00 plus 00 .

I have the one A time they got

it up to us okay, which was 10 pl us 11 .

Then I

have the 2 dash 1 they gave us was 01 pl us 27 plus
16 which they later revised to 01 plus 26 plus 27,
I wrote those down.

3. 3 Insertion Activities
Cooper

Okay, l et ' s start on inser tion activities.

SAFE

t he swi tches we did that just right for our checklist .

In fact , we are even more convinced than ever

that a good, thorough, accurate, checklist is the only
thing to have and
Conr ad

Physically marked them off when they "·e r e done .

Cooper

We followed it conscientiously.

The sequential

light t ests, we did it j ust by the teE.ts .

Stowage:;

. we already had modified our checklistE, ·and we already
had written on some of it that we would do these i f
we decided to.

For instance, the D- rlng safety pin,

we did install them at right t i me, and there was no
problem on those ; they wer e nruch easi•~r under zero- g
to get in and out than we had thought and I had no

"

.kQt4FIDfNJ1A.L,

31

trouble getting my D-ring in, did you?

.

Conrad

I waited on mine , remember.

Cooper

Yes , you waited . .. .

Conrad

I s towed my D- ring thing

Cooper

So we closed the cover immediately and I decided I
woul d go ahead and see if I could get mine, and I
got to i t right away and it went right in, so I
put it in .

Conrad

We, of course, got in trouble in the second orbit ,
but we did not unstrap or put t he drogue pins in
the seat or unstow any items of gear other than the
flight plan books and the 16mm camera and the
Hasselblad.

I take it back.

We went through the

Flight Plan as advertised and then stowed the items.
We had D-2 canera out, the Blob out, but we did this
in the proper places in the Flight Pl an.

But we

never did unstrap .
Cooper

We never unstrapped and never put the drogue pins
in until after we go to 6 - 4 GO.

We got a

6 - 4 GO.

Conrad

But we restowed too , after we got in t rouble .
throught maybe having to go into 6-4 why,
we'd put ourselves back into the configuration

We

32

to reenter
Cooper

were never up .

lready decided

t hat I was not going to launch with th£~

They

are just useless as far as I am concerr..ed, and I
as delighted I did not have them; and I didn ' t
miss

I don't think, I think

could remove th€m and
Conrad

-

The arm restraints are there for the pressurized
case and high altitude ejection .
mine up .

I did go with

I would prefer to go with thEim down, but

there wasn't any reason , I didn ' t need to get my
hands on the hand control or anything ~.o I left
them as they were, but I don' t think tr.ey were
necessary.

•

"

FtDENTtAL
Cooper

Okay, belts .
belts .

I couldn ' t

33

~~

he

The harness - While we 're on the harness , I

don ' t like that harness worth anything.
t hink what we need is a simple type adjustable type
harness wi th clips on the legs

that you can undo

legs to get to some of the functions you have to :
uri pation and defecation and so on in the spacecy ft .
I do ' t see why we have to have a big, expensi/e, custom,
made ha~ss that you can ' t readily get on

off

and this on~ you can not readily get

and if
on it and snaps

you had one with

harness , it would

like you do on

be, I think, a hundred times useful as this one .
Conrad

Let me ask you a ~uestion .
you r eally - I agree.

Do you really - now , do

Let me say this .

I agree you

should firs t be able to get your harness on and off,
but in zero- g I ' m not convinced that three , especially
two leg snaps type arrangement.

In other words , a

harness that would come completely loose and have
many straps that hitch to the other straps would be
really good in zero- g .

What I think we need to do is

to be able to get in and out of that harness that we
have , easier.

Like, maybe you could loosen the leg

straps on it but not have them come apart .

~

NftDENTrAL

Now , I

took my harness off in flight twice .

I took 1 em
"

off once-Cooper

Yeah, but you wouldn ' t even have to step through these
leg loops if you had - just like on an airplane harness .
You could undo that and you wouldn ' t eve·'.l. have to worry
about the leg loops .

Then all you 1 d have to do is just

slide out of the torso area.
Conrad

Yeah.

Well» lets sees that ' s what I' m saying.

If you

unhook both of those leg loops and you throw the whole
thing down in the footwell and then you pull it back up
again you got a leg strap floating off ever here and
you got a - Cooper

Well that ' s no problem.
ing your lap belt .

It ' s no worse i.han it is find­

Did you ever have i;rouble getting

your lap belt back on after you took it off?
Conrad

I always hitched it on the Velcro over on the side .

Cooper

But you never had any trouble ~

ting t o it. I didn ' t .

/

I let mine float free and I never had any trouble getting
t o them at all .
Conrad

Well , I just don 1 t lmow now. I really d:i.dn ' t think it
was that bad getting in and out of this harness .
only concern was that if- - I stayed- -

Cooper

How many times did you get i n and out o f it?

~

My

::

( OhJFt0!
Conrad

Twice .

35

The big problem was having you unhitch the

straps on my suit .
Cooper

That ' s right .

Conrad

The harness--the easiest thing was getting in the legs .

With the cables to go over the harness .

That was no problem at all .
Cooper

Yeah.

Conrad

Where I needed help was getting over my shoulder and
getting the straps on the suit hitched back up again,
which is a two man operation.

Cooper

Well , my point is that for normal wearing around the
pad area or wearing around when your suited and everything, you ' d be much more comfortable if you could have
those straps loose where they ' re not gouging you in
the legs ,

Conrad

Yes , well-- Oh, I agree.

Cooper

Or where you had adjustments on them . ...

Conrad

. .. adjustments see--

Cooper

Okay, well .

Conrad

Where you coul d

make the legstraps loose but you' d

never disconnec t them so you don ' t have free floating
straps around t here .
Cooper

It was no big problem ....

My suggestion would be to have them exactly like you
did in a parachute harness .

You have the leg adjust-

ment and on that same fitting you have the little snap
"

wher e you can unsnap in the places you want to .
Conrad

Oh yes , you dan do it either way.

Cooper

You cou,Yd either loosen them or--I just thi

Sure .
we've

gone to such complex tailoring devices in orde
f

ovide some company with a great elaborate pro

of

providing expensive harnesses that they .. .

per-

sonally don ' t think they ' re worth a darn for what they're
·ntended for .

I don ' t think you gain that much .

I

think'y~u loose a lot of it .
Conrad

~

stow

that harness .
Cooper

The life 7 est.

Now I disagree wit

said that those aren ' t in the way.

everybody that ' s ever
e were them all

theI time mainly because we didn ' t hav a darn place to
s i ore them and they're a pain in the Ii,leck t o get on and
off but they are really in the way.
@f everything you do .

The;r ' re in the way

They bump int0 your arms .

Tbey ' re there to cut down visibilit

on ;rour chest and

they ' re just a nuisance,
Conrad

Yeah ,

Cooper

We didn ' t

e didn ' t have a place t

them off and left them off .

store them.

store them or we'd have taken
I am here t o say t hat I

ONFTDENTl~t

37

think they ' re r eally bad where they are .
Conrad

After the big sweat was over and we got a GO and we
were relatively sure we were going to stay there for
awhile unless we , you lmow, had some other emergency
come up , I would have preferred to take off the harness
and the life jacket and stow it somewhere if we ' d
have had a place to stow it .

Cooper

Right .

Conrad

But the other thing is that maybe that ' s just my personal feeling .

I ' m extremely meticulous and we kept

that spacecr aft as empty as possible .

Everything had

it ' s place and it stayed in it ' s place .
Cooper

And that harness and the vest--are pret t y big, bulky
items -

Conrad

And I wasn ' t going to have it rattling around down there
on the floor , loose .

Cooper

Okay, on the drogue pins .

By golly, I thought those

new l i ttle things on the drogue pins made them very easy
to get in and out.

There wasn ' t a bit of problem wit h

those .
Conrad

I popped the drogue pins in and out on mine .

Coope~

I put mine i n or out once just to ... .

Conrad

I think Gordo put his own in and out once to see if he

could do it and he coul d .
Cooper

Okay.

That worked real well .

Fuel Cell o and Fuel Cell Hydrogen Quantity Read .
2

Yes , we read them at least a million times .
Power Readings .
t hose.
FCSD Rep

Fuel Cell

•

Yes , everything checked out fine on

Bermuda 2- 1 update : fine .

Orbital Flight .

You ' d better get out your flight plan on this because
t his is the original stuff I was telling you about .

Conrad

Well , that ' s all right .

This probably will go fairly....

FCSD Rep

All three , if you go the way you did it.

4.0 Orbital Flight
Cooper

Okay, on 4 . 0 Orbital Fli ht . Platform Alinement.

Conrad

There ' s our first problem .

Cooper

There ' s our first problem.

Our plat orm mode did not

work and I don ' t lmow what ' s wrong wit
darn thing does not zero out

but the
on the space­

I

craft.

It allows a good

e to sit in

there and won ' t zero it out and it is ex remely s l oppy
·n pitch .

The whole thing, I think tb7:r was something

~rong with the whole thing because it d esn ' t work at
I

a \ 1 like the ones in the simulator, an

the whole thing

plu's or minus a half a degree

a very, ver y

system

thing really wrong with it .

lucky to be plus or

I personall y think that

...

~ pl&f~T A~

39

\
something was wired up wrong or something in i t because
it was not working right .
Conrad

We didn ' t really get a chance to evaluate it too well
because we had trouble with it so we stopped using it
and by the time we ' d been able to do anything with it
we had other problems , fuel problems and so forth . So
we never did get back to using it again .

Cooper

Well, we had other control system problems which were
overpowering, platform problem wise , but we did try one
burn on the platform and it was a terrible mistake .

The

darn thi ng did not have the accuracy to really hold it
and we got one foot per second in and out of plane there .
Conrad

Yeah.

Cooper

In one of those , that coeliptic burns and we ~ade our

That was in those coeliptic .

other burns then on Rate Command

and man, that Rate

Command system is just beautiful .

It holds that space­

craft so tight that it can ' t vary.
Conrad

Yeah .

We had a beautiful control system, I thought .

When

Gordo made any of the burns on the Rate Command or
anything l i ke that it really responded -- well.
Coope1:

Rate Command has tremendous torqueing.

Boy, it ' s strong

and it ' s instantaneous and you can just stop it right on
the money.

Really good.

40

FCSD Rep

Okay, on this platform alinement thing.

You went to

SEF and caged and SEF and Platform Control Mode,
Cooper

We pitched down to visual when we went to CAGE and then
went to SEF and we went to Platform mode and after fiddling around with it awhile we decided the Platform mode
wouldn ' t work so I went to Pulse and then I , just using
my needles , Platform needles then , I just pulsed the er­

rors out until we torqued around and got the ... got
it ... on a fine line.
Conrad

Okay, Now , there ' s no doubt in my mind that the Primary
Scanners , there ' s no doubt in my mind now, but we lost
on Primary Scanners .

We started to aline the primary

Scanners and I don ' t think we ever got to platform a line
correctly because the primary scanners were not working
correctly,
Cooper

Now the primary scanners,

The funny part of it is the

Primary Scanner was working in such a rr.anner - working
just enough, that it checked right because when we checked
out t he alinement of it and the tolerances on it it was
working fine ,

but there was something in it on one of

the tests that we did later showed thai it was actually
driving, tending to drive the spacecraft down .
Conrad

Continuing to torque you down to about fifteen degrees
nose- down ,

•

.

41

Cooper

Or more .

Conrad

In other words , it continued to try to aline t he platform
at about fifteen degrees . It tried to put the nose on t he
horizon is what it did .

FCSD Rep

It tried to aline the platform up at fifteen degrees
nose down?

Cooper

Or more .

I figured it was about somewhere around-­

Well , one time it alined us at about 40 degrees nose
down and it still was indicating in scanner limits .
Conrad

The scanner got worse as the flight went on, but I don ' t
think it ever worked correctly .

Cooper

No . I don't think it did , now I look back .

Conrad

That ' s the thi ng right there and I think that this- I 'd l i ke to know what they decided from tracking the
REP on how we put the REP out because we put the REP
out in the proper position, but I don ' t think the
platform was alined correctly . We had trouble with that
scanner in the sunlight on the horizon and this was right
when we were using it to aline - j ust before we put the
REP out .

Cooper

Just as we were using it to aline and put t he REP out ,
the Scanner began to skew all the platform needles off
and it skewed off and , --went to ORBIT RATE.

L

42

Now wait til we get the onboard tapes because the tape

Conrad

recorder was working and this all is on the onboard tape ;
the conversation that Gordo and I had about that.

So

we weren ' t really sure it was working right but it
f

wasn 't that far off that we were going in the dark-Cooper .

Approximately 30 seconds before we had to pitch around
or had to yaw around to eject the REP, I had to go back
to CAGE and try getting a real rapid P] a tform aline in
there , SEF and PULSE and I had the neec.les zeroed and we
may not have been so far off but you don ' t know .
isn ' t enough time to really get it alined.
words .

That

In other

I had about the time we did it and got there we

probably had maybe , 30 seconds to Plat::orm aline .

That ' s

about all we had .
Conrad

Well , we were just hoping that if it had been pulled off
only in pitch why, you know , we ' d get it right--we'd pull
the pitch right back in again.

Cooper

But the scanner was acting up very badly by that time .

FCSD Rep

How long did you aline the Platform initially?

Cooper

Initially, we alined the platform for about 15 to 20
minutes and it seemed to aline allright although at that
time Pete and I had a discussion right then that we seemed
to be alining nose down .

..

Conrad

Now , you see .

Here ' s something that I've never heard

from the other guys .
Cooper

Now there ' s another thing.
to show us .

See, we never had a simulator

Never once did we have any darn thing to

show us what out the window should look like .
Conrad

And when the Platform is alined and you ' re zero- zero- zero ,
boy, oh boy! That ' s a , just -- It's a very peculiar looking
situation and it ' s not what I expected to see at all .

Cooper

No , it isn' t me either .

Conrad

And I ' ve never heard either Gus of John or Jim and Ed say
"Put a little gouge out"

Now I ' ve got a gouge tha t I

can draw for you where I 'm sure tha t I can put the Platform in roll and pitch within a degree in roll and pitch
of where it should be out the window on the horizon and
it ' s by using the corner of the window and the RCS
thrusters on the front : the front RCS yaw

thruster in

the lower corner of the window and you can put the
Platform-- you can put the spacecraft zero- zero and roll
and pitch just, well , like that.

We didn ' t know that

before we went .
Cooper

This is one of my strongest recommendations if we aren ' t
going to have any kind of a visual out the window display
at least we ought to get some of the great planners to

•

44

-----

•

draw up on a piece of paper what the window , what the
;:

horizon should look like through the window whic~

d

requested several times and never got -- to show ~~~) guy
what

these various things should look like out the

......__

window;'---...We spent the whole darn eight days trying to
~rt=--'l;fl:e-s-0--~ ~ ~43 ~ould

look like

and I'm not sure we were very clear on it to the day
we re- entered,
Conrad

Yeah.

Cooper

Now that 's ridiculous!

And it ' s becau:3e of this odd

angle that you sit off in there .

It completely fouls

up everytning, as to getting these various angles :
inverted and right side up and 90 degrees angles and
all this .
Conrad

/ 1think we ought t;=-I ' ll tell you i ; ~ d recommendation for the guys who are going to
do this on GT- 7 with that Hasselblad can take a pound
or two of fuel and sit up there and pl:.otograph
the camera back inside the spacecraft

get

the window perspective in this thing .
zero- zero- zero , bank right 90 , bank lnft 90 , at
nose pitches above the horizon ,

<iOt◄r

,e eNirrXt

ifferent

Really , we sat ther e and had hours worth of discussions
in drifting flight when we'd be drifting through , you
know , and we ' d say, "Hey, doesn ' t that l ook like they'r:e
about 30 degrees nose up and roll right 60 degrees?" and
then we ' d try to find those lines and match them and
see . . . there ' s an awful lot of learning there .

By

golly, if we ' d have a Platform Aline Gouge , a visual
gouge idea , we'd have picked up this trouble right off
the bat.

We real ly didn't think the platform. was

alined right , but we really didn't have anything to
tell us t hat it wasn ' t .
Cooper

Now looking a t it where we know now after we went to the
other scanner finally and we got proper operation knowing
what we learned during the flight it appears now like
we were--the number one scanner was trying to aline us
several degrees down over what it should.

Conrad

Yeah.

FCSD Rep

Did you ever go back to Primary after that?

Cooper

Oh . We checked it a lot of times after that and tried
it numerous times and it got worse and worse and worse
and it finally was actually driving the spacecraft down
to minus 90 degrees and still the scanner, that ' s the
funny part of it , the scanner wouldn't go off until you
were about 60 degrees below the horizon.

46

Conrad

It seems to me we ' ve got some data for them on Primary
scanner over the states so they could h~ve it on telemetry,
They should be able to find out what happened on that ,

Cooper

Yes , something was really fouled up , I think ,

Insertion

Check List-Conrad

We went through it by the numbers ,

Cooper

By the numbers , Thruster and Control Mode Check - we went
t hrough by the numbers.

Conrad

Everything was fine .

Well , we were a little bit late,

We get a little bit

behind and it was about the time when we were late performing the thruster control mode check because that was
supposed to be done before you got to the Canaries and
we did it after the Canaries .
Cooper

That ' s right ,

Conrad

We were behind, but we started catchine: up .

,

ee,~FID El'<ITIAI!Cooper

Com Systems Check.

We were right on the money, on time ,

on that .

FCSD Rep

Everything checked out okay on that?

Cooper

Yeah.

FCSD Rep

Com System?

Conrad

D- 4, D- 7, I did by checkoff list and checked out
okay over Carnarvon.

Cooper

6-4 GO/NO GO, well , that was quite late .

Conrad

No.

We got a GO for 6- 4 over Carnarvon .

That's

just to get past 2- 1.
Cooper

Okay, Yeak Okay, got the 6- 4 GO/NO GO, that ' s right,

D- 4, D-7 GO/NO GO .

Those were right on the money

and everything was fine there.

Third adjustment

maneuver.
Conrad

Was nominal

Cooper

Was nominal

end everything was fine there.

Power

down D-4, D- 7 was nominal . 16mm, 35mm, D-6 equipmert
unstowed and mounted and there we begin to deviate
a little because just prior to this time we began
to get this rapid decrease in the -well- where
was it there?
Conrad

It was - let me go into the log-book here for one
second because I got some.

-

48

FCSD Rep

This Perigee adjust.

Did you do that i::1 Rate- is

that the one you did in Rate Command?

Or is that

the one you tried in PLATFORM?
Cooper

~

Did that in PLATFORM and it worked fine on that one.
Did that one in PLATFORM and it worked ,~eat, but
then on some of these other burns we did I tried
it in PLATFORM and it really didn 1 t work well at
a ll.
thing.

That 's why I rather suspect the P::.ATFORM
There's something wrong with it .

I think

i t was better at some times than others .

It was

allowing a lot of drift.
Conrad

Okay, in the log book I have it at 50 m:.nutes which
is just prior to Carnarvon that I found the Fuel
Cell o2 and H Heater Circui t Breaker OFF. Now
2
that--I found it off because they told us to heat
the Hydrogen not the Oxygen, but the Hydrogen final ly drilled down to the 220 and they want ed us to
use the heater and I turned the heater on and I
noticed that I didn 1 t get any ammeter rise and so
I looked at the circuit breaker panel and the
Circuit Breaker was OFF.

So, now in ret rospect

seei?hg·the o ON which is on the same circuit
2
breaker burned out, I'm sure that it blE,w when this
thing burned out,
f

..
FCSD Rep

We were at the power do':m. on the D- 4 and D- 7.

Conrad

Oh Yeah.

Well, about that time I think we were

getting back on the Flight Plan.
out.

We got the 16mm

We got the 35mm out.

Cooper

D- 6 equipment was

Conrad

Well, it ' s really D-2, it ' s what it was and I had
that work so I decided, "I ' ll put together in
pieces at the blob and the camera put together
separately and they had it all loaded with the
right film and everything and had it on the floor,
and we were ready to go . "

FCSD Rep

Were you pushed for time to do this?

Conrad

We were right on the money.

We finally caught up

after Canaries and we were on the schedule at
Carnarvon.
Cooper

Yeah.

Cooper

Radar test #6, at 01 : 30, that worked fine .

We were in good shape at Carvarvon .

bring it on.

It worked .

Observed the transients

on R dot, range and range rate.
load came out fine .

We did

6- 4 Preretro command

Blood pressure on the Command

Pilot there past Carnarvon, let's see .

Now that

was back over the Cape here, yeah.
Conrad

No , you broke the O-ring didn ' t you?

IAL

Right off the

:JI

50

bat we broke the 0- ring.
Cooper

That 's right . That ' s right .
one .

..
That 's the first

We broke the 0- ring and couldn ' t give them

that blood pressure .
Conrad

I think that was the one.

Cooper

That 's right.

We fina l ly gave that one up ,

The

0-ring was broken on that one.
FCSD Rep

Let's see .

This first blood pressure that you got

an hour ...
Conrad

They got that one and then when Gordo--

Cooper

When I, When we transferred over to me and I
plugged it in the ... 0-ring broke and ,:e didn't
have time for tha t pass again .

Conrad

We had a bunch more 0-rings .
it but we fixed it .. .

Cooper

Fixed somewhere around there.

Conrad

... shortly thereafter .

Cooper

M-1 experiment .

Conrad

We turned it on on time .

I forget when we fixed

51

..

Cooper

Yeah .

I got a lot of comments later on that on.

That

thing is so noisy.
Conrad

Oh, you know , I found out what happened, you know .

They

went back and recomputed and they found out they had four
days worth of air in the bottle--Ha Ha!
FCSD Rep

Four days?

Conrad

Yeah.

Cooper

But the thing.

You can turn it off and it keeps run­

ning back there .

And it goes SMACK- CHOO , SMACK- CHOO ,

It ran out .

SMACK- CHOO .

.,.

Conrad

Yeah, it 1 s pretty noisy.

Cooper

And in a real ~uiet cockpit it really sounds loud .

FCSD Rep

This radar test #6 here at O1:3O-

Cooper

Used to turn the radar on.

Conrad

Used to turn it on.

FCSD REP

Used to turn it to standby.

Cooper

Turn it to standby and warm it up .

Conrad

Used to observe the warmup transients .

FCSD REP

And all this happened, right?

Conrad

Yes , and it 1 s on the voice tape.

Like Gordo said,

you lmow, what the radar needle did ,

What it does is it

has sort of a cyclic thing when you put it in standby
and it 1 s ready to run why it sits there and the lock on

L

52

l ight blinks Green/OFF, Green/OFF.
Cooper

Lock on light will blink on and it will come out R and
R dot will go from peg to peg.

And they 'll settle out

when it really is warmed up good and you' ve gotten past
the transient periods and they ' ll all come back to zero .
Conrad

I think what they ' re looking for are clues to tell you
that the set is warming up correc t ly.

Ba.ck in the

early days of TACAN we had warmup problems.
FCSD REP

In other words , this would be your firnt indication if
something was wrong?

Cooper

Purge Section.

One and Two .

Conrad

Well , we got our first load , this 6-4 load.

The first

load that came up over the DCS system and it came up right
over the Cape.
Cooper

Purge Section.

Conrad

Yes , no . Yes . That ' s when we were getting rushed .
go back to that .

One and Two .

Got that?

Let ' s stop right there.

Let ' s

The REP was

supposed to go out at 02 : 07 and I purg·ed early and I
always had been purging early because I purged it about
1+50 and then I went through the check off list and they
were all checked off here.

I powered up at 1+50 , I

purged the fuel cells and here I checked them off here.
. . . prop gauge experiments and the RAD 1 on and the cold

53

IR on and the power on the exmitter on and the recorder
off and I went through these by the numbers .

Com­

puter, we went to Catch- Up . We had the hundred feet
in the window .

We were really getting ready to

put the REP out and right then and there was when we came
over the hill and we were beginning to get to the dark
side you know, and the sun was getting low and that ' s
when the scanner started going out ,
Cooper

That's when the scanner started dropping out .

Conrad

And we started getting the scanner light and then now ,
you got to visualize there ' s part of the problem. We're
coming into this "Fuzzy Zone"- horizon and that is the
best way to describe it .

Cooper

Yeah, you can't see anything.

Conrad

And the spacecraft looks like you're pitched up

tremen­

dously when you're zero- zero- zero to begin with and we
both had the impression that the scanner was pitching
us up.

Well , that may not have been true.

It just

may have been that that's the way the sky got to looking
as we approached the dark side zero- zero- zero .
Cooper

Actually, you have a transition point there where you
cannot see the horizon and it doesn ' t look like either
sky or earth or anything.

It's a complete blank ,

Conrad

It ' s really a grey area.

FCSD REP

Right at dusk.

Conrad

Yeah.

Cooper

Right at dusk or right at sunrise.

Conrad

Yeah. Now the first time we went through there we didn ' t
even see it .
insertion .

We were working.

That wan right after

So, mind you , this is the s1~cond time we

got to see it and I can' t emphasize thii, point enough,
even though we were on the flight plan and everything
else, you got to let the guys learn what ' s going on up
there.

You haven't been up there befor~ in that darn

vehicle you've got to learn it . That ' s :right where we
started getting in trouble .
Cooper

That ' s right .

That's the exact point t ·:1.at we made .

Conrad

I made it for six months now.

Cooper

For many, many months we've made this over this flight
plan, sticking this REP, thi s whole REP thing in that
early in the Flight Plan before you really have a chance
to get the systems ironed out and checked over and
everything and if everything goes exactly right and
nothing fails you can run through it time and time and
time and time again and you'll make it and you ' ll make
it on time.

55

Conrad

Yeah.

Cooper

But you add one little failure in there and you ' ve had
it .

Conrad ,

Yeah . That ' s where I made my first mistake.

We got

purged in an hour and 50 minutes and I was going by the
check off list and right there we got in this discussion
about what was happening to the platform and I missed
the most important thing on the check off l ist .
got to

I for-

• st as simThat ' s the whole G-- d-----­

/

been running for the D- 4 cold IR, it ' s been our biggest
constraint and a thing that I knew as well

as my right

arm but there was a glitch and the glitch got us off

\

-

the scheduled activities and I missed it bigger than
eek.

I di

ors on the cold IR and it ' s

a ll my fault and I accept the blame for it .

We went

through this quickie aline business and we got turned
around and Gordo had it right on the money, we wer e
right out of plane and we got the REP out 15 seconds
late.

It went out at 02+07+15 and we turned around,

waited for one minute, got the radar on, locked on it

..

and we were whistling away from it and I was back on
the Flight Plan and happy as a clam when I suddenly

@OMFIBEt4t4A.L
decided that something wasn't reading right and I realized
C

that I hadn ' t blown the doors on the cold IR and I blew
them and at that time the REP was at 25JO feet from us ,
which is the end of the experiment, but I think it was
still reading- Cooper

But it was still reading on the, according to the gage .

Conrad

Yeah . I think that cold IR read to a great, great thing.
Now , the Radar gage, this is where--here comes the next
mystery- the radar gage said the REP waE leaving us at
this point in time and that--

Cooper

Five feet per second?

Conrad

Yeah. I have 3 1/2 feet per second written down .

Cooper

Oh, at that particular point .

Oh, wel:. i t - - when we

first got our first measurement on it ·;he range rate on
my analog dial over there read exactly 5 feet per second

that it was going away from us .
Conrad

Yeah. Okay.

Cooper

Right on the money.

Conrad

To go back to the D- 4 in time it was 0.2, it was 02+ 16+ 15
when I blew the doors , which was corre3ponding to
2500 feet and I ran that REP D- 4 recorder until 02+37+12
and--okay, now.

That darn REP!

Gordo had the needles

right on the REP and that REP was going straight out
from us at 270 on the ball .

'COr'1FIDEtfJal>Att

It just went , I just

57

, CO► I F 1 DE NJ:1A t

thought everything was going perfect .
moving

The REP was

just exactly out of plane away from us and

it was moving at about the right velocity and then the
mystery came.

It just kept on going.

Cooper

Yeah.

Conrad

It kept right on going straight out, and-­

Cooper

It wasn't slowing down very much.

Conrad

And I got over here on the graph and I kept reading
the mileage and we were up to about 7 feet a second.
It was leaving us , and I realized, I began to think ,
well gee, this is-

That ' s when I was really convinced

that the platform wasn't alined and we must have kicked
it out some screwy way.
us quite fast .

Then it started to drift : ~

It finally did peak out an

ent

)

----------a ~ ...--n:-~---------;---:--:--:-----;------:-:--:;-,i"'T"--,-----,-----r-;-;:--:-:--he corner at some phenomenal dis ance ,

was almost nine tenths of a mile away from us , but
drift aft quite rapid
and .when we got to the nodal crossing time , it was behin~ (
us by a mile , according to the radar.
on radar.

Now this is all

And now , mind you, it ' s nighttime and it was

right there.

We could see it plain as day.

Cooper

Okay, let ' s see, we were at the--

Conrad

Okay, that's when we got to this next screwy thing.

/

See, the REP went straight out and kept on going.
Cooper

The REP goes straight out and then it just kept on
going.

It was slowing down very l ittle and just kept on

going and going and going and going.
Conrad

And it never really stopped.

What it d:Ld was it

sorta, it sorta starting going off this way, you !mow,
and it never got out to a node point wh~re you had
a definite stopping range and a start back in again.
Well , the range rate never got below a foo t per second .
Cooper

The range rate never decreased.

You never got a decrease

in range rate , but it just kept- it started drifting slowly
of f the 270 line on back out, but it we·nt straight
out the 270 line to a- Conrad
Cooper

What was the range?

Do you remember what the range was

when it sti ll was out there?
Conrad

It went straight like relative motion to us would
have looked like it went out looking down a plan form,
if we were here.

It looked like it went out like this

and it slowly started doing this .
Cooper

Yeah.

Conrad.

And it never did have a stop to it.
behind us back in here someplace.

It finally crossed

C

eNftOf
"

Cooper

59

We never got the point where it crossed behind us because somewhere when it was about the 210 point was when

Conrad

we were out of fuel, of fuel cell o .
2
Yeah, well , you see, we went by Carnarvon--

Cooper

And this was coming down just BALOOM BALCOM BALOOM
BALCOM BALCOM.

Conrad

See, here we go .

We went by Carnarvon.

Here I was trying

to figure out in here what was going on and what we
were going to take out and everything and we went by
Carnarvon and right here at Carnarvon and that's when
Charlie .. . called up and says check your o2 heater
switch to AUTO .

Now I had seen it fall , had noticed

that it had been falling and I had gone to the AUTO
position when without even being told -Cooper

You had already gone to nanua.l.

Conrad

And then I was doing many other things and I decided
it wasn ' t coming up and so I'd gone to manual and held
it over there a couple times and sort of looked at it
and --

Cooper

That didn ' t work either.

Conrad

I must have kidded myself into thinking that I was
getting something out of it, and then I forgot it
again and then~-

60

Cooper

:But you did go back to the AUTO.

Conrad

Yeah . I put ii; back in AUTO , you know , and then I called
t hem, I think it was on the tape and I think I told
them, I said, the S'f!litch is on AUTO .

We're okay.

Don ' t worry about it and then right aft er that we got up
to this 240 or so in there and we realjzed that something
was wrong and the heater was out and I guess we told
them--We told them at Carnarvon that t he heater was out .
Cooper

Well, we checked at that time then on ·~he annneter on
and off and on and off t hat on both manual and AUTO and
it was obvious .

Conrad

And that ' s when we--

Cooper

And it was coming down so rapidly that it looked like
very shortly thereafter we were going t o have fuel
cell stoppage..

Conrad

We were getting below 200 and falling pretty fast and
we had a big discussion between ourselves and we just
made up our mind to forget the REP.

We felt we were

really in trouble.
Cooper

So we elected at that point to start rowering down because
we knew that we were using fuel cells a t a very high
rate .

Conrad

And we secured the Platform and Radar and everything else.

~
Cooper

r

ENTI~ -

61

So we said okay and we ' re stopping it right here and of
course about this time we were in the boondocks area
away from everybody as always occurs.

Conrad

We were between Carnarvon and Hawaii .

Cooper

And--so we just started powering down everything and
holding on.

Conrad

So from there on we were off the Flight Plan.

Cooper

From here on to the next twenty orbits the REP was
right with us. Ha, Ha, Ha !

Conrad

That ' s what I cam't figure out .

How did it get 375

miles from us when it hung around f or 5 orbits?
darned thing.

That

Everytime we went on the night side-

Cooper

It was so--

Conrad

As a matter of fact, I didn't see it for a time or two
and then all of a sudden, the nose of the spacecraft was
lighting up !

Cooper

We even saw it in the day side .

It was so near we could

even see it in the day side and at the transit areas when
the light woul d be shining on it we ' d be just going into
the darkness we could look back and you could even see i;
the dipole on it as it tumbled.

..

The tumble rate was very,

very slow.
Conrad

And then you guys called up and told us it was 375 miles

62

C

Cooper

That s impossible.
1

away.

That thing wasn't that far

It hung right in there.

Cooper

I think that 's the whole things .

Cooper

But 1 1 11 tell you there were two differnnt night
sides we went into.

Conrad

Several- -

Two different night sides- -well , I reaU y-- i t
wouldn 1 t have surprised me if it had hit us.

Cooper

Me either.

It seemed to me like it was a lot closer.

Conrad

That 's what made me think that well, th? platform
was aligned and I don't know what exactly happened.
I did notice that it sort of climbed on us.

So

then I had the feeling that maybe it was doing sort
of a figure eight type thing.

That maybe we had

fired it off up or down a little bit yoQ know .
.And it was in three dimensions ; a little bi t out
of plane working it's way around us , backing up
and going a.head and coming back around because the
darn thing was always there .

It was there until

the darn lights burned out on it.

Anyti me we

wanted to find it if you wanted to move t he
spacecraft around you could find it out there .

EOl"'lf!ltJEt ◄ =F hA. L

Cooper

It was close enough so that almost any attitude
you were in you could see i t shining on the
spacecraft.

Even if it was clear back out here

you could see the nose just lighting up from it.
Conrad

So I know it couldn ' t have been too darn far away.
I mean maybe up to five miles or something l ike
that , but it didn ' t get that far away from us .
don ' t understand the 375.

I

I was really surprised

that those guys called up and said it was 375 miles
away.

1

Cooper

Yes.

Well , I don't believe that figure.

Conrad

It will be real interesting to see what they dig
out f r om it .

Well, all the radar and everything

we had is on the tape , isn't it?
Cooper

Well, that was our first big heart breaker .

Conrad

We ought to be able to put that all together .

Cooper

After all the work we did on t he REP , then not
to pull the rendezvous out , we sure--

Conrad

Well , from there until we got the GO to 6- 4 we
just were along for the ride .

Cooper

.

We just stayed--

I knew that--I was just so sure of all the time we
put in simulating that darn thing I just had a
queasy , uneasy feel i ng that maybe we better put

64

in more time on other things .
That something was going to go wrong-~
Conrad

I felt every problem that we had I felt real
good about the fact that we had either t he smarts
t o lmow that it was straight forward--

It didn't

take too long to figure out that that h1~ater was
on one line, both heaters , and that we'd had a
single point failure.

And as a mat ter- of - fact we

t ook the schematics out.
Cooper

And there's another argument for our ha-ring it;' for
when it occured there wasn ' t anybody around to ask
advice .

Conrad

I t was very straight forward to throw t he switches
and look at the amp meter to see whethe:c you were
getting anything out.

There was no dou·:it in my

mi nd that it had burned out and the sam,= daml
thing with the thrusters.

When we finally decided

we had a problem with them we went through the
ci rcuit breakers just like we did in th= trainer
and it was obvious that number 7 was out and 8
went out and then the rest of them started getting sour.
So, I think that all the training we had we were pretty
well prepared.

Cooper

I do , too .

I ' l l tell you- - the launch- -we were

perfectly normal and right on the money-Conrad

Yes , we were sitting there waiting to find out what
they wanted us to do .

I mean we !mew we could

go on the batteries long enough to get to a
fairly decent re- entry place and we wer e taking
bets wi th one another and we were kidding about
McDivitt.

There must have been real pandamoni um

at MCC .

They were burning up the lines to every­

where .

Because ther e r eally wasn ' t anythi ng we

could do after that but just sort of wait .

We

re- stowed everything and we were ready to go i nto

6- 4 if they wanted us to . We wer e all prepared to
go i nt o 6- 4.

We didn 1 t want t o.

Cooper

We really didn 1 t thi nk we ' d make 18-1.

Conrad

Gor do was the eternal optimist though .

I ' d s ay ,

" 125 pounds" and he'd say, "Well , it ha sn't really
fallen anymore . 11

Then it would fal l about another

20 pounds and I'd say,

"Wel l , that ' s 100 pounds

now ," and he'd say, "Well , that's really not much
bel ow what it was before ."
I think we had a little more confidence than the
guys on the ground , I really do .

I r emember old

1':0 NEIDEbll IAJ. ..

66

Steiner saying don't worry about that liq_uid
going through that heat exchanger .
will go through just fine .

He said it

The one thing that I

thought was that we might have dinged the tank
with the REP but as long as the q_uantity stayed
up there we were in pretty good shape , but I wasn't
sure that we didn't just might have sorre sort of
a hole back there and were just slowly leaking
pressure even though the q_uantity-Cooper

That was one thing--we always worried E~bout that
REP with that big diapole hanging out.

If it

skewed up a little going out what woulcl it wipe
out going out .

It just happened to be with a lot

of that OAMS--fuel cell lines and all 'Ghat type
stuff back there and that was one thing that
always kind of concerned us about ejecting the REP
now and then.
So that was one thing we kept running )ver and
wondering what i t had wiped out .
Conrad

Yes.

That was the only thing that kept bothering

me , but it held to 60 though and that was pretty
good.
Cooper

Okay.

Let 's see boresight on REJ?,nodal crossing.

We didn't get the nodal cropsing.

toNFll)Et~t1'1L

I · sure wish we

:

COMflDEN I IA[ »
could have hung on long enough to find out where
i t crossed us behind there .

FpSD Rep

Let's back up just a minute on your lock on .

Cooper

Okay .

Boy, it just clung right on to it and zap.

We got the lock on and the darn range and range
rate came right on there .

It was moving right

out at about 5 1/ 4 feet per second just throttling
right down the old line .
Conrad

Address 69 was reading just fine.

Cooper

Everything was right on the money.

Conrad

Address 58, 59--

Cooper

The range was moving right on out just like it
should and we were sitting right there on our 270
point on the ball tracking right straight out for
a long ways out .

Then is when the variance came

in, when it kept going out .

It should have

started slowing down on range rate .

But , it

seemed like it was slowing down awfully slow .

It

seems like the range rate kept on for quite a ways .
Conrad

You know I had a 58 ,of -63. 8, and a 59 of a 13~8
at .89 miles and we should have never gotten that
far away from i t ever--in the beginning.

Cooper

See with it moving out at the R that we had, all
the figures we had ever run on it--we had our own

68

little calculations right here--finally we were
off our graph up there, weren't we?
Conrad

Yes .

Well , you ' ve got to realize that the graph ' s

based on out of plane and this was the hypotenuse
to the thing, but even so-Cooper

But s t i ll you 've got to--

Conrad

It still went away more than it should have .

Cooper

Because you cosine angles were fairly 13mall in
t here .

Conrad

It still went away more than it should have.

Cooper

I don't quite understand it.

Conrad

We 'll know what the platform--I presume they can
t ell how well we had the platform al igned .

Cooper

But there again, there 's the f irst little horse
shoe nail that throws the glitch in things.

When

that darn s canner s crewed up right at the most
crucial time .

It probably had been screwing up

all along , we just hadn 't really caught it .

It

really threw the glitch in right therEi at a point
when it really shouldn't have.

We ma~, have lucked

out still , and gotten . it out right on the money
and it may not have been the problem.

I don't

know, but anyway with the best we had to work with
we got it out the best we could and it looked like

=

•
it went out in good fashion .

I think we s till

would have been all right if we had gone ahead
and done the rendezvous with no problem even if
we had gotten a little out of plane with it we could
have handled this later on.

But, there again it made

it difficult for Pete because it got him completely
off his schedule , too .

Conrad

It got him late blowing

the doors .

Well , we s t ill were reasonably well on

top of it .

Let ' s see .

We can skip all this REP s t uff .

You got anything

else you want to lmow about the radar?
FCSD Rep

It would be best I think to go on through it and
say what you did and didn ' t do so we can stay on
this .

Conrad

Yes, well--

FCSD Rep

Use your flight plan.

Conrad

Well, we got as far--let ' s see, it says when on bore- sight read and record address 58 , 59 , and 69 and
this was just before 2: 51 when we were supposed
to have a reading to give back on the ground.
This is the reading I got:
139 . 8 .

58 read -63. 8, 59 read

The distance was-- address 69 was .89 miles

and I got that at the t ime that it was supposed to

70

be gotten,
Cooper

Why don' t you bring the flight plan over here

and let's start down it.

We might as well

s kip what he has in the flight plan here
because it varies so from there on.
Conrad

From here on you can for get this flight plan .

Cooper

That ' s right .

Conrad

Right here .

Cooper

Where 's our little book of the fl i ght plan?

Conrad

I've got i t right here .

Cooper

Oh , okay .

Conrad

Okay.

All this time we sweated out getting home

and that ' s when we wound up-- here is where we
s t arted on this flight plan, at 1 day a nd 02 hours,
so that's 12 hour s after lift- off.
Cooper

We finally got back on A f light plan ani --

Conrad

Yes , and that ' s the first thing we started to do
was to power back up .

FCSD Rep

One day.

Conrad

No .

Cooper

We star ted that one day--

Conrad

We went CEl' to 2400 Zulu and then tha t became day
1 , 00 hours and lift-off was 1400 Zulu.

That's 24 hours .

That one day remember we-­

CO N·rrD Et ◄ ifI,A. L~

"

Cooper

From lift- off until 2400 hours the day of launch
was elapsed t ime and s t arting a t tha t t ime we started
calling it day one and then GM!'.

Conrad

Okay.

So , we went through a l i ttle deal here

where we started to power up and they let us tum- we'd been drifting hadn ' t we?
Cooper

Yes .

I ' ll say.

Conrad

We turned up the AC , ACME inverter on and the ACME
bias power on OAMS attitude on and we went t9 pulse
and we were supposed to power back down again at
02 + 27 + 25.

We were supposed to have this H
2
purge a t 02 + 45 + 00 . Tha t was the first thing,

they were just going to let us purge H we
2
didn 't purge the o:xygen. Everybody was worried
about that .

Then we were on the flight plan and

they gave us an update time for our first
medical pass and we stayed- - ! think we took these
vision tests , didn ' t we?
Cooper

Yes, we did .

Conrad

We just stayed right on the fli ght plan , had the
vision tests , and I have a comment in here that at
01 days 04 hours and 32 minutes we saw our first

Cooper

meteor r e- enter .
~an , we saw a lot of those meteorites re- enter

€Or<tFlt,fN I i.2u

72

below us .

•

That kind of startles you when you
::

realize they are

9ntering below you.
you .

ve
Conrad

This is when the exp
minds .

It means

imenters went out of their

They handed us this flight pl8l1 you wouldn ' t

believe where they had 1, 2, 3,4,5 , 6,7,8,9,10 , 11 ,
12 , 13,14 , 15 , 16 ,17,18 , 19 , 20,21 22,23, no 22 experiments
they gave us to do in a row an

they ir.volved

everything in the spacecraft anti we had gear all
over .

You wouldn ' t believe it .

much junk--we went wild.

That

I never had so

'/s when we called

up and said, "Hey, gang let ' s be a l i t·~le more
reasonable."
Cooper

The other problem

didn't list them

seque
Conrad

Yes , that ' s right.

Cooper

They put them in there and we had to keep skipping
around on them to get the sequential time on them
and that was a mess .

Conrad

Now, what we did is we copied down in this book
and then we'd write it down at the proper time so
that we had it sequentially in the flight plan.

Cooper

It worked out very well .

NFIDE

•
Conrad

73

You , don 't want to get into which experiments we
got done and which ones we didn't or do you?
Do you want to go through it that detailed?

FCSD Rep

Well, there's an experiment section in there .

Cooper

Well , let's cover all the experiments in the
experiment section .

We might just comment right

now how that I think our book arrangement worked
out extremely satisfactory and I don't know how
we'd have ever kept up with where we were if
we hadn't had these books to follow .

We just

passed these books back and forth and we managed
to keep them stowed pretty neatly.
where they were .

I knew r ight

Pete· kept them stowed beside

his left leg in the seat.

They slid right do~m

the seat.
Conrad

Right here and Gordo kept them on his right and if
he had them and I wanted one --

Cooper

If he was asleep I would just reach over and slide
them out and vice-versa.

And then our Volkswagon

pouches held the l i ttle ones real fine .

These

books were used a jilli on man- hour s-- just back
and for th .

They really worked out well.

They're

easy to write in and we tried to keep meticulous
logs on everything and I think we did reasonably

ftBENTIAt

,

L
well .
Conrad

Okay, now we also wrote in these little screwy
ditties .

This is where we kept the things if

they wanted us to power-up something or pull
one of their nutty tests that they dreareed up
in the middle of the night .

We ' d write them down

just in order in which they came.
Cooper

Do we just want to go right on down thrcugh here?

FCSD Rep

Okay.

Why don ' t we go right on down anc. list what

we did and then when we get in the experiment section
we can go into detail .
Cooper

Okay.

Where did we leave off here now.

one day 4 hours and 40 minutes .

At--okay ,

Let' s flee we

didn't do this-Conrad

No , we didn't do the cryogenic test .

Cooper

Then at 1 day 5 hours we did the S- 8 , I)..13, Connnand Pilot.

Conrad

That's another thing.

Tnt's right.

They had you doing these

things while one g.:;.y was asleep' and one guy was
awake .

You wake up and have a briefing period

just a bunch of baloney.

We were both awake

and when we took a test why we took it together
and got it out of the way.
Cooper

l,'e ate together and slept together and took the
•.•. together. We'd been completely st~rtled

it's

75

wi th terrible pulse rates when we ' d hear somebody

calling from down in that deep barrel , Gemini 5,
Gemini 5, Gemini 5.

Ha ,ha.

Lights on all over the place trying to find the
radio switch.
Cooper

Okay.

Ha- ha.

Out of a deep sleep .

I think maybe if we'd just go down through

here and hit these things that particularly-Conrad

Tell me where we are in time and then I'll look
in here to see what notes there are in here .

Cooper

Well , and then we left these pretty well as we went
through the flight plan here and then we left
those pretty well--

Conrad

Well , these are all the next day

s o--

Cooper

These things are all ready listed in there--I think
were just mainly the things we wrote in here .

Conrad

These S-6 passes

Cooper

S-6 weather pass at 1 day 6 hours and 10 minutes .
1 day 7 hours 48 minutes 26 seconds .
G8, we did that .

Sequence

That was the hurricane too wasn' t

i t? And then we had another sequence on that -the next trip around at 9 hours 22 minutes 49 seconds .
We looked at it again.

Then at 9 hours 27 minutes

33 seconds we had a sequence 208 and that was-Conrad

Man, we've got logs for the logs.

"C O ► li 1DENJl4,L

76

Cooper

I don ' t know but what we might be better
on this just to go through our individual
specialty logs and log where occured at what
time , because that's the more accurate
one of all--because this was kind of our running
logs of what was going on--to warn us when things
were coming up ahead.

As far as going back into

this and doing the whole thing that isn 1 t as accurate
as going into-- there are so many specia:.ty
areas in here .

We have those logged real

accurately according to time.

I think :.t

might be better to go through and get a:.1
those and build a flight plan out of that
r ather than go through the

flight

plan because the flight plan had to
be just completely- -we didn't sleep
when we were supposed to and we didn't
eat when we were supposed to and-- .
Conrad

Well, let's go on through this thing, and now as far
as the experiments go those guys have a complete
log of what they sent up to us and that should
jive with the complete log that we have of what
we received and from that and what we logged and what

::

77
we did we can tell you at any point in time whether
we got a certain experiment done or not.

If they

want to know if we got something done or not and
if there's a reason why we didn ' t do it why we
usually had that recorded somewhere.

Either

in here or in the flight plan.
Why don 1 t we go through this one?
Cooper

Okay.

Conrad

When we get to a point of the experiment or s omething we can check in here .

Cooper

We did the UHF test .

FCSD Rep

Why don't you read off those days .

Cooper

Okay.

One day and 8 hours--let 1 s see 1 day 10 hours

49 minutes . Sequence 03 UHF test 3.
Conrad

Right .

Cooper

We did that .

Conrad

We had--were supposed to do an Apollo a t 01 12 36
17 ,

Cooper

Now I don't think we got that one.

I think that was sequence 208 .

Why don't you check

that one real quick--yes.
I think that was the one we couldn ' t get because-Cooper

We had weather over that one .

Conrad

Covered by clouds .

Cooper

Okay, we had UHF test number 3 at 10 hours 49 minutes .

78

FCSD Rep

One day?

Cooper

We've al l ready mentioned that one .
that one.

::

We did get

We have that one written up here actually

i t occurred around down here.
plan up- date .

Flight

Yes, we had lots of those.

Conrad

Now, here was the D-4, D-7,421 .

Cooper

D- 4, D- 7 421 occuring at 1 day 12 hours and 7
minutes .

Conrad

I ' ll tell you whether we got it done or not .

Cooper

We didn ' t do that one .

Conrad

I don't know why we didn't do it .

No.

We were in

drifting fl±ght by then, I guess .
Cooper

Then we have a note right here.

The D- 6 number

19 scrubbed for the State side pass .
scrubbed that one .

They

There was a weather problem

on that one .
Conrad

Yes.

Cooper

Yes .

Conrad

Okay now this is an interesti ng thing at 01 days
14 hours , completely different than GT 4, we
started getting these RCS hea ter lights.

Those

guys--the only time they got an RCS heater
light was something like day 3.

Ed said. it was

in ring A and he turned on the heater a.r.d he got

:

79
the light 2 or 3 times and he turned the heater
off then it ca.me on again.

You lmow , for an

hour's per iod of time and he nBver had the lights
again.

Now, this is another reason why I suspect

this OAMS system-- one of the biggest mistakes
ever made--whoever recommended it on the ground
to power down that OAMS heater to save electrical
ener gy foul ed our whole system because we started
at this point time having RCS heater lights .

I

checked for 8 days throughout the flight and I
could always get an RCS heater light.

If I

turned off that heater switch I 1 d·have an RCS light
come on every once in a while and so we left those
RCS heaters on all the time.
Cooper

From one day and 14 hours the RCS heater were on
the whole flight.

Conrad

You lmow they're auto .

And the only heat when

necessary, but every time we turned the heater
off we wouldn't run for an hour or two that the
light didn ' t come back on again and it would
either be on ring A or ring B.
Cooper

And the temperature that we'd get on the gage
when those lights would come back on was something
in the order of about 60 degrees wasn ' t it?

I

L,

80

55 degrees .
Conrad

Yes .

Cooper

They ran when the heater was on--it kept them
between 60 and 80 .
80 degrees.

One time ring B got up to

But it ran between 60 and 80

degrees, that those heaters kept the RCS., A and B.
But , any time if you turned tha t heater off it
wasn ' t any time at all until the light cl3.me back
on again so we just turned them on and l ,~ft them
on the whole flight .
And that RCS couldn't have worked better .

It

was the most beautiful system you ever s~w.
Conrad

Boy , i t sure did .

Now , here of course--

Cooper

As you say, in contrast to what we had before .

Conrad

Here 's another thing when we got into these high
tumbling rates that really kept the spacecraft
cold.

Cooper

Shew!

The windows even froze over.

Conrad

Yes , i t was darn cold .

Cooper

We were down to minimum flow .
flows off--completely off.

We had beth suit

We had the fui t

coolant completely down to the next to Jast notch
and we left i t cracked as we were afraic. we would
completely freeze up the whole coolant if we shut

::

81- - - --

it completely off and later they told us that we
could go a.head and shut it completely off.

And

we were sitting in there just shivering and shaking
and I was a lot colder than Pete.
I was really cold.

He was cold and

I was really thinking seriously

about--if we couldn ' t get that thing warmed up I
was going to take my suit off and I did for a
while in fact ~ake my inlet and exhaust hoses off .
Conrad

Yes, that was his answer to the problem.

When he

got too cold, just disconnect.
Conrad

Just let it blow i nto the cabin.

Cooper

But, it was so cold in there that

·ndows froze

over and we were sitting there spinnin@.

Conrad

It had a rapid freeze on them.

I didn't see that

except when we were doing the high tumqling and i t
got really cold in there .
Cooper

I

You could see the frost bui ld up on the outside all
over the spacecraft .

Outside up o

section around the thrusters
down there .

the nose
frost all over

When you tumb

have enough time

e sunlight-- when the sun-- I think to warm up that particular

section.

When we damped it immediately thereafter

Flf)ENTIA

82

..

the whole thing star ted to warm up .
the frost melt outside .

You could see

Everything seei:ned t o go up .

The fuel temperatures would go up , and t'.le whole
ECS system would warm up, the cabin wouli warm up
and everything.

We were sitting there--

Conrad

A slow drift or stabilized fl i ght--

Cooper

When we wer e s itt ing t her e r eally sp inning up, th:ings
just got colder and colder and colder .

:IJ"ow by

spinning up I ' m talking about we got up )nee to
12 degrees per second.
except visuall y .

It wasn ' t any bother to us

You just couldn ' t stan i to look

at i t out the window.

It just gave you 3uch an

awful looki ng pi cture .

Like you were in an inverted-­

upside down--wrong side up- -.

So we fin~lly put

the polar oid filter s up . . . the holes .
Conrad

We got completely i n the dark ther e .

Cooper

I didn ' t even want to look at what was ~)ing on .
It was odd because before you could take a penci l and
put it out here and it's the best attitu,ie indicator
you had.

If there ' s any little r ate goi:1g on at all

the penci l would give it to you .

You ca1 sit and

hold it r i ght out in front of you and it's just like
an arti f i cial horizon.

It ' s the most be,mtiful--

or camera or whatever you

ve out there it will do

NFIDENTIAL ~

~rqflDENTIA~
the same thing.

You put something out in front of

you and it would just disappear.

Whew!

It wouldn ' t sit in front of you.

It would move from

one side to the other of the spacecraft due to the
rates you would build up .
Conrad

Yes, here's where we got into this business of the
OAMS Heater- Off and ACME-Off and the C adapter to
Command and the Scanners-Off and they wanted to update the computer.

We brought the IGS and the

computer on and then we powered down again and this
is-Cooper

One day 14 hours where this started.

Conrad

Yes , right in here .

Cooper

And then is where we brought up the second fuel
cell .

Conrad

That was passing over Carnarvon .

We brought back on--

Got the pump back on the line and then we got ready
for our first big day over the States.

Cooper

Yes, that's a great da;y .

Conrad

Boy, we were busy though .

Cooper

I tell you though , those passes over the states

We learned a lot .

were really good.
Conrad

The third day was our best day as far as being
organized.

They gave us about the proper amount

of experiments and we were well organized.--

84

Cooper

Yes, we had a great day .

Tha t third da~r was a goody .

Man we had everythi ng right on the button.

We

got good shots of it and everything just worked
ou t right on the money.

Okay, let ' s se,3.

This is

15 hours 40 minutes, that's still with everything
powered up .
Conrad

Then we had this D-1 and D-4 and we got those .
were photographs .

Those

We got the photographs of the moon

and the IR measurements of the moon and with the IR
film and I think they're probably pretty good.

Of

course the Air Force has tha t film .
Cooper

We found that the I R and the retical and the radar
and everything were pretty well right on the money.
Everything seemed to be boresighted pretty well, and
Pete could look thr ough his questar lense at a s t ar
and be boresighted right in the mi ddl e of the darn
camera.

I'd have it right in the middle of the ret ­

icle.
Conrad

Yes , I ' ve got to eat crow on that .

I Fas the @J.Y

that was complaining about did they reE,lly have this
stuff boresighted.

Everything was extremely well

boresighted .
Cooper

Ye s, it sure was .

:
Can ' t complain about i t at all.

•

85

Conrad

No, it worked very well .

Cooper

Let ' s see we had an observation of the storm and some
pictures there at 17 hours and 12 minutes still on

...

day 1.

Oh, we brought the radar to stand-by to

warm things up there at 17 hours-- 16 hours
Conrad

Radar temperature went down to 19 degrees.

Cooper

16 hours and 50 minutes-~it wa s the secondary

coolant loop that got so cold.

They wanted us to

bring on some added heat source so we brought the
radar on to stand-by for quite a period of time
to warm things up , and let ' s see-Conrad

They wanted to warm the radar up , too .

It got too col d .

Cooper

Yes , that ' s right.

Conrad

That was S- 8, D- 13,

Cooper

That was S-8, D- 13, and that didn't work out very well.

What did we do in here .

'That was too early.

That was the one that was so

early in the morning.
Conrad

It seems to me that's the first time we looked at
it and we saw the smoke.

Cooper

Oh yes .

Cooper

Now , let's see was it the first one or the second
that I saw and you didn 1 t see.

Conrad

I don't know.

I never saw it.

G@t lfill.Et ff1,1'1_ 1

86

FCSD Rep

S- 8 , D- 13 ,

One day and 18 hours .

Cooper

I saw it .

That ' s right .

We couldn ' t se e it at

all unti l we were almost over i t and then I found
the target .
Conrad

We could see the smoke and we were looking at the
smoke and looking at the smoke--

Cooper

The sun angle wa s very low and it was very bad
but just after we got right on top of i t and going
on over I located the targets and was trying to
point them out to Pete .

At least I sor-; of got

a pattern on the ground and I think tha·; ' s why
I could find them.

I recognized the pa·;tern on the

general area of the ground that I could find .

They

were in between two r ivers and a bi g r e i mud hill.
Okay, what did we get on that?
I got on that one .

That wa:3 next and

Let's see that was three and

four and 18 hour s and one day 20 hours 4 minutes
43 seconds .

We got that .

And then S- 8 , D- 13 ,

Conrad

The same one .

Cooper

The same one we were discussing there.

Yes .
;

COt ◄f ll'Et ◄ tf lsA,b ◄

87

Cooper

Okay , we moved to Med Data to Hawaii at 19 hours
I got there at 7 i n

and 55 minutes which we did.

the Caribbean at 20 hours and did the MSC- 1 at 21
hours 52 minutes to 22 hours and 44 minutes.
Conrad

Then we stayed on the flight plan there and at
Hawaii had a critical tape dump at 1 day 23 hours .
I congratulated Gordo for exceeding his original
flight time at 2 days

Cooper

Just barely started .

Conrad

Gee .

Ob!

hours .

Here's that "dinged by a micrometeorite . "

I haven ' t told anyone about this because I ' m not
really sure that was what happened, because it
happened twice and it happened right in the same
place .

It might have been metal cooling, but right

over my head something dinged the hatch .
bigger than heck - dinged.

Just

You know , just like

someone shot a B- B off of it .
Cooper

Yes, I could hear .

That's just exactly what it

sounded like .
Conrad

I was convinced that we had gotten dinged by a
micrometeorite .

So I put it on the voice tape and

wrote it down here .

Then a couple of hours later

we got dinged just as loud just about in the same

•

ac: 0 1◄ F 1 D E NJ J,A L ~

88

place again, so that made me think , well, you know

:

they aren't going to strike the same place twice
so maybe it wasn't a micrometeorite after all.

I

really don ' t know what it was, but I think it's
worth a look at the hatch.

It could have just been

that metal was cooling down or expandin~· or something, you know
Cooper

They were right directly overhead on thE! right
hatch .

Conrad

Yes.

It really sounded like someone fired a pellet

or a B- B, or a . 22 off of a piece of me·;al .
Cooper

We decided we wouldn't put this out ove:c the radio
or we would get everybody all shattered .

Okay,

well essentially that day 2 - that whole page from
2 hours to 4 hours - went right on flight plan
schedule .

We did the Vision Test there and we

called down the scores from both that one and the
day before .
Conrad

Now we were on this split purge cycle .

Cooper

Yes , now here is where they started making a
mistake.

Somebody didn 't realize that I could not

purge the fuel cells from my side.

I can ' t get

to those switches, and I had to wake Pete up

€O t ◄ FI 0 Er ◄ T I A k-'

::

every time he was supposed to be asleep when the
fuel cells were purged .

Well, I could get to them ,

but I had to crawl right over in his lap to do it,
so he was awake then .

After that I learned to wake

him up early and let him get awake before he
purged them.
Conrad

Scared the heck out of that guy at Carnarvon , too ,
I ' ll bet you -- We were going to purge the fuel
cells for the first time and I was sound asleep.
Gordo said, ''Wake up , wake up, we ' ve got to purge
the fuel cells!"

I reached over there and turned

on everything and all the Delta- Plights came on .
Cooper

He hadn ' t put the crossover --

Conrad

The crossover valve on.
lights are on!"
purging!

I said , "The Delta- P

The guy at Carnarvon said, "Stop

Stop purging!"

He must have thought the

cells were going to go right then and there so
Cooper

And then Pete woke up .

Conrad

Then finally I woke up and got to thinking about
what was going on there and found out that I'd
fouled up, slightly.

Cooper

All right, let 's see.

We deleted on day 2 , 6 hours,

and 35 minutes, we deleted that Philippines S-7 and they

90

were -Cooper

I wonder what the reason was for that .
some interference with something.
to that one.

There was

I conldn ' t get

Oh, what the heck was it?

There was

something else going on they had us doing right
then .

Oh , somebody was asking me somet:1ing.

were having a big discussion over cryo .
right .

They

That ' s

We had a great big 2 days 6 hours - we had

a big discussion over the net on something on these
cryos and it occured right at the time when we
were supposed to get this one on this Jass .
Cooper

Okay, at 2 days 7 hours and 45 minutes we did MSC1 again, and in fact I think we did all the MSC- l 's
pretty much on schedul e.

At 2 days 9 hours and

15 minutes we were supposed to do an Apollo
Landmark in Africa, and the one they called out for
us to do in the Flight Plan , there just wasn ' t any
description of it .

It was very poorly described

and we couldn't find where and what it was they
wanted us to get.

They never did call out a

number on this nor did they have it listed here .
Conrad

What was the time on that?

Cooper

It was almost 02:09:20 : 00 .

...

91

Conrad

02: 09 , huh?

Cooper

Yes .

Conr ad

Gosh, that doesn't even show here .

So , I guess

they never did even call it up from the ground .
You just saw it in t he Flight Plan .
Cooper

It was in the Flight Plan - -

Conrad

But they riever called it out .

Cooper

They n ever called it out .

Conrad

I haven ' t got it written down , either .

Cooper

Okay, on through the second day we did another UHF
Test , another Medical Data, on 2 days 12 hours and
50 minutes.

Conr ad

That ' s when we first powered the platform back up.
We were still building up.

Cooper

Two days and 13 hours, we powered the platform back
up and we did a UHF No . 1 , we did a D- 1 sequence 2,
we did a D- 1 sequence 3, we did a D-6 sequence 12 ;
and these are all s t ateside passes .

That was a

busy time ! We did a D- 6 at day 2 , 14 hours .

We

did a D- 4/D-7 at 14 : 35 .
Conrad

What ' s this , now?
D- 4 , a UHF 2

Cooper

Right .

I have the platform power up , a

92

Conrad

- - an S- 6 at 15 : 45 --

Cooper

You ' re ahead of where I was .

Conrad

Oh, I ' m sorry.

Okay, we'll back up.

D- 6 at 13 :41--46 .

We got Tampico instead of Monterey beca-i;.se it was
clouded in .

Then we did the UHF No. 1, and we got

this S- 5/S- 6 during our African pass- dicn ' t we?
And we got the D- 4/D-7 over Kano .
I ' m not sure we got that one.
log here.
get it.
Cooper

Let me look in the

4 : 20, no clouds over Kano , so we didn't
It was supposed to be cl oudy O'rer Kano .

That ' s right .
Kano.

Wait a minute,

There were supposed to b1? clouds over

It was supposed to be clouds we '~ere getting

pi ctures of, and there weren't any clouis .
Conrad

Yes , it was clear.
did not do .

Then we had an S- 1 , which we

We did the S- 1 later.

That's when we

went to platform power up and the computer on, and
then we started a D- 6 at 15 : 16 .

After D- 6 at

15 : 16 was a number 20 , which, if I'm net mistaken ,
was supposed to be Waco ; and we got DaJlas instead
because Waco was cloudy then .

Yes , it was supposed

to be James Connally and we took Dallaf1 instead,
because Waco was clobbered.
Cooper

What ' s this I have here?

That ' s your note there.

r

·GONftf1

93

Conrad

21 . 1 feet per second Delta P .

Cooper

Oh, that was our pre- burn stuff.

.,,...

At 2 days

17 hours 34 minutes and 31 seconds we had a
maneuver load .
Conrad

Well , I have the whole thing here .

We powered

up the platform on day 2 at 15:50 with the platform caged BEF, and at 16 : 15 we alined BEF with the
rate gyros on.

At 16:45:00 the computer went on

and we addressed 25 90201 , and apogee adjust maneuver
was a t 16 : 50 : 17 .

We translated forward to zero the

IVI, so it was actually a retro burn .

I mean we

were BEF.
Cooper

We were using the aft-firing thrusters.

Conrad

Yes.

We had a D-6 on the ship , and we didn't see

it, at 2 days 16 hours 56 minutes and 49 seconds .
We didn't see the ship.

Then at 17:20 the second

day we alined the platform SEF and we sat the
computer up to address 25 00158 .

We made an SEF

burn, which was a phase adjust maneuver, at 17 :
34:58 .

Now , that one we did in the Platform Mode

and it didn't burn for schmaltz.
Cooper

The platform didn ' t hold it .

It allowed us to get

a little bit of left-right and up- down .

Conrad

I don't bel ieve that Platform Mode was holding the
t olerances it was supposed to.

It was drifting a

full degree, and it was supposed to hold better
than t ha t .
Cooper

I t is supposed to hol d plus or minus half a degree .

Conrad

By drifting off in yaw a degree , it burned the whole
time 1 degree off in yaw in the same direction .
You see, that accounted for the sort of l arge outof-pl ane number; it was like 0.8 foot ier second
that we got in to the out of pl ane.

Okay, then we

had a D-4/D- 7 at 17: 42:00, a 410 Band a 407 over
Carnarvon; and it was not done .
Cooper

Tha t 's right; we didn ' t have a reticl e .

Conrad

Because the reticle pooped out .
reticl e had burned out .

We thought the

It wasn ' t unti l l a ter on

after we were going to fix the reticle by putting
t he auxiliary light in there that Gordo found that
t here was a short in the cord when the cord was
stretched , and that t he short wasn ' t i n the cord
when the cord wasn ' t stretched , and that the sight
was okay.

That reminds me of another thing.

Right af ter we got airborne I went to use the
little auxil iary l ight down here .

It was in the

95

clip so hard that when I pulled it out , I pulled
it completely apart.
my lens .

I shattered it .

I broke out

Glass floating around and everything.

Where did we stow that?

I forgot .

I gave it to

you and you stowed i t -Cooper

I put it in the garbage bag.

Conrad

That ' s right ; it's in the garbage bag, someplace.
Well , they have gone through a ll that.

Cooper

Incidentially, that one single-point cord that we
have in there over on my side , if I had had
something to cut it with, I should have cut it
right in two so it wouldn 't be used again .
no good .

It's

It works fine as long as you don ' t put

any tension on it. When you s t ring it up to put
it in the reticle, it shorts out .
Conrad

Then we went through another maneuver preparation
at 17:50: 00 on the second day.

We alined the

platform SEF and we sat up an out-of-plane
maneuver and address 27 00150 , 15 feet per second
out of plane burn, and 90 degrees yaw left .

At

02 days 18 hours 06 minutes 50 seconds we made
that out-of-plane burn .
Cooper

We did that in Rate Command and right on the money.

Conrad

Yes, we did that in Rate Command right on the money.
Then we had an S- 8/D-13 and we documented those
t hings ; Gordo saw part of it and I did.r. 1 t .
never did really get a good score .

We

ThE·n at 18 : 50

again we alined the platform SEF and seit the
computer up to 25 00164 and burned thiE1 reverse
coelliptic maneuver at 19 : 04:18 , and that was a
good burn too.

MCC had put in their Agena computer

an Agena ephemeris, and they ran a rendezvous
solution on a fake Agena.

They had us make the

actual burns, and then they computed hJw close we
would have wound up.

I was told over the radio

that we got within 0 .2 mile of altitude and 0 . 3
mile horizontal distance from where we should have
actually been.

That was well within the tolerances ,

so they were apparently fairly pleased with the
burns .

Then we had S-7 at 2 days 21 tours 33

minutes 02 seconds , and Gordo shot moet of those.
They always happened on your wat ch.
Cooper

Yes.

Cooper

Then we did 2 days 21 hours and 50 minutes .

We had

Apollo Landmark south
Conrad

Th.at' s when I woke up and you had tha·~ Lake . . . I

,,

-·

I

99

got the S- 7 again, or you got it , at 3 days 06
hours and 32 minutes.

We del eted an S- 7 at 3

days 05 hours for some reason .

I just have

"delete" in here .
Cooper

What was that?

Conrad

Yes.

Cooper

Yes .

An S- 7?

I don ' t know ; they just told us to delete

that one at 3 days 05 hours .

Let ' s see ; we

deleted a Cabin Lighting Survey because Pete was
asleep.

That was one time when you were asleep

and I didn ' t want to disturb you .

You hadn ' t had

any sleep in awhile .
Conrad

You have the note down here that at 3 days 6 hours
and 33 minutes you found the OAMS Control Propellant
circuit breaker open and OAMS Control Regulator No .
1 circuit breaker open ; and you don't know when
they were opened, and I don ' t know when they
opened, but we know what did it .

We had been

parking the water gun up there like you are
supposed to be able to do and then pulling i t off .
You tend to pull down thi s way , which would cock
the gun barrel up into the circuit breaker panel ;
and I think I probably knocked them off , but when

100

•
I ' m not sure .

So , from that point in time on we

never used the hook-up that you can hock it up on

-.

the -Cooper

We al so found that little-hook up was i •eeling gray
paint off of those bars and i t was floe.ting all over
the cabin,

Conrad

That ' s right .

It kept knocking the gre.y paint off

the guards and i t kept floating around the cabin .
So from then on we always put the water· gun in the
gun holster down there where it belongs .

As a

matter of fact I think it was easier tc get it in
and out of the plastic thing that holds it on the
circuit breaker guards - holds it on tt ere so
tightly that it is a big swivet everytime you pull
it off.
Cooper

Okay.

At day 3, 6 hours 32 minutes 46 seconds we

did an S- 7 Experiment that aircraft surpor t on it .
This was over the Philippines.
Conrad

We got four pictures .

Cooper

Right .

Conrad

We did an MSC-1 at 07 : 40.
pass in there at 0~: 53,

Cooper

Right ,

We had a medical data

CONFIDENT~
Conrad

101

Then I have Pla t form to ORB Rate , Prelaunch , and
horizon scan for some r eason .

~uestar 01 , 90

degrees left .
Cooper

We alined SEF at 13 : 10.

Conrad

Oh, that was these platform tests 1 and 2 that they
wanted us to do .

Cooper

That 's right.

We were getting ready for another

stateside pass, too .

We installed the photometer,

we did an S- 8/D-13 pass at day 3, 13 hours 32
minutes at Laredo .
Conrad

Oh , let me make a comment right now on S- 8/D- 13 .
We were supposed to make a measurement , a window
survey, of the window before day one and the last day.
Okay, the window scan was done on 1 day 18 hours
26 minutes 00 seconds.
scan .

That was the first window

A second window scan was never done because

the last 3 days of the flight we were in drifting
flight .

This required a 30- degree sun angle on the

window, and we never did have a control system
back until we were on the RCS sys tem.

We weren ' t

about to do any experiments on RCS fuel .
right before retro .

That was

The second window scan, the

one at the end of the flight , wasn ' t done.

But

102

I will make the comment that I don't think the
window changed, just from my looking at it .
Cooper

No , I don ' t think it did, either, I think it was
just as bad at first , as it was at l ant.

Conrad

That's right.

Cooper

And it was pretty bad .

Conrad

So, I don I t think they lost anything ·;here on that

Cooper

data.

We just couldn't ge t that one.

Okay.

Let's see.

We had a medical pgss at day 3,

13 hours 50 minutes - 13 hours 47 minutes, actually.
Alined the platform
Conrad

We went through a really big day .

This was day

3 and this was the day we were really organized .
The experimenters sent us up about the right
number of experiments.

They gave us enough time

between experiments , and they planned them well
enough so that we didn't have any troubl e changing
the gear around or anything, and we had a big day
that day.
Cooper

This was a great day .

Conrad

We had enough time to do it all and we felt good
about it.
flew.

We felt that it was the best day we

103

Cooper

Let ' s see .

Day 3, 14 hours and 18 minutes , we did

that Zodiacal Light .
Conrad

That ' s right.

Gordo really had it on there .

I

think he got some good dope out of that Zodiacal
Light .

The pictures should be good .

Gordo held

it right on the money.
Cooper

Let ' s see; and then we did D- 6 .

Conrad

On the D-6 134, we looked for the ship again but
didn't see it that day , and that was one thing we
didn ' t get .

Cooper

I have here now a D-6 .
Centro.

We did it .

This is El

No , no.

Conrad

021 is Dallas , I think , or something like that .

Cooper

That's right .

And then day 3, 15 hours 8 minutes .

104

Cooper

We had a full day this day ,

Let ' s see-­

at 3 hours-- day 3 , 15 hours , ]3 minutes
,:,

we had D- 6 134,
Conrad

When was this?

Cooper

3:05:13:51

Conrad

Yes,

That was a 134--that was the ship

and we didn't see it .
Cooper

Yes--that was the weather.

Conrad

Yes--I have "no joy for sunlight here,"

OK then we had a D- 4 at 15 : 59 ,
Cooper

Right

Conrad

409 and 410b and we got them both done .

Cooper

We got both of those.

Conrad

We had a platform aline at 16 ::.5 :00.

Cooper

And a medical pass - right - pl atform
aline .

Conrad

What was that--the computer waE: off by
240 miles?

FCSD rep

Yes .

Their computations were calling

for 240 short based on what waE put into
it .
Conrad

That ' s right--that 1 s just what happened
and we were trying to fly short .

CQNEJD;l»TI~

•

@NflDi~TIAL

•

105

FCSD Rep

Yes .

Conrad

Well, do you feel better?

Cooper

No --

Cooper

At 16 hours and 24 minutes we had a
medical pass .

At 16 hours and 15 minutes

we alined SEF, powered up the radar,
rate gyros, etc .

At 16 hours and 37

minutes we had a D- 4 pass 423a, .
Conrad

That was the first missile .

Cooper

And we saw it .

Conrad

Saw it come up thru the clouds--or right
at the edge of the clouds.

FCSD rep .

Which one was this--out of here-­

Conrad

No--we didn't get any missiles out of
here.

It was out of Vandenburg.

It

was the Minuteman out of Vandenburg.
FCSD rep.

You got it as soon as you came out of
the clouds?

Cooper

Yes.

Conrad

Yeah- -just as plain as day.

Cooper

Right on it .

Should have gotten some

good readings on that .

We powered up

the computer then at day 3 , 16 hours

106

a.nd 45 minutes a.nd radar was on a.nd
radar off, on--we had that radar test
right in there that they wanted to do.
Conrad

Did we get those pictures of Venus and
Fomalhaut.

This platform 1 and 2

business?
Cooper

I thought we did.

Conrad

I didn ' t have a done log on that and
I don't think I wrote that down anywhere
whether we--

Cooper

I don't remember whether we ever got
Venus or not.

OK, let ' s see---the tape

recorder was apparently still working
there because you changed the tape there.
That day at 1 7 hours-- yeah--he:r:e we go.
Conrad

Wait a minute--here, I got it down here.
Platform test 1, magazine 9, picture 23,
l/30th of a second- no - somet::iing
Questar.

Cooper

Didn't get Venus--

Conrad

Platform test 02 , magazine 9, picture 22,
I/30th of a second-- oh, no fili;er--I 1 m
sorry.

Fomalhaut--we got Foma:Lhaut but

CO~FIDENTIAL.-

107

we didn ' t get Venus .

::

it .
Cooper

We never found

That' s right.

That ' s right.

We never even found

Venus on that night side.

Platform

test 2-Conrad

And I got a remark here to find out
that on day 6 at 01 hours, 02 minutes
and 15 seconds where in the heck were
we because there were great fires on the
ground?

Cooper

Yeah.

Conrad

OK--so I did write it down--all right-SA- D-13, day 3, 18 :16 :14--and I had
some comments about that here some place .
16:14 - We scored a 4 and a 1--and the
4 was in the upper--the 1 was in the
upper left hand box and the 4 was in
the second box in the second row.

Cooper

Right.

OK about this period of time-­

let ' s see we had an S- 7--0h, first before
this--then we had run some more tests
on our primary scanner and found out
that it was completely inoperative and--

108

Conrad

Yeah.

Cooper

Just kept getting worse, worse , worse-and so--Pete has a note here--tell Houston
about primary scanner--which we did
shortly thereafter at 3 hours, 18 minutes ,
3 days, 18 hours and 16 minutes we did
an S- 7 , and then at 3 days , 18 hours
and 25 minutes we purged, powe:('ed down ,
computer off, platform off, re·;icle off,
rate gyros off, etc. , etc.

Conrad

Yeah.

Then you have a--you 1 ve got an

S- 7 done at 03:21:20 : 08.
Cooper

Right ,

Conrad

You had an Apollo landmark at 03:21:38 :02
a 213 and I think that--we got Lake
De Poo Poo or whatever it was , when we
got t hat done.

Cooper

We got that one.

Conrad

There was a D- 4 D- 7 at 03:22: 48 :17 a
425a--I don ' t know what that was but-­

Cooper

Well , we also got in addition just before
that at day 3, 22 hours and 15 minutes
we got an S- 6 magazine 4; exposure 12 ,

109

cyclone off Japan which has been added

C

into there.

And then you start on that

HF test number 1 starting at 22 hours ,
55 minutes .
Conrad

Oh, yeah, 425a was Hawaii , Maui.

Cooper

Oh, yeah , you got that one.

Conrad

Maunakea was the volcano--it ' s not
active--but anyhow--

Cooper

Wait a minute--oh--213 is what--

Conrad

Huh?

That's Apollo landmark--this was

the D- 4 D- 7--let 1 s see the Apollo landmarks--let me look there and see if we
got 213 on it .
Cooper

All right , then that was at 22 :48 - the
D-4 D- 7 was at 3 days , 22 hours , 48 minutes , and 17 seconds was the 425a--and
416 .

Conrad

You got the Apollo landmark at 03 :21 : 38 :
02: 213 , magazine 4 , frame 10 , 1 - 2
pictures you took.

Coop:er

Yes .

Conrad

Camera 11.

Cooper

Then--day 4 start at day 4 , 00 hours ,

110

25 minutes, cabin lighting.

19 minutes

was the medical data, at 40 let•s see-40 minutes there was the D- 2 series 1, 4,
5--sequence 1, 4, 5.
Cooper

Mode 414 I have here--What was that?

Conrad

145 was a military, U.S.

Cooper

Yeah.

Conrad

That was if we saw it we were ·;o be in

What I s this Mode 414--

Mode 414 on the IR.
Cooper

Oh, OK.

Then we had a D- 6, mode 01 at

44:10, day 4, 44 minutes and 10 seconds .
Conrad

On day 4?

Cooper

Yes.

Conrad

I don I t have anything down hero for that.

Cooper

04:00

Conrad

Mode Ol--that 1 s--I think. that 1 s . -~ I
may have the numbers wrong.

Cooper

OK--at day 4, two hours, 20 minutes vision tests, both of us.

Conrad

Had that HF test in there someplace.

Cooper

Yeah, I've already called that out.
Medical data pass on me over CSQ at
03: 11:00.

We had an S-7, day 4, 03 hours ,

'AElEN:J:

111

20 minutes and 25 seconds , we got an
C

S- 7, sequence 01 and let's see--and thru
this period was where we both completely
ran out of steam-- here on--we were trying
to get you to sleep so I deleted all of
these tests right in thru here to let
Pete sleep .

On day 4, starting at 3

hours and 45 minutes on-Conrad

Deleted the HF tests here--

Cooper

Kept adding these tests in here that
were--just weren ' t going to get him
any sleep at all.

Conrad

This was this 145 mode this was at D- 6,
D-4, D- 7 and D- 2.

It was the 145 mode

for the 01 and 414 .
Cooper

That ' s right .

Conrad

Yeah, here I have this thing--4th day,

At day 4 , 48 hours--

U. S. passes--we started at 11 :00 o!clock.
Cooper

What 1 s this 04, 4 hours , 48 minutes a.rid
58 seconds there was a D-2 that we had
no success on,

Conrad

Now comment on that .

To do any of those

things you have to have the platform on.

112

FCSD r ep .

Then the platform wasn ' t on?

Conrad

Was not on .

Cooper

That ' s right- -see you got to he able
to have an accurate means of pointing
of having yaw and--

Conrad

They said pitch up 83 degreeR, yaw 45
degrees left--out of that window.

You

don I t have any idea in the wo:dd.

I

mean, we didn't even have rat1:! gyros
powered up .

You have no idea in the

world where you a.re pointing, just-Cooper

You are wasting your time try:Lng to do
this kind of job without a platform .

FCSD rep.

What is this a shot of--what "i.s this
target?

Conrad

Well , for any pointing r equiraments ,
especially ones in the sky--

Cooper

Where they are going at different angles ,
see.

Conrad

You have to have a platform.

Cooper

Then along at day 4, 5 hours and 40
minutes , Buzz ' s eX])eriment was placed
in there on a switch--

f

113

Conrad

Yeah.

Cooper

That was the straw that broke the camel's
back--we didn't do .

Cooper

Did MSC- 1, day 4, 5 hours and something
to .6 hours and something. Let ' s see-then on down to day 4 , 11 hours and 5 minutes

Conrad

Powered up.

Cooper

Then it ' s powered up platform, had a
medical data pass , 11 hours and 25 minutes
aligned SEF--11 hours and 40, powered
up the rate gyro and computer on--11 :51
bio-med recorder number 1 off, number 2 on.

Conrad

That was half way through the flight .

Cooper

11 : 55:55 we had a D- 6, the recovery ship,
and that wa$ ~he one we saw.

Conrad

No , we didn ' t get it .

I got no joy on

that one .
Cooper

OK .

Conrad

We got them the next time around I think.

Cooper

11 : 55:55 , 134 sequence zero A.

Conrad

Yeah, we got them the next rev .

Cooper

OK .

Conrad

OK--I 1 ve got the D- 6 at 12:24:02 was done-

114

that was the sequence 091 or W:~atever
it was.
Cooper

Right .

Conrad

The platform aligned SEF, for t he command
pilot we got- -

Cooper

Purged the fuel cells at day 4 , 12 hours
and 50 minutes .

Conrad

Yeah, SA D- 13 on Laredo at 13 : :?3 : 39-what happened?

Cooper

Neither one of us saw the target --on
that one.

Conrad

I'm not sure I 1ve got anything written
down.

I don ' t .

Why don ' t I ?

I don ' t know what happened.

Huh.
Then we had

a D-6 089-what the heck was 085'?
Cooper

Day 4, 13:58:50 , D- 6 in F.a.st .Af'rica- -

Conrad

0h yeah, that was Blantyre Aercdrome and
Malawi.

I don't think we got that one.

Cooper

Yes we did.

Conrad

Did we?

Cooper

Malawi airport--remember?

Conrad

Maybe we did- -I don't have a done written
on it for some reason.

115

"

Cooper

Yeah, I remember we had the picture of
it you know and it was out there on
that little point--or wa s that the one
by Ka.no that we couldn' t find because
of the weather.

Conrad

There's one in there where we did 089- let's see what it looked like .

Cooper

Look up 089--that 1 s the one wher e we
had all the weather on it by Ka.no ,
wasn ' t it?

Conrad

Yeah, well , we saw these lakes but-­

Cooper

We saw the lakes but that was in under
a big deck of clouds .

Conrad

Did we or didn't we get the aerodrome.
guess we didn ' t get the aerodrome.

Cooper

No , we didn't get it.

Because remember

we saw the lake and saw the river come
out and then there was this whole deck
of clouds over there so we couldn ' t get
that because of the cloud cover .
Conrad

That's right.

Cooper

We saw the general area-- where it was
at--but we couldn' t get on it at all .

I

116

Let ' s see at 14:15, day 4, D- 4, D- 7 ,
410c.
Conrad

D- 4 , D- 7 , 410c was--that•s one of the
ones where we were supposed to track
a star or something--yeah , we were
supposed to track Nunki and we never
could find it because it was--

Cooper

It was up in first, early--

Conrad

It was up early-- we had troubln with
that .

That ' s another thing I could have

recommended those gu:ys--we got enough
to do in the spacecraft not to worry
about setting up the star chart and
figuring out from the- -somethir..g you
can ' t do from the star chart is figure
out a pitch and yaw angle and the
grormd ' s got that information up the
kazoo, so on any of these ones where
they want you to photograph some stars
or anything else-you' ve got to platform
up again - the easiest thing to do is
send up a pitch and yaw with it and
that just takes all the work out of it

117

in the spacecr aft. Gosh, we ' re messing
around with the star charts- - still don ' t
tell you how much to pitch up or yaw

.::

around to find the darn thing.
Cooper

They tell you where it would be on yaw
path.

Conrad

You just sort of got to figure it outit •s over to the left or the right and
go over and look for it .
not the way to do it .

Well , that ' s

Heck, we never

navigated that way in the Navy.

You

go into star chart with local hour angle

and it gives you the elevation and azimuth
to the star, from North, and that ' s
essentially what you need here .

You

need the elevation and azimuth angle off
the orbital plane.
Cooper

OK , let's see--at day 4, 14:56:50 we had
a D- 4, D- 7 White Sands Sled Run which
was successful .

Conrad

And then we got the ship.

Cooper

An then we got the D- 6 424a r ight after
that.

At 14: 57 : 31 we got D-6 sequence 134 .

118

Conrad

Which we did photograph the Lake Champlain.

FCSD rep.

Did you see this thing-- how dii you
pick this thing up--did you us: a telescope or-

Cooper

We saw him visually - found h~n visually
and then

FCSD rep.

From the wake--

Cooper

Put the pipper on him and Pete took
pictures with the big camera.

Then we

got a D- 6 15:04:40 series 134.

What

was that?
Conrad

That ' s the ship .

Cooper

Well, what was the 424a?

Conrad

That was the White Sands MissiJe Run.

Cooper

Oh, OK,

We got a D-4, D-7 at 15:19:00

that was the 419-Conrad

The 419 was the ascension calibration.
We did that darn thing again for them-remember that over Australia or something
I don't know what the heck we did it
for because I told them we got that
thing once.
aline.

Anyhow, then we did a platform

~FIDE~TIA

119

Cooper

All right - 15 hours 40 minutes-

Conrad

Then D- 4, D- 7 was the second Minuteman
which we saw but we didn't track.

Cooper

16 hours 28 minutes, 423b - we did the
HF tests 4 at 17 hours.

Conrad

Wait a minute- I got a - we had an S- 7
at 16:37 and it was the thunderstorms in
southern Florida.

I think we got those.

Cooper

We got that one.

All right -

Conrad

We had a D- 6 at 16: 51:25 which was an 065 -

Cooper

Right

Conrad

And if I ' m not mistaken that was that
Island off Brazil and we photographed
the wrong island - then we found out
our mistake in time and -

Cooper

Just as we were going over we shifted
over to the other island -

Conrad

And we photographed the right island it lookeQ. like there was only one island
out there and we found out there were
two i s lands out there so we did get the
right pictures .

Cooper

There again, the maps we had just weren ' t

120

big enough in their overall look at
things to give you a clue as to what Conrad

I ' ll show you this - This is the kind of
thing that you just can•t have-that was
065- now what you need to help you find
an island is some clue as to Khere it
is located in the world- well, t hat ' s
what we had--

Cooper

Yeah, there was the island--

Conrad

Now it turns out that right up about here
there ' s another island--laught er--and
man we took all kinds of -- sE!e fortunately
it was far enough away - you •• look 15
seconds up there is 15 x 8 is 120 milesand 120 miles is a lot of dist ance but
you are covering that in 15 snconds - well
fortunately this was about 15 or 20
seconds - we·were pitched down and we
were at least at the 90 and Wt:! got the
second island a little bit pa::Jt the nadir ,
because we already had been t :cack.ing t his
first island see and thlm here we came
drifting along feeling how great we were

Q©~fNTtAE,

121

getting the picture but we really dirui 1 t
think it quite looked like the right
island but because we didn ' t see an air
field on it - well here came the island
with the air field - it was a good 200
miles down the pike but you need a little
more Cooper

A little more help as to where it ' s at.
Let ' s see 17 hours was HF test 4 we did that,

Conrad

Yeah, we powered down .

Cooper

17 :40 - Medical data - we did that.

Conrad

Yeah, now here is a good time for a comment
on this thing.

Every time we went thru

these state- side passes now a - to operate
on a state- side passes - they start out
two orbits before you hit the state- side
passes- you started getting chatter--the
first time you hit Carnavon and then well-no , I take that back - the first thing
that happened is we come by that low sweep
up thru Central America liliere we got
Canaveral and Antigua and we get Houston

122

remote from there and it would be Dave
Scott and Elliot ,a.nd they would start
giving us a little poop about what was
going to go on that day see--and heck
they'd tell us a little bit acout the
latest hydrogen calculations er something
(laughter) and that was - we 1 ci. sort of
get an idea of what was going on, then
the next t~ip around is the first time
you pick up Carnavon and then he'd sta.xrt
to give you an update and he'd get about
half way through what you wern going to
do in those state- side passes and we ' d
pick up Dave Scott again at Canton and
he I d finish it and then we'd come by that
fringe pass by the states and that ' s when
they changed the watch and we'd say hello
to everybody that was going off and coming
on and then we'd have all the stuff and
the next trip around - that would start
the three revs over the states see and
then it was just go--you had gear all
over the spacecraft - gee we had everything

123

we owned out and we ' d be going through
books and writing and flight plan and
then we ' d leave the states and it says
pilot ' s nap period and Gordo was supposed
t o do something else and that was impossible - it would take two more revs to
clean up the spacecraft before we ever
got to do anything else so we never got
on that part of the flight plan.

This

pilot nap period - that was a big joke Cooper

Now pilot's eat period and nap period
and all -

Conrad

Always cleaning the spacecraft and we
had to clean up the whole thing - it was
a good time to do it -- we ' d have meal
garbage out and we ' d have all the experiments out so we ' d -- up to the states on
that last one .

Cooper

It was handier to eat together too because you had to get the stuff out
anyway--so it was handier for us just to
eat together so we just always ate at
the same time .

•

124

Conrad

And we would be in the procesH of cleaning
up when we'd come by and we ' d have that
Guaymas pass where we'd come ·1:iy and have
California acq. and Guaymas acq. and
we ' d go right down the side of Mexico ,
the west side, and then cross the isthmus
and go down Brazil and then fI'Om there
on you - that was your last contact with
the states and you'd stay out there with
the CSQ RKV cycle through the rest of
the night and that time we got all the
way around there and picked up the CSQ
the first time and we ' d have Hawaii once
more -

Cooper

Then we were already through my s l eep
period and that ' s supposed to be Pete ' s
sleep period - that was the not:'lllal sleep
period.

Conrad

We worked our tail off that wh:>le time -

Cooper

That was the normal sleep peri,:,d and we
just barely have things all sq·.lared away
so then we both powered down - ·-

Conrad

Go thru this terrible 50 minut,:s with both

of us like this - we ' d uh- uh, oh, yeah - hi

125

there - laughter .
Cooper

Yeah, ok, everything 1 s fine (snoring)
(1a,1g~+.er) .

Conrad

Talk about lonely--that •s when it really
got bad.

You really knew you were out

in the no place.
Cooper

We just discussed one thing while you
were out, was this window situation.

You

couldn't even begin to see out of Pete' s
window when we launched.

It was really

terrible and it was in between those
outside panes and glass .

And my window

between the outside sealed units and the
inside unit of glass there was a bee Conrad

Oh, yeah , yeah, that stuff is on the
inside of the outer pane.

I ·don' t

know

how that got there.
Cooper

And inside these two outside units on my
side in between those and the inside pane
of glass there was a little bee and a
fly and a whole bunch of flecks of dirt
and odds and ends in there.

And my

window wasn ' t as frosted over as his.

126

Over the period of time, they both got
a certain amount of little frosty scum
on the outside of them and when we fired
the scanner covers there were about foUT
or five little gray flecks of etuff and
debris just flew everywhere right in that
period of time and four or five· little
gray flecks came on the window.
Conrad

Heck, that's before launch isn't it?
Oh, I didn ' t know that.

FCSD rep .

Did it ever clear up?

Cooper

No . I think it was just unforg:i.v eable.
I think if they can I t do bette1· on windows
than that they ought to just qt.it trying.
I could see maybe having some El.lllount of
debris-and then when you use the thruster s
the debris would all show up again.

We

were on--here we are up here--t his med
data.

Day 4, 16 hours and that data -

did .
Cooper

16 hours 28 minutes - D-4, D- 7 , D-6 , 423b.

Conrad

Yeah that was the second missi:.e - which
we didn I t get any track on -- ue saw -

i'

ONFl0ENTIA[
Cooper

HF test 4 then at 417 ,
data was done.

127

4:17:40 med

HF test 4 ended on -

down there - OK, day 4, 19 hours 44 minutes
was S- 7 which was completed .
Conrad

Yeah, both the ·s- 71 s were completed.

Cooper

Then there's an S- 7b, 21 hours , 9 minutes
and 50 seconds storm Doreen - we completed,
Time of closest approach was at 21:09:30,
They had us tracking this storm - you
see

Conrad

Oh, yeah.

Cooper

We estimated the eye was approximately
250 miles left of course -

Conrad

Have you got the orbits - yeah, here it
is .

This thing is the greatest thing in

the whole world .

It 1 s the simplest -

cheapest thing in the spacecraft and Cooper

It is - it is great.

Conrad

We would have been lost without this
thing.

This orbital update map.

Boy,

it really- well, the orbit was really
good as far as Cooper

You really don't know where ~ou are at-

,,,
128

Conrad

But this is a good little map t oo .

It

really has the right things on it.
There wasn't anytime we didn ' t Look
down and know exactly where we ·Here.
This thing is really great.

Probably the

cheapest thing in the spacecraft.
Cooper

That 1 s one Jerry Jones made up.

We tried

out a long time ago and I said I liked
it and I wanted to take one like that
rather than this big elaborate one Conrad

Yeah, it really worked great.

Conrad

Yeah, I just saw all these map star updates
we had here.

Cooper

Yeah.

One thing they could do .

They

could put about 3 or 4 more orbi ts on it
and not have t o update it so often .
be a little handier.

Might

Just a tr.ought -

but it 1 s good the way i t is.

CK, l et's

see , we ' re on day 4, 22 hours en d 20
minutes - we did a cabin l ighting survey.
Conrad

We did the radar test 10 .

S-7 , MSC-1.
Cooper

And med data.

~tf>fNT=IAL

Cabi n lighting

~
Conrad

ffDffiTIA[

129

Apollo landmark 207- that was at 07 :14:25
must be day 5 ,

Cooper

No , not that far along - We did UHF 6
we did at 2 hours , day 5, 2 hours and
something.

Conrad

You said you had an S-7 that was again
during my sleep cycle and you said missed
while discussing Cryos with CSQ.

Cooper

Right.

Conrad

And then you had an MSC 1 at 05 :40 and you
got that done.

Cooper

Now you're ahead of me--hold up just a
minute .

We 're down here now - let~

here's the S-7.

see -

05 :40 MSC- 1 that was done .

Conrad

You got your Apollo landmark -

Cooper

Apollo landmark at sequence 207 at 7 hours
and 14 minutes.

Conrad

What was 207?

Cooper

Lake Titicaca

Conrad

That was the Canaries -

Cooper

Oh, yeah , all right.

Then we had SAD- 13 -

vision tests on both of us which we did
together instead of separately.

And then

NFl0Etsl:TIAt

130

'4

at 5 day , 10 hours and 20 mim:.tes we
had Apollo No. 208 , which we g'Ot .
had S- 502 which we got .

We

We had D- 4,

D- 7, sequence 414 which we got and we
had the platform tests which ·Ke did .
Conrad

Yeah then we got the radar teet run -

Cooper

And Pete has a note here "Get serious,"
it really starts getti ng thick and
heavy.--

Conrad

Well , I don't know--they were really getting
wild -

Cooper

We had a platform aline - plat form test,
radar test , this is day 5, 11 hours and

35 minutes - We had D- 6 , D- 4, D- 7 , platform
aline, radar test Conrad

That ' s where they were off the·ir rocker.

Cooper

But we got them.

Those were s.ll in the

day 5, 11 to 12 hours Conrad

Listen, there ' s a lot of sloppy things
in there - I mean we got thine:s done but
we missed little

subtleties -· like we

were supposed to run the 16mm camera
along with some part of the I R gear and
I wouldn I t get that on - and E. bunch of

0NF-IDENT.IAL

.Iii

G0MF-IDFiNTl~"t
little things .

131

Again, we were always

man, they had stuff thrown at us as fast
as you could say Jack Robinson,
Cooper

Let ' s see--S-B , D-13 at Laredo--do you have
one of those right in that period- day 5,
13 hours -

Conrad

Day 5, 13 hours - no .

Cooper

I don ' t have it either .

Conrad

I have this all scratched out for some
reason ,

Cooper

D- 6 - This is where we really began to
have trouble with something -- what was
it we were really having trouble with?

Conrad

The O.AMS systems cut out.

Cooper

That ' s right.
out .

The O.AMS systems pooped

Day 5, at about 11 hours when we

were cranking up for this is when we found
that our OAMS systems was really getting
bad, and we already had discovered that
we had one thruster out and a partial
otrer one out but this is the time when
we found out we had about 3 others that
were just about out.
Conrad

Yeah, I have a little note here - report

- ~ NFIDENilAl

•

132

to fl ight ~oi ce tape out - num·oer 7 yaw
left thruster out and OAMS heat er light
turned ba ck on again.
Conrad

And so we were supposed to ask 7 Keywest
and D- 8 S- 13, SAD- 13 about 6 : 22:50 -

Cooper

OK - From ther e on for a while things
just got scrubbed i n the flight plan on
that day five , the l atter part of the
time on entries there .

Conrad

Yeah, that ' s when they got us into this
minimum power down - voice cont~ol - 1
suit f an - 2 coolant pumps , 1 a,Jq_. aid ,
UHF r eceiver, DOS receiver , PCM -

Cooper

That ' s when they decided the hydrogen
wasn I t going to l ast at the preoent
electri cal rate .

Conrad

That ' s what I wrote down - Houston hot
dope - drift for three days - r icky, tieky.
(Laughter) Sorry -

Cooper

But at day 5, 19 hours and 25 minutes we
did get a fix on Doreen - wher e she was
ther e .

Conrad

Yeah, everything happened that day.

That

IDE1'1TIA -

133

was when the PC02 started to read for
some reason.
Cooper

PC02 came off the scale and was reading
way up there for a while.

We broke out

one of the co tapes, and it showed that
2
we were still all right .

We figured the

gage was its usual reliability.
Conrad

Okay, now, I think this is good for the
recorder right here.

At that time, as

of 5 days 21 hours 00 minutes they
wanted to know what our experiment status
was.

So on the UHF , we had completed

tests 1, 2, 3 and I said 6 just so that
if they were still trying to keep that
number under their lid.

That's what it

sounded like because they kept mentioning
it.

We ' d done D- 1 , 1, ~, and 3 which

had completed D- 1.

D- 2 we had done

nothing, because we didn ' t get the REP.
D-6 we'd taken 72 pictures .

D- 4 , D- 7 we ' d

had completed 405, 408, 409, 410, 410a,
410b , 411, 414 , 420 , 422 , 423a, 423b , 424a ,
425a.

We had 16 minutes and 8 seconds of

Jeo~~f6i~tW

on. ~

134

Conrad

On S-8, D-13 we completed all tests although we
didn ' t see the targets several times.
completed it.

On S- 1 we

S-5 and S-6 we'd taken three maga­

zines for a total of 210+ pictures .

S-7 we had

23 pictures or 8 groups that they had ~anted plus
we had taken cal card picture.

The M-1 broke at

4 days and some odd hours, and I don ' t know the
exact time .

M-3 didn't make any difference.

we did on day one , three, and four.
Landmarks 207, 8, 12 1 and 13.
lighting surveys.

MSC-1

Apollo-we got

We'd done 4 cabin

The humidity sensor we read at

least once a day, and the 16mm film we had one and
a quarter magazines shot up which is general stuff.
That was what we had completed in 5 days.

Then

from there on, we went through this big drill of
sending up of all kinds of experiments but don't
expend any fuel on them.

An so we were pretty well

restricted to S-5, S-6, and S-7 type phJtographs
which was about all we got.
Cooper

Catch as catch can.

Conrad

We marked down all this other stuff.

W1~ did catch

a D-4/D-7 occasionally if it was the ri1sht sort of
thing-if we were sort of pointed in the right

FJD~TIAL ~
direction.

135

Like I got a--in drifting flight I

got 417 and 418 at 6 days 8 hours 41 minutes .

I don ' t remember what that is .
Cooper

From here on , we just-- we drifted through this
period of time and the only time we ever powered
anything up was when the drift rates got up pretty
high.

We would power up, damp the rates , and power

right back down , and hope we- - and did manage to
keep somewhat attitude so we could get occasionally
some pictures .

For instance on--we did continue

doing MSC-1 experiments which incidentally-- even in
times of minimum power when they wanted us powered
right down to our eyeballs they still left MSC- 1
on.

I don ' t know how much fuel i t takes , but it

always erks me if we had to have everything off
why could they manage to leave that one on.

Day

6 , 8 hours, 41 minutes we got D-4/D-7 417 , 418 , and

414 .
Conrad

Yes , on that one day, Day 6 , when they had the HF
tests in Houston--0roadcast HF- - we had Houston on
HF till 15 hours 59 minutes 00 seconds and this
included the remoting through Ascension,and the
remoting through Ascension was beautiful .

That

was really good recepti on.

And then tl:.ey were

playing 'Never on Sunday' and that faded out at

15 hours 08 minutes.
Cooper

That was the best HF test we had .

Conrad

Yes , and we started receiving the music again
coming around the other side of the wo1·ld at

15 hours 49 minutes.

This must be 16::9.

14 : 59?

14 : 59, I got the wrong number in here J think .
just make a note to check it.

I'll

No, thi~ is 15:08,

15:49 which is about right half way arcund the world
and this number may be wrong.
Cooper

Is that day 6?

Conrad

Yes, check it and see if we got a note in the Flight
Plan.

Day 6 at 1400, almost 1500.

Then we did

some of these radar tests and for the 1ikes of
me to underst and do you know what was ~ome of the
discussion on why the radar didn't work after that .
Gee, it locked up so beautifully the first day on
the REP down there.
Cooper

The one REP pass we had, man, things Jt;.s t worked
like a charm.

Conrad

And it just never did work after that.
got a lock on.

We always

137

•
Cooper

And I read analog.

My analog read beautiful , but

he couldn ' t read out digital and that ' s impossible
because the analog data comes from the di gital da ta .
I could even tell where it was .

It was s i tting

out on Meritt Island, wasn't it?

I ' ll bet--it wa s

accurate enough--I ' ll bet you that you could almost
t ell what building it was in.

It looked like it

was r ight out here in the south part of the complex
here .
Conrad

Where wer e we receiving music f r om?

Cooper

We got a little Chinese HF br oadcast every now and
then.

Conrad

Peoples program.

We went through these radar tests just drif ting
around out there .

Cooper

Oh, yes , they were trying to jam our r adios .
Everytime we went over the China area .

Conrad

I had the decided impression that they were t r ying
to jam our UHF.

So it was either that or--oh, yes ,

where was it where we heard the radar on the r adio .
Cooper

China.

Conrad

No , we were along the fringes of Russia , but we
went over China.

Cooper

We were over something like Indi a .

We wer e coming right over the Tibet- - the hi gh Tibet

QWflO

138

area there , and we were just on the south edge of
China.
Conxad

Have you ever t axied close by radar?

You can hear

i t on radio , i t goes "beep , beep, beep, beep,"
and you can even clock the antenna sweep , and
you can get about three pulses . . . . "Beep ,beep ,beep,"
and then , "beep, beep , beep" , and you can see that
old antenna down there on the ground going around
and we could hear the UHF as big as heck and we
were way up in the middle of no place, and I know
darn well it must have been--Russian radar.
Cooper

We were up on the high of southern China.

High

plains area.
Conxad

Okay, then we ran another eXPeriment summary, and
this eXPeriment summary was for the sixth day .
And on the D- 6 we did not see 135 which was the
Laser.

Laser out of White Sands .

that darn Laser .

Never did see

And the D-4/D-7 we caught a

417, 418, and on S-6 we ' d taken five more pictures .
On S-5 we'd t aken 43 more pictures and on S-7 we ' d
taken one more storm or two pictures .

On S-8 , D- 13

I have no- - we didn't get to mark the targets , but
we may have gotten the 70mm pictures of them that

EM=FfAL
they wanted .

139

I had to point--I may have all

spacecraft in the picture .

I don ' t know-we were

just drifting by this one .

And then at 11 hours

30 minutes on the sixth day , we went through this
crank up this number 2 fuel cell again after it
had been shut down for 20 hours .

They wanted to

bring it up by warming up the coolant loop so
we went through this drill of shutting off the
Primary Cooling Valve Circuit Breaker and opening
the Rad Flow to BYPASS so that we could bypass
the SECONDARY LOOP and let it warm up a bit .

Then

we went through the purge procedures and brought
the fuel cell on the l i ne .

And i t came on pretty

good .
Conrad

We never got any of the rest of the experiments
on that day .

They wanted general photos of the

U. S. and so forth , D- 6 1 s and we just were never
in position .

We were always pointed straight up

or something like that .

Then we had another UHF

test leaving the States and on the seventh day
and we lost HF on the seventh day at 16 hours
and 27 minutes and 00 seconds .

I had the Squelch

set on 4 , and I brought the Squelch up higher and

..

~ NFl0ENTIAL

140

and we got them back again and lost it 3 minutes
later at 07 days 16 hours and 30 minufos .

Then

we did a MSC- 1 .
Cooper

I have a note here 7 days and 20 minut(~S was that
large storm where we located the depre:3sion on it .
Take a look at it , and see just where :Lt was ,
and weather breaking off from it .

Conrad

And then when they came up with their :1ext ground
t est whi ch--

Cooper

Had two S-7 eXPeriments .

Conrad

. .. which I think we could have done without and
that ' s when they had us warm up the solenoids for
ten minutes .

The thing that got to us was that

we had turned-- They had us shut off the Propellant
Valve and what we should have done wa s dumped the
Propellant by rotating through all control posi tions
on the handle , but what they had us do was go to
the full yaw left position and dumped the whole load
of manifold pr opellants out through the the malfunctioning left yaw thrusters and man did .that
couple up into a couple of beautiful rates, and we
were doing it at night, and we didn ' t realize until
it wa s too l ate and all of a sudden there were the

141

stars going by , and we were just going through the
world every which way , and we were supposed to
hold it that way f or ten minutes and we were--okay ,
we were well aware .. . .
Cooper

Where were you?

Conrad

Yes , and I just got to this big set of procedures

This day 7?

on that test and it didn ' t work .
Cooper

I have a note here at Day 7 , 3 hours and 19 minutes
only 22 more r evolutions to go .

Same length as

MA- 9 .
Conrad

Okay, now , here are the comments of the degregation
of the other thruster s .

Now left roll only with

the roll logic switch in pitch.
yaw .

We had no right

Right yaw only with the roll logic switch in

yaw position.

No left roll.

Then if you had the

roll logic in yaw , pitch up and down were okay in
yaw right gave right roll also .

Pitch up , right

roll , pitch down you a lso got a right roll .
You ' ve got to figure out which thruster s were
weaker than the other ones .
Cooper

Roll right gave yaw right .

Conrad

Right , and then r oll logic and pitch rolled right
okay.

Roll left okay .

No left yaw.

So and the

CONFIDEJ\ITr

142

other thing is is when you hit the thrusters you
can very definitely tell from the sound that some
were putting out· more than others.
Cooper

I think that ' s what was giving us the yaw
roll off was that in pairs of thruster of one would
be strong maybe and one weak and would give you
couplings .

Conrad

That was exactly what was happening.

~'.hey were

cross coupling.
Cooper

It was really messy.

Conrad

And then I 1ve got down here the roll..

I have

nothing else in the book until we start talking
about retro here and the change s that we decided
to go into 121- 1 instead of 122 .

And t here would

be 27 minutes over Carnarvon instead of 36 and all
the power up sequence .

Now , I ' ve got one comment .

We came up over Carnarvon and when I hi:.d-- when
we left the Cape on the Rev going into retrofire
a transmitted a val id load up t o the sJacecraft
and I called McDivitt and I said , "I ' m putting the
Computer into Reentry ," and we came up over
Carnarvon and the guy says , "Stand by. I ' m going
to update you computer with a new load .

GE>NFH:)ENffA L

'

Boom!"

143

And the computer was in reentry and I said, "Golly,"

,,.

and I swi tched that thing to pr elaunch and he said
the loads in and va lidated , and I didn't get a DCS
light .

And I ' d gotten a DCS light everytime .

Cooper

We never f ailed to get a DCS light .

Conrad

And I was never reall y convinced even when we
checked the two cores that the l oad wa s r ight that
he put up there , but I guess it was .
checked out .

Tha t ' s been

We did have the right load in the

computer.
Cooper

That procedure is r eal ly poor , very , ver y poor .

Conrad

I don ' t understand . ...

Cooper

We had agreed and agreed and agreed that nobody
would send a DCS load or anything without permission
f r om you first --t i ll they cleared with you first .
And he just right out of the clear blue sky with
12 minutes-- something like that to go to retro .

Conrad

27 .

Cooper

27 was it?
close .

Well , anyway , it ' s getting down darn

Here we were all l i ned--all set up to go

and everything all squared away and what we thought
::.

was a real proper load out of the Cape .

Had gone

into reentry and here we wer e a ll set .

Then here

-CQNElQ f=.W+tAL

144

this gu.y just says, "I ' m sending a DCS update , "
and WHAM! her e it comes .

No warning.

No nothi ng .

Before you could even tell him to wait, t he
darn things i n reentry .
Conrad

He didn ' t check his ground information, becaus e
if he ' d looked at his boar d , he would t.ave seen
that the computer was in r een try .

He could have

told us to put it in prelaunch.

It all happened

so fast .

Boy, my heart r eally sank , because we

had that thing-- we were all set up .

We were rea~y

to go and everything and that was a bi g· blitz.·
Now , after 121 orbits and we'd left the Cape after
stateside track.

Why, after 121 orbits did they

have to update that thing between the Cape and
Carnarvon?

I mean they should have known where

the heck we where .
Cooper

I just don ' t understand it .

I don ' t either and if they are going to play
around with that , boy, my feelings r ight now on
i t is that that DCS circuit breaker oug~t to be
off all the time.

I felt that way befo:ce , and

I deci ded well , those guys worked out so well that
maybe it would work , but after that one time ,
that just convinced me that you ought to just

145

turn that darn thing off and leave the DCS circuit
:z

breaker off .
Conrad

Okay, the next thing before retrofire .

Cooper

I had one note here, just a second, at 7--Day 7 ,
22 hours, and 30 minutes.

We were on that real

black night side way down there somewhere on the
South American area .

Remember we saw those tre­

mendous series of thunderstorms .

Just fantas tic ,

you could-Conrad

The brightest lightning I ' ve ever seen anywhere .
It lit up the inside of the spacecraft .

Cooper

- - see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles
almost as far as you could see in any direction
out the windows you could see lightning just
lighting up-just blossoming everywhere .

There

were hundreds of miles of thunderstorms of which
you could probably see at one time-you could
probably see 20 or 25 thunderstorms light up
at the same time .
Conrad

And I've got somewhere on the 16mm film .

I opened

the stops up, and I took pictures of the lightning.
I don't know whet her it came out .
Cooper

They would just light the whole spacecraft up.

Boy, I ' ve never seen such fantastic big areas
covered by .thunderstorms .

Just , tremenious !

And

they were big, each individual CB lookei like it
was maybe 50 to 100 miles across and just whole
columns of them stacked around.

They must have

really been. ...
Conrad

Okay , about the only other thing that I can think
of that we did in the test nature there--was
wanted to and did fire the oams Squibb on the
regul ator , and you can ' t hear it .

And every other

Squibb--every other thing that we ever fired we
could hear .
Cooper

But that one we couldn' t hear.

That simulator was really good on that SEP OAMS ,
SEP ELECT, and SEP ADAPT .

Simulator could be

a lot louder on the SEP ADAPT.

That thing really

takes off .
Conrad

How do you want to cover the reentry phase?
Because that's about it.

I ' ve got one other comment,

but this one is written after landing.
.
HF whip antenna didn't deploy.

FJDENTIAt

It ' s the

FIDENT ~L
Conrad

JI

147

Well , why don't we get ourselves down on the water?
Stowage wise when we left the United Stat es on the
last Cali fornia- Guaymas pass which occurred at-it occurr ed around 7: 18: 40, something like that.
We started our reentry stowage right then and there .
Very early i n the game , because we wanted to make
sur e that we had- - that was almost 20 some hours to
reentry.

Cooper

First of all , at least once a day, we went through
the entire cockpit and br ought everything up to
completely clean configuration .

Everything stowed

and we had about a 2 day basis .

We planned what

meals we were going to need for the next 2 days and
we would get these meals out , get them stowed in an
easy- to- get- to place--around the footwell areas-generally i n the footwells back in our feet area
and would restack and restow garbage and try and
get it completely caught up on a day- to-day basi s ,
so that we didn ' t have a lot of garbage sitting
around .
Conrad

We always did i t right after that CaliforniaGuaymas l ast pass over the States starting out
into the boondock area and this conflicted with the
Pilot ' s naptime .

That was my scheduled napti me .

Of\lFIDENTI

.€>MFt0ENTt.

148

We never- - we always ran late on that .

I ' d get the

nap, but I'd get it much later and that would cut
a l ittle bit into Gordo ' s sleep per iod and that
would wind up overlapping into my sleep period and
then we would both catch a nap . . . Gor do's napti me
which was just before Carnarvon .
Cooper

I don ' t think we ever came over Carnarvon but what
we were asleep.

Conr ad

The next morning we would both be asleeip .
Gordo ' s right.

. . . but

The meals--if we wc,uld like to

stop and talk about that .

We did not E?ven get into

the left food box until the fourth day.
meals that were in the footwell .

We ate the

There! were two

stowage footwells to start with and th1:.t gave us
the two garbage bags that we always hac. out .

In

other wor ds we always had two silver be.gs, food
bags , open that we could put garbage ir.--any kind
of garbage-- and we always kept two of t hose out, - one on Gordo I s side and one on mine.

~'h en we ' d

actually collect more- -we ' d eat more me•als , but
we always ran with two of those out at least and
we ' d wind up with maybe two in each foctwell and
that's when we would restow at the end of that day .
What we did was put as much of the garl:,age as

'

149

possible back in the r i ght hand box.

We completely

emptied the right hand box at the beginning of
the fl i ght and stowed the articles around the
cockpit in those red bags that we had built for the
back of the seat and they really worked well.
the top of the seat .

On

I kept two meals always stowed

i n the area that led to the right hand stowage box
over my left shoulder .

I kept my two meals there .

Gordo normally kept his two down on either side
of his helmet in the footwell area.

We kept our

garbage bags--our silver garbage bags down in there
and the reason I say silver garbage bags is because
those green ones that McDonnell made just didn ' t
work at all.

We never used them in the whole

flight.
Cooper

They are no good at all .

Conrad

They tore up .

Cooper

They are hard to get into .

They tear .

The top-­

the way it puckers up there you have a hard time
getting anything in and out of it .

I finally used

one over there to fasten that camera- -that 200
millimeter camera, that 35 mm camera.

We put the

lens down there so that it would hold--so that the

L

150

bag would hold it in.

Keep it from floating and

then fasten the velcro upon the back of the
maneuver controller.
Conrad

Now there was one thing that one green bag that I
had originally had the REP plan stow in it.

The

REP plan was never taken out and I never took the
bag off the wall.

Then, the other green bag had

the Poleroid light filter in.

I took that light

filter in and out so many times that ihe elastic on
the top of the bag broke and the bag ~ot completely
frayed from my right leg rubbing agai:n.st it.

My

pressure suit actually wore that clott all through.
You can see that on that bag t hat came out of there .
So they didn' t work at all .

We kept s.11 our food

garbage and all that little sort of tl:.ings in the
silver food bags that we opened and wl'..en we filled
one we would wrap it with tape and stew it down
there until it was time for our daily housecleaning.
Cooper

I might add for stowage two items that we found were
extremely important were rubber bands and tape.

Conrad

We actually ran out of tape on the eighth day packing the last of the garbage.

We used every bit of

tape that we could lay our hands on.
tape off of the bags.

ftBEN,T"'L

•

We took the

"

~GNaDENTIAL

151

Cooper

And I had a whole pocketful of rubber bands.

Conrad

And Gordo had a whole pocketful of rubber bands .
We found that was the only way to handle the food.
After we ate a rehydratable package or even a few
solid packages that we opened.

We always resealed

them again wi th tape and rolled them up as small as
we could get them and used the tape to wrap them
with for stowage.
Cooper

To keep them very small and compact.

FCSD Rep

Did you get all this stuff where you originally
planned to put it?

Conrad

I have a copy of our reentry stowage here which
shows what varied from the way it was.

Now the

big items, there was only one big item that didn't
go .

There were only two i terns that didn't get

stowed i n the place that it was called for that I
remember right now.

The S-1 camera went over in

the right food box rather than the left food box
and the urine device we kept out until the last
minute and we restowed it in its original stowage
place which was in Gordo's left box.
Cooper

And then there were two partial bags of defecation
bags and an empty bag and one bag full of about a
half of a meal , paper and wrappings from one meal

152

that went in behind my ejection seat.

I managed

to work around the side and get clear down around
to the back and manage to shove it down in behind
the seat.
Conrad

Then I had a little bit of miscellaneous trash like
that in the right lower wrap around reel pouch that
was over the seat for reentry.

It connisted of

several things which we hadn't planned t o stow any
place .

The cardiovascular cuffs that :: cut off were

one of them.

Some loose paper trash Lke the top

round paper ring off the defecation bags.

This

was j ust a convenient place to put light trash and
I saw no reason to remove it from there .
was about it.

And that

I forget--they'll have a list of

the other items that were in there but they were all
minor paper things .
Cooper

Yes, I had a few pieces of paper and th ings in the
outboard back wing.

Conrad

But we pretty well had everything s towed in its
proper place before reentry.
exception.

Very l i t-;le

Well, let me look right now.

what we had stowed in the right place.

I marked
Okay, in the

two left--they ' re called left and right food box
extensions .

~0NFI

The back ones that had thEi rubber coveTs

L

153

on them.

They had originally had the-- in my side

the blood pressure reprogrammer , the hose interconnect adapters and the pilot's personal preference
kit .

Gordo's side it had just the personal prefer­

ence kit and the hose interconnect, right?

There

wasn't anything else in there , was there?
Cooper

I don ' t think there was .
It calls out here for a blood pressure reprogrammer
but we only had one.

Cooper

No, we only had the one on board.

Conrad

Okay, I removed those three items and Gordo removed
his two items just prior to reentry .

Cooper

The hose interconnect--! had

Conrad

Yes, that's what I sai d , the hose interconnect and
the pilot's personal preference kit .

The two kits

we stowed in our leg pockets and the two hose things
we stowed up in the green pouches during reentry
so that they would be handy on the water to connect
the hoses up .

We filled those wing boxes with food

trash from the last days worth of meals because we
had completely filled the right hand food box with
trash and we had completely filled the left food box.
Let ' s see in the left food box we did stow the 16 mm

J:lDEN

154

camera and we di d stow the 17 mm lens and the 18 nnn
lens and the 75 mm Hasselblad.
the urine receiver there .

We did not stow

We stowed that up where

it had started out in the left side food box.

We

did stow the mirror sight there and we did stow
the r i ng sight and we did stow the 18 voice tapes.
Now the 18 voice tapes cartridge holder was entirely
unsatisfactory.

We had to take the 18 voice tapes

and take them in groups of three and wrap them with
tape so that we had something that was a little
handi er to work with than stuffing that box.
Cooper

Yes , that thing is just too big.

Conrad

We stowed them in groups of three in that box, but
we got it all in there and the reason we didn't get
anymore in was that that box was still half full of
food .

Matter of fact, you didn ' t hardly get

below the level of the lid.
Cooper

I got just to the bottom level of the lid.

Conrad

Yes, there was a good three days worth of food
left in that box.
was supposed to

Everything else went where it
go .

Except we only stowed two

16 mm film bags in the center compartment and I
left two in the original right hand box because they
were not exposed.

We spent so much time in drifting

,eawflQEblJlAL
I

·•

155

f l ight and everything that we just di dn ' t ever

.

shoot up the 16 mm film .

There just wasn ' t that

much to shoot it up on.
FCSD Rep

How long for reentry?

Starting stowage for reentry?

Would you estimate?
Conrad

We did it in three steps .

20 hours before reentry

we started really really thinking about the big
stuff .

You know the thing that we thought mi ght

cause us a problem.

The one place that we were

worried about was getting all the stuff in the
left hand box .

So that ' s

when we got t o looking

at the tapes .

We got all the gear out that we had

to stow in ·there i ncluding the Hasselblad and sort
of got an idea how much room it was going to take
in that box and that was when we decided we had to
tape the cartridges .

Now when I say tape 18 car­

tridges, heck , that sho t an hour r i ght there .

I

mean, you just don ' t do anything fast up there ,
and so we were ready for reentry 6 or 7 hours
before reentry.

We could have come in anytime ,

because we took care of our major i tems very early.
Now , this doesn ' t mean that we couldn ' t afford to
pull that camera gear and run experiments because
all that stuff was still in the same place and we

•
could have laid our hands on it.

We didn't

actually stow the Hasselblad till the very end.
Cooper

We stowed it about 4 hours .

Conr ad

And so we were prepared by working constantly
through the night but not steadily.
and off .

We took little rests.

We worked on

Then we went

back and-Cooper

To give a time estimate though for purposes of
planning I would say you should figure on it taking
you at least a minimum of about 4 hours to really
thoroughly restow.

And this depends 0:1 how messy

t he cockpit is .

If its really messy it will take

longer than that .

If the cockpit is r,~asonably

squared away and reasonably clean you ;,hould
figure on it taking about 4 hours to rHally completely thoroughly stow everything and get ready for
reentry.
Conrad

Now we were really conscious all 8 dayn- - we would
say to one another, "Boy, it's time to stop and
stow things right now," because the si·;uation is
getting out of hand and you'd be surpr:.sed at
how fast you can build up trash in tha"; cockpit
and not realize that it is in there, ycru see .

•

157

Realize that if we had to reenter shortly or even
if we pack it t ightly , but I think the bottom of
the box I think I wasted a--1 1 11 say I could
have put another silver bag or two worth of trash
in there by stuffing the lower part i f I had
known about it in the beginning.

But it didn't

t ake us much past day 2 to realize that we had a
trash problem and we had to keep on top of it
every single day if we were going to ever have it
cleaned up at t he end.

And we were in good shape.

We were as clean as a whistle when we came in .

..

ONFIBENi lAL

..

158

FCSD REP

How about the power up?

Cooper

I think

that the power up went just r :Lght straight

forward.
Conrad

Yessir, I've the checklist right here.

Just like the

insertion checklist we went by the numbers and I actually
marked it off as we did it and you can see it right
there.

I went through power off check off list and we

went right down the thing we had.

Our checkoff list is

wrong and we had changes in it right h,~re.

We had

Attitude Indicator with FDI, Computer :?ower-ON, Computer
to PRELADNCH, Platform- CAGE, Scanners :?RIMARY, Rate GyrosON and it should read Attitude Indicator with FDI Rate
Gyros-ON, Computer in the PRELADNCH MO:)E, Computer
Power-ON Platform, Scanner etc.
Cooper

The arrangement of it was wrong.

Conrad

Yes, the arrangement was wrong.
the numbers right here.
forward.

But w,~ did it just by

And it was completely straight­

Interesting note on the Plat.form, we went for

many days with the platform powered do,.;n to that it

got as cold soaked as it was ever goi~~ to get and the
platform took the maximum time.

Heat dxop out took

exactly 25 minutes and then it was a l :Lttle slow coming
in.

On the cold starts it took 28 minutes to get the

€0NftDENTIAL
attitude light.
drop out .

159

It took 3 minutes after the fast heat

And then I noticed after that was the first

time after we did that- powered it up two or three times
why the platform came in at 25 minutes of a f a st heat
drop out.

And then ;x ~gat after tha t it would start to

cage up and you ' d get the Attitude Light on and you ' d
be in business with the Platformt but that platform
performed beautifully.
Cooper

Well ~ I might make just one remark on the platform.

Some­

thing that I thought was extremely interesting to me.
People have talked about the bad platform drift and
everything but we had one occasion we had our platform
powered for some 18 or 20 hours .
Conrad

Let ' s see t why did we do that?

Cooper

Because they wanted us to-

Conrad

Oh, it was after we tumbled up there with that OAMS
check which they really didn't think out too well and
they thought we might lose our gas volume.

Cooper

We were about to lose the gas volume by starting to
vent again so they wanted us to power up , bring the
power up to a pretty high level to keep below the
vent pressure on the hydrogen.

Conr ad

Yes , to keep the platform warmed up incase we had to-

160

Cooper

So they wanted to keep the platform warmed up also .
So we went for some approximately 20 hours with the
platform warm-running- up.

Conrad

In drifting flight .

Cooper

In drifting flight.

So what we did- we caged the

platform, brought it up to cage and the~ we just went
to orbit rate.

Left it in orbit rate and we caged it

at a time when were just guessing pretty close to o o1 o

7

and then went to orbit rate .

Some 20 l'..ours later drifting

all around, - tumbling all over the sky, -·a ll over t he
placesConrad

It was amazing how close the pl atform 1,,as .

Cooper

The platform was almost right on what cur attitude was
after that many hours of orbital rate errors and drift
etc . etc. added in to there and it still was a good
relative attitude indicator I thought it was really good.

Conrad

In all three a.xis it stayed on.

Cooper

I really thought that was quite good.

I was pretty surprised.
That platform really

behaved well and it really took a l ot of abuse.

Dif-

ferent times we powered it up- in drift- did all kinds
of things.

You couldn't have mistreated it more if

you tried.

Alining the platform very straightforward.

We alined it in BEF. First of all , we went right to

our old platform position which was BEF and started

-,

right from there in lining in a fine line by BEF position
going out just- lining from there and we found that
we had quite a yaw error in it.

We noted that-

Conrad

That showed up in roll real fast .

Cooper

So we noted then that our yaw- what we figured was our
yaw star one of them that we remember as our yaw star
was a little bit over to the right about 10 degrees.
So we just went to cage.

Eased it over about 10 de­

grees, uncaged it in BEF and sure enough then we went
to platform position in BEF showed the needles weren't
very far off.

Right away they began to aline. . . .

very closely and we had it alined very shortly.
Conrad

Yes, I can't say too much for that star chart either,
boy, it was real comforting to have those yaw stars
and it turned out that Scorpio went right down the middle
of the tube for us.

We just always knew that we had

the platform in good alinement be for retrofire.

We knew

that we were right on in yaw all the way down that line
and we could just name the stars and we knew that they
were just going to come right down the middle by watching
them go and it worked real well.
FCSD REP

How long did you aline the platform?

FlDENTIA

162

Conrad

One and a half orbits.

We really aline•d in about one

and a half orbits.
Cooper

We powered up two and one half and thei:. actually,
we were actual ly alining for about an cr bit and a
half before retrofire.

And we were on all the aline­

ment and everything was done on the RCc system.
FCSD REP

How about the preretro checklist?

Cooper

Let me say this on this alining.

We fcund t hat we

coul dn't even see any decrease at a ll jn RCS after an
orbit and a half.

The way we were doirg this we were

doing it i n Horizon Scan BEF then using· the Rllse MJde
in the H')rizon .Scan.

To really keep tl:.ose needles

real ly closely centered.

Now, you can do the same

thing in Tu.lse BEF, - but the Ibrizon Scan if you neglect it for just a minute, the lbrizon. Scan would
hold it in there real closely and wouldn't let you
wander off anywhere in pitch.

00 F-t0E-N:f:t~L ....

Conr ad

I can't sey too much f or that star chart either .
Boy , it was real comforting to have those yaw stars ,
and it turned out that Scorpio went right down the
middle of the tube f or us and we alweys knew that we
had the platform i n good alinement before retrofire .
We knew we were right on in yaw al l the wey down the
line, and we could just name the stars and knew that
t hey were just going to come right down the middle
of the pipe , and watch them go .

It worked real well .

FCSD Rep

How long did you aline the platform for r etrofire?

Conrad

Well, we really alined it about 1½ orbits .

Cooper

1
We powered up for~
and we actually were alining

for an orbit and a half before retrofire .

All the

alinement and everything was done on the RCS system.
Let me sey this on this alining.

We found that we

couldn 1 t see any decrease at all in the RCS quantity
after an orbit and a half .

We were doing it in

horizon scan , BEF, and then using the pulse mode in
the horizon scan to give you the fine control within
the horizon scan to really keep the needles closely
centered.

Now you can do the same thing just in pulse ,

but if you neglect it for just a minute, the horizon
scan would hold it in there real close .

L --

It wouldn 1 t

let you wander off anywhere in pi tch and roll .

You

had to watch the yaw very carefully, of course , but
you could concentrate on doing other things for just
a few seconds time and you didn ' t get your errors
built up into it .

You still have the iulse correc ­

tion within the wider band of t he horizon scan .

We

found that little teensy little blips to make your
correction

and I don ' t think we were u:.:irig any

fuel at all .
FCSD Rep

Did you get any reading on how much yoi. did use?

Conrad

I checked this morning and it ' s not i n yet .
know how much fuel .

I don ' t

We used Ring A sir.ce we powered

it up at 2 orbits , over Carnarvon the fir st time .
What I r ecall from the preretro checkl::.st - - it
commenced at Carnarvon one pass before r eentry.

In

other words , we went an orbit and a ha:.f on the RCS
system -- Ring A.
Cooper

Most of that time wEi were alining.

We used dual ring RCS rate command for r etrofire
only.

Then we turned Ring B off and d:_d the whole

reentry on ring A.
Conrad

Pulse .

FCSD Rep

You operated Ring A all the way?

Cooper

The last I saw of Ring A in the r eentr;;r, down before

we went to drogue chute out, I still couldn't see
any decrease in Ring A.
Conrad

Well, I'm not sure that Ring A wasn ' t out of fuel ,
somewhere around between 100 000 on down.
other ring wasn ' t .

Cooper

But the

I know darn well it wasn't .

What do you mean it was?

It wasn ' t out before we

put the other ring in at all.
Conrad

No .

I know it wasn ' t out before we put the other

ring in .
Cooper

Did you take a look at it around 100 000?

Conrad

Yes .

I know the thrusters were firing.

It was

firing.
Cooper

Well, the gauge indicated it still had all kinds of
fuel lef t ir1 it just before 100 000 .
!

Conrad

Well, thats regulated pressure .

Cooper

Yes , it ' s pressure .

Conrad

It's not going to tell you anything in the way of
fuel usage .

You have to see source pressure to find

out what -- we don't have that .
Cooper

Well , you would - -

Conrad

I'm not sure that Ring A didn't run out of fuel, but
if it did , it did it somewhere around the time we
put the other ring on , because we never got any

os cil lations or anything.

The rings were f iring -all

the time .
Cooper

I ~ never was out of f uel before we put the other one
on , 1 1 11 guarant ee .

I know because I was sitting

there controlling with it and I know that we had
control .
Conrad

I know that both thrusters were physically burning
inside - - you know , the throats were burning when I
shut the propellant off.

In other words, t he pro­

pellant was shut off and there was no fuel f low
going to them, but both Ring A and Ring· B thrusters
t hat I could see had throat f lames i n them.
Cooper

That ' s just from residual fue l .

Conrad

Yes , that ' s what I mean.

So , I had the impression

that t hey r an al l the way down , and then i f Ring A
did run out of fuel at all , it did it a.t the very
end , you know .

I think that you ' ll find that there

was f uel in both RCS rings and there sr.ould have been
plenty of RCS B fuel left , because we didn ' t even
turn on RCS B until l ess than 70 000 .

We wer e at

50 because
Cooper

Yes .

Conrad

- - Gordo put the drogue out instead of turning the
ring on.

0Nft9ENTt'A~

OONffl:) erqTf AL
FCSD Rep

Why don't we pick up on page 26?

Cooper

Okay .

168

•
5.0

RETROFIRE

5 . 1 ~ -36 Events
Cooper

TR- 36

Conrad

TR-36 is not right .
verification .

There ' s no aft- f i rjng thrusters

That ' s for OAMS .

And thEre was no

TR- 22 either because that was for OAMS , nor was there
a TR- 13 or 12.

What we had was a TR- 27 clock set

over Carnarvon .
FCSD Rep

You started your event t imer at TR- 27?

Conrad

That Is because we changed from 122- 1 to 121-1.

We

went r ight down the pre- retro checklist before that by
the numbers , and we had what we call a ~R-36 which
was nothing more than pick up the event timer .

So

we had the pre-retro checkli s t complete before
Carnarvon .

That ' s when t hey glitched us , and I 1 m

going to complain about this one .

We had a valid

load in the comput er and a valid TR when we left the
States on Rev 120, and I see absolutely no reason
if those guys don ' t know what the heck our orbit is
aft er 120 of them up there , that they had to go
ahead and send a quick up- date over Carnarvon -Cooper

Yes .

Conrad

-- I f elt that screwed us .
what happened.

I still want to know

~t0EN,-IAL
Cooper

And we told McDivitt --

Conrad

We didn ' t get a DCS light .

Cooper

We told McDivitt when we left Houston that everything
was all square and that we I re going to Reentry Mode
on the computer then.

We did , and then at Carnarvon

the CAP COM, before he even gave us a warning or
asked us about anything or even checked to see what
mode our computer was in, sent an up- date .

Very ,

very poor.
Conrad

He said , "I'm sending you a new load and a new TR.
Stand by."

Boy, we were all over the thing trying to

get it back to PRELAUNCH .

I never got a DCS light

on either the TR or the load .

I quizzed him and I

told him I didn't think the load went in.
11

No , the load was valid. "

He said ,

We r ead out a couple of

cores and checked TR , but I don I t understand why we
didn't get a DCS light .

Now I won ' t understand it

because we should have gotten two DCS lights .
Cooper

Yes .

Conrad

I didn't get one the first time when he sent the

One for TR and one for - -

TR, and I didn ' t get one when he sent the load .

We

were in the process of switching the computer to
PRELAUNCH, and I think the el ectrpns got lost in the
shuffle there .

I gather that they took the computer

ONFl[;)ENTIAL

170

out yesterday and that the load in it was valid .

It 1 s

just that they computed the wrong place to land , in
Houston, and sent the wrong load , period .

Boy , that

was a heck of a thing to do, and I really

that darn

DCS!

I 1 m going to do just what I said I was going to

do.

I f I ever fly again , I ' m not going to fly with

that DCS circuit breaker on.

That ' s just exactly what

I was afraid was going to happen, and they couldn ' t
have done it at a worse time in the flient .

They

just absolutely couldn't have done it wcrse .

The

one thing that I had forgotten many times was putting
that computer from PRELAUNCH to REENTRY.

I had it

underlined 50 times on the check- off liflt .

I was

going to make sure that it was in REENTI'.Y .

When they

told me leaving the Cape we had a valid load and a
valid TR , I called McDivi tt and I said :: 1 m putting
the computer in REENTRY.

The next thin/~ is , at

Carnarvon the guy should have seen on h:.s board that
the computer was in REENTRY and should have told me
instead of sending a load like he did .

We moved as

f ast as we could when he said he was sending loads
to put the darn thing back to PRELAUNCH .

That really

screwed us up and I 1 m really mad about that .

That ' s

the only gripe I have against them, but it's a major one .

171

=-

Cooper

Yes .

It 's major enought that , by gol l y , my recom­

mendations exactly like Pete ' s .

From now on my rec­

omendation is
Conrad

That did it .

Cooper

-- that the DCS circuit breaker is left in the OFF
position.

Conrad

Yes .

The next time I ever go for the reentry and we

put a valid load i n the computer, I'm going to turn
the DCS off so they can ' t screw it up again without
me turning it back on .
Coop_e r

Absolutely.

Turn that circuit breaker to the OFF

position.
Conrad

That's right .

I 'd rather miss a load and go with

the earlier one.

I still can ' t believe that after

120 orbits they didn't know exactly what our parameters were for orbit .

I don't even know why they

needed that track over the United States the last
pass .

They 'd been tracking us all night long.

They ' d been tracking us for 8 days, and they ought
to know where the heck we were .

If they want to do

it at the last minute, then let's plan on loading the
computer at Carnarvon and not load the computer at
the Cape .

This loading it at the Cape and then chang­

ing it again at Carnarvon has got to go .

GON.flDENTIAL

Cet-ctftDEt~rrt~

172

Cooper

And t hen saying this is your final load.

Verify - ­

Conrad

Bad news.

Cooper

Then unscheduled and everything else - -

Conrad

I don ' t blame that guy at Carnarvon because he wasn ' t

I 'm r eally mad about that !

expecting to send us a load either .

I hlame Houston.

Houston sent it down to them at the las·; minute ,
obviously, and he was doi ng the best he could and
he got rushed .

The whole thing we wanted to do on

r eentry and the reason we stowed early md sat there
with nothing to do was to make sure that we were
never rushed .
l oad .

We weren't until the guy sent that

And there we were , 27 minutes fr:>m retrofire ,

and I r eally wasn't convinced we had th~ right load
in the computer even when we left Carnar von.

Boy,

I
Im
really mad at that !

Cooper
Conrad

Okay.

I
Ive
got some recommendations.

I think we

ought to rewrite our TR- 256 check- off list because
there are too many things that happen en it at TR- 5
and TR- 256 .

We changed the procedure in f light

I knew I was going to do it that way ar.yhow , in t hat
I brought up the main batteries early.
them on at 7 minutes .

I brought

I verified the computer in

173
REENTRY again, of course, and squib batteries .

We

were already on the RCS system, so we didn 1 t have to
bring-them on, but I did bring on the other ring at
that point .

At the 256 , we wanted to go platform to

ORB RATE as late as possible, so we did that after
we got TR- 256 function light -- the attitude indicator
light -- and that showed we had all our clocks were
in sync ..just perfectly.

There wasn I t a clock in the

spacecraft that wasn ' t in sync .

The TR was in sync

with the event timer and they were in sync with our
back- up watches .

There was no doubt in our minds

that everything in the TRS system was working right
down the line and that we were working right down
the

line.

Cooper

We went to retro attitude punched the --

Conrad

Went to retro attitude, set up the whole thing for •
the reentry , and at TR- 1 --

T -1
5 . 3 -=-It-

Cooper

TR- 1, SEP OAMS, SEP ELEC , SEP ADAP, four squibs on - ­

Conrad

At TR- 30 seconds --

Cooper

Arm retro.

Conrad

I've al ways made it a procedure to arm auto- retro at

We already had that .

TR- 5 seconds
Cooper

Let's see -- SEP OAMS , SEP ELEC, SEP ADAP -- we did a

t0NilQE i

L

CO~EIDENTI L

174

I
Lets
see, retro rockets squib

all four

armed at TR- 3O, arm auto- retros at about TR- 5 seconds
Conrad

Ye s .

TR- 5 .

And I absolutely positively go on record

that the manual retro- fire button was pushed, because
I pushed it four times at one second ani the COMP
l ight went green at -FCSD Rep

One second after auto?

Conrad

No .

One second after the retros actual l y fired.

T -0
5.4 =-R-

At TR- O' spacecraft attitude was right on the money.

Cooper

Ther e were no rates .

Control mode was dual RCS

I've got a couple of comment s about the retro s .

Conrad

There ' s no doubt in my mind that the number 3 retro
stopped firing at l east a half a second before the
number 4 retro started t o fire .
Cooper

It sure did .

Conrad

And there was another one in there --

Cooper

There was no overlap .

Conrad

iI I m pretty sure that between the second and the
l

t h ird , there was no overlap -Cooper

Between 2 and 3 .

Conr ad

-- but they were much closer together than between
3 and 4 .

.,
Cooper

175

Number 1 was firing and it was just tailing off when
number 2 took in .

It had the proper sequence on i t .

Number 2 had completely stopped and there was an
interval ther e of , it seemed like , several seconds .
It wasn 1 t , but it seemed like there was a definite
distinct -Conrad

Between 3 and 4 was the one that. really seemed l ike an
eternity.

Cooper

There was a definite distinct separate interval
there where there was no firing going on.
fired .

Then 3

Then there was an even longer interval in

there involved and then 4 fired .
Conrad

Yes .

That was long enough between 3 and 4 fo r me to

think maybe the fourth one wasn ' t going to f ire at
all.

FCSD Rep

I think we ought to get some comments on the night

Conrad

Oh , we weren ' t even aware of it .

Cooper

We had the lights up bright in the cockpit -­

Conrad

We went with the lights bright

Cooper

We decided we ' d play it just like we did in the
simulator , just like we were going to be in the simulator , you know , with all the lights up br ight and not
even worry about what was going on out the wi ndow.
However, I did sneak a little peaky or t wo and you

fJBfNIIAL

,

G~El0ENTIAL

look like you were sitting in the middl11 of a fire
barrel .

Boy!

When those retros go off , the whol e

spacecraft ' s enveloped in flames

jus·; looks like

the whole place is burning all over bac:c there .
This flame comes all the way back over che spacecraft
and all the way up -Conrad

At SEP OAMS , electr ic and adapter, though , we didn 't
see much of anything.

Cooper

No.

I saw a flash at SEP ADAP.

Conrad

I saw a l ittle flash , but I thought maybe we d see a

I

lot more f lashing- type f l ame .

Actual l y , no big prob1

l em in that night retro , but I 11 tell you one t hing ,
you I re not ever going to do it out t he window.
Cooper

You ' re never going to see anything out the wi ndow i n
a night retro .

You ' re just completely enveloped in

f lames.
Conrad

Those RCS ' s are firi ng away like mad and there ' s al l
kind& of light outside and everything, so night r etr o
is an instrument- type thing.

Cooper

It's purely instruments .

If you don ' t have i nstru­

ments , you 1 re just not going to shoot :i. t .
Conrad

But otherwise , I don ' t think t here was any di ff erenc e .

Cooper

No .

Conrad

We were completely in the dark f or a l)ng time .

We

177
didn't have a horizon for 5 minutes after retro- fire ,
We were in the middle of the United States bef ore we
saw the groU.Ll.d.
Cooper

The first place we saw was White Sands .

Conrad

White Sands --

Cooper

Just past the terminator

Conrad

-- was the first place I saw when we CaJlle out of the
terminator on the ground.

Of course, by that time,

we had a sort of what you might call a discernable
horizon, but it was so fuzzy.

There is no such thing

as a horizon at sunrise, looking the other way.
Looking 180 from the sun you I re looking into a gray ,
black, fuzzy -- boy, there's no discernable horizon .
You ' re looking at the terminator.

It's not a usable

horizon.

We were on gauges

I don't call it usable.

all the way and not until we got past the Mississippi
River did we get what you would really call a horizon.
That's when the reentry started getting different than
the ones in the simulator.

The reentry was much dif­

ferent in ball attitudes, in that we were much steeper
on the ball.

We were looking at more and more white

that I ever saw before.

I was hard pressed -- if we

didn't have the bank angle index on the ball you
couldn't tell what your bank angle was.

f-lDEWJ~L

€>MFl0ENflA~ ..

178

Cooper

Yes .

Conrad

There was no horizon.
gone.

The black part of the ball was

It was gone for the rest of reentry.

We l ost

it awful earl y.
FCSD Rep

Do you remember a point, say 400 000 .fee t, •:,at what
pitch angle you were on the ball?

Conrad

400 000 feet - - the trim hadn ' t begun to affect you
too much and Gordo was at about 30 degrees.

Cooper ·

About 30 degrees .

Conrad

Yes.

Yes.

But he was still flying the spa~ecraft, just

holding attitude there .
FCSD Rep

Okay , how about when you hit the atmosphere?

Conrad

280 K.

Cooper

At 280 K we were --

Conrad

It seemed to me that's when t hings started to steepen
up.

We started to really trim up .

We were beginning

to get g -Cooper

By the time we got to 280 K, we were at about 50 degrees
pitch, roughly -- 50 or 60 degrees on t he ball.
were quite a way down.

We

From there on, we were moving

right on around on the ball.
FCSD Rep

Were you able after retrofire to roll i t up and put
the horizon on the top of the window and hold that?

Cooper

Yes , on the ball, but we couldn't see t he horizon.

FtOEM

::

L
Conrad

179

Yes , those lines were useless as far as the horizon
on it , because there wasn't any horizon out there .

GCSD Fep

You had to use the 8-ball entirely?

Cooper

Yes.

Conrad

That was a pure instrument retro.

Cooper

You're darn right, boy.

I I 11 guarantee you anytime

you fire retros at night, you'd better have instruments because you ' re not going to have a visual outthe- window, because those RCS thrusters out there
will just blind you.
Conrad

Yes, and this t alking about doing this stuff on rate
needles and no ball and everything is a bunch of
hog- wash.

You'd better have the whole panel.

Cooper

You're darn right.

Conrad

Or you fire them in the daytime, with a good horizon .

FCSD Rep

Let me see now.
did you hold?

Cooper

You rolled it upside down , and what
You held 20 degrees --

20 , degrees until it s t art ed trimming out .
}

switch between rate and attitude .

Then, I'd

I ' d just hold that

attitude and when I'd see a little tiny rat e creep
in -- I was on single-ring pulse - - I'd just pulse that
rate out.

Of course, _: that was establishing my trim
./

angle right there.

You'd see it on the rate.

You'd

180

see the pitch rate needle start to mo're just a
l ittle tiny bit .

That was showing you that you

weren ' t quite on trim.

Then I'd tweek it and it

would sit right there, and it would just start trimming itself out on the ball.
FCSD Rep

When it trimmed out you damped the rates.

You were in

single- ring di rect?
Cooper

Well , at 400 KI went to single- ring direct .

Conrad

Yes , we were in pulse

Cooper

Yes, single- ring pulse .

Conr ad

Single- r i ng pulse to 400 K --

C0oper

Then I went to RATE COMMAND on the attitude control
selector and took the ACME RCS switch to direct -one to direct,! the other one was to off.

Then I used ,

)

single- ring direct throughout the ree'.ltry , until
very late when the oscillations got so rapid that 1·
had to concentrate too much on them rather than the
attitude .

Then I went into ACME

just put the

RCS switch to ACME and then flew the attitude with
the stick and allowed the RCS to damp the oscillations.
FCSD Rep

Still one ring?

Cooper

Still one ring.

Conrad

We di dn't go on dual- rings until below 70 000 feet .

18 1

Cooper

We had the drogue out before we went on dual- rings.

FCSD Rep

Was there any problem?

Conrad

The thing was steady as a rock all the way.

Cooper

Yes, it was beautiful.

Conrad

I ' ve been hearing 40-degree oscillations on the
drogue and all that sort of stuff .

The only

oscallations we had on the drogue were high~requency low- amplitude oscillations, where the
drogue was stable, sitting above us steady as a rock,
pulsing longitudinally like this

Cooper

It squidded super-sonically for we were about 112 -­

Conrad

And then the shrouds --

Cooper

Did you hear about the Mercury tests where the drogue
was

Col').rad

a few times?

The shrouds on the spacecraft had a high frequency 1·ow
amplitude oscillation, but the nose was like 5 degrees ,
it seemed to me .

It ' s just surprising.

We were as

steady as a rock as far as I was concerned.
Cooper

Well , I think the whole

Conrad

The oscillation was there, but I think the

Cooper

I think the whole retrofire and reentry is so much
easier than Mercury that I can ' t believe it.
really a piece of cake .

L •

It is

182

Conrad

At 30 000 we shut off the propellant valves to the
RCS.

It was still working away merrily there trying

to steady it down on the drogue.

As :: ar as I know,

there was propellant in both Ring A and Ring B when
we shut them down.

5. 5 1 Retropack Jettison
Cooper

We jettisoned the retropack right in retro attitude -­

FCSD Rep

You didn't see the retropack burning up or anything?

Conrad

Yes, I saw it reenter behind us but nowhere near like
those guys did.

Cooper

It was miles behind us when I saw i t .

I thought I saw something way back thEire burning.

I

guess that was it.
Conrad

Yes.

Up and on the left side of where? I was looking .

I saw it burn up behind us .
us by then.

But it was miles behind

You see, it had been chaf:ing us in the

dark so we never did see it close up.

We never saw

anything like pump packages blowing O\;.t when we set
the retros.

•

t1'EITTIA7: ~

183

5.6 Communications
Cooper

Communications were good throughout the whole reentry. We went into blackout right on time .

Conrad

Right on time.

Cooper

Yes, just right on the second when they said we' d
go into blackout.
they said we would..

We came out just exactly when
The only thing was, when they

asked us what our over - shoot or under-shoot was
I ' ll be dam if I could t ell them at that point .
I sure as heck didn't know with this computer t elling us one thing and yet it not doing the right
thing.
FCSD Rep

We'd better put the retrofire IVI readings in here .

Conrad

269 aft , 010 l eft , 181 down . And that comes out
amazingly close to a nominal combination .

As a

matter of fact, it shows that we should have had
about a 60 degree bank. angle, and if you compensate
the 6o degrees for the off- set it would have been

54 or 53-Cooper

Yes.

Cooper

Almost completely nominal.

Conrad

I think this chart's a handy gouge .
what the ground gave us.

It agrees with

We didn' t fly it, of

course, We flew the computer, but--

184
Cooper

Well, this is the bank angle we flew until we got
cross, and down-range at 280K.

Conrad

We went from full lift at 400K to 53 degrees, which
was the given bank angle by the ground which we
agreed to use.

We went to 53 degrees until guidance

came in, and it came in at 280K.
that we were high.

The needle showed

It showed that we were very

high, that we were going to over- sho,)t by a large
distance, and-Cooper

This is the first normal indication.

The computer

is supposed-Conrad

· ·• do anything which is what you're supposed to do.
We sat there to watch the trend.

No,;hing happened.

The needle didn't come up off the peg.

I looked

at the high scale and it didn ' t look to me like the
high scale was pegged out.
Cooper

It wasn ' t pegged.

I went to the higl:. scale and it

was about half way down.
Conrad

Less than half way down, indicating that we were
up around a 75 mil e over-shoot, which just told me
we were humping a little bit to get down into the
target.

Cooper

Right.

Conrad

And, in fact, at that time we were

G>NFIIDENTIA

6NFIDENTIA[ .

185

Cooper

•.• to get on down to it because it told me--

Conrad

We were just sitting there waiting for the needle

-------

to come up like we had seen it do a million_.:t.ime
in the same situation.

--

-

It never came off the peg.

Then , we got in a little discussion, you know.

I

fel t that we ought to go to full lift because I
thought something was wrong with guidance .

Gordo

agreed that something was wrong with guidance but
he reall y t hought maybe we really had over- shot .
I'm sure the retros were on time and they were
nominal , almost.

So , we final l y wound up going back

to the nominal l ift vect or- Cooper

I went back to the nominal bank angle, which we had
agreed we ' d go to i f anything happened .

We had agreed

with FOD that if anything happened throughout reentry--something was wrong with guidance-Conrad

We flew--

Cooper

--we would go back to the nominal bank angle , that
we wouldn't take any great abnormal- type situation.
We woul d go back to t he nominal bank angle, so that
in the event they lost communication with us or
something screwed completely up in the reentry,
they would know that we used as near as possible to
the nominal bank angle.

186

Conrad

Now , what really hurt there though was that he
sat there at the nominal bank angle of 53 degrees
until we got to, say, 2 1/2 g's , which is a fair
.long time through the guidance ... .

When he elected

to roll to the 90 degree bank angle, that' s when
we were getting the most lift.

Boy, we dug in--

I 111 tell you we shot up there to 7 1/2 g ' s in
nothing flat.

It was at about that time that we

rolled back out again, you see .

We ' d lost the main

lift that we were going to get out of it, but, as
it is, I don't think we did so badly ·Ninding up 83
miles short.

I understand they were targeting

240 miles short .

Cooper

That's apparently what the load they had in the computer
turned out to be--erroneously put in a.t 240 miles
short .

Conrad

Yes , they were off by a factor of 240 miles .

Cooper

So , if we had followed the computer e:icactly we'd
have been a lot further shorter than we were.
Fortunately, we recognized that somet:1ing was amiss.

FCSD Rep

Did that down-range needle ever do an;rthing?

Conrad

No, I don ' t think it moved at all,

Cooper

I don ' t think it ever really moved.

I think one

time it moved a little, but I really don ' t think

ElQENllAt •

..

187

it moved much.
Conrad

I think we were hoping to see it move, you know,
but it was just one of those- -that's a fast time
situation there, and it was jus~ one of those things
where we made the right decision in the end to go
back to the nominal bank angle.

Everything in the

computer indicated--the time to 400K and roll needle
initiate were within a second of one another.

What

the ground gave us- Cooper

And the time to 290K was exactly right .

Conrad

And 280K time, roughly as far as we knew and everything- -BANG!

in comes the guidance initiate down­

range predict on the needles.

Everything up to

that point--the computer had come on green, the
IVI's read nominal, we saw the kind of thing we
expected to see .

We were completely suckered on

that, because the computer worked just like it was
supposed to-Cooper

And the down- range needle indicated exactly what
it always will do and exactly what we'd briefed
with FOD.

They had agreed that what we should see

on the computer is just about the maximum deflection
on the low scale when it first comes on.
Conrad

And that's just what we got.

O NEIDE~ JIAL,.

188
I

Cooper

Because that ' s exactly the way things arE' all set
up in the math flow.

You' 11 get that anc. then very

shortly thereafter if you hold the nomim.l bank
angle it will take a little bit of time End it will
start easing on up.
Conrad

And you ' ll get an idea by the rate of ea~ing up .

Cooper

If you roll to the 90, of course, in thai position
you ' ll get to it in a big rush, but you \\-ant to be
careful not to overshoot .

Conrad

You'll never get back.

Cooper

But, then when I held the nominal bank angl e and
it didn ' t come up and didn't come up , then I rolled
to the 90 to see if I was going to be able to bring
it up.

Of course, by this time I realized that

when I didn't see it come up something wa.s really
wrong.

I then went back to the nominal .

Fortunately,

that period that we held at the nominal is what
carried us down as near as it did.

The short period

that we were at 90, of course , is where ~e were
really digging in-Conrad

It cost us 83 miles, probably, because I think if
we had flown the nominal bank angle all the way that
we'd have really wound up real close to the darn
carrier.

..

--Cooper

We'd probably wound up 45 miles from the carrier-­

Conrad

That going to the 90 degrees for the time period
that we did cost us 80 something miles .

Otherwise,

we flew the ~
Cooper

The,.....wholy

ning is if we hadn't tried following the

computer we would never have known
,,/

Conrad

Yes, and I'll tell you one thing.

I ' m still con­

vinced right now sitting in this room that computer
will bring you right in to where you want to go if
you have the right load in it, because it just \worked
magnificently.

It came in just like it was supposed

to and it did it on boost, too .
on it.

I was really sold

I think the computations in that computer

are accurate enough for the kind of work that a guy
can do onboard the spacecraft, and··it ' s a darn fine
piece of equipment and it was working well .
the first ones to get a good look at 7
worked just l ike it was supposed to .

We're

and it
If it had the

parameters in it we'd have split the
ship right up the middle .
Cooper

I think so.

FCSD Rep

What was the cross- range needle doing?

Cooper

Cross- range was showing that·we needed left bank in

I think it's just a dirty shame.

there--that we needed to move to the left.

In other

/
/

<;ONFtDENTIA [ .

190

words, you're flying opposite.
needle to.

You're flying your

In other words, you' re flyir.g back

course ILS on lateral and you ' re flying a standard
ILS on the glide slope--front course IL~,.

The

cross-range needle was showing off to the right,
which indicated that we needed to bank Jeft , which
is exactly right ,
hit 10 miles short.

That's just exactly right.

We

We never did get t he cross­

range--cros s-range was coming in--cross--range did
move in on us.

Down-range, I don't believe, ever

really moved .

Cross-range did move in ~1ome on us,

and that's when I went back to the nominal.

I

thought, well, we're past the time to rEiverse bank
angle.

Maybe I ought to roll right.

So, I rolled

over to the right side and said, no , by golly, I'm
still going to follow the cross- range.

At least

it's giving us the proper indications, l believe .
So, I rolled back in to the left bank, ,rhich was
smart because we still hit slightly to t he right.
Were we off to the north or the south, Pete?

I had

it all figured out one time.
Cooper

I don't really know Gordo.

I didn ' t pa;i, any a tten­

tion to the cross-range needle.
Cooper

Anyway, the way I had it figured out here the other

191

day the cross-range needle was indicating properly.
FCSD Rep

The down-range needle , when it came on, stayed in
the same place all the time--all the way through?

Cooper

Yes.

FCSD Rep

Full- scale.

Cooper

Full- scale .

Right .

Just about full-scale on the

low range .
FCSD Rep

Okay.

How about any of the up- dating done during

reentry?
Conrad

We got all the times .

We got a ll the times just

fine and I wrote them all down .

They gave us

enter blackout at 16 : 14, out of blackout at 21:20,
reverse bank at 19:25, bank left 54, and bank right
68 .

The drogue time was 22+05, and the main time

was 23+48 ,

They were all good times.

all written down.

No problem.

I had them

They got the up­

dates in before blackout and in plenty of time before blackout, as a matter of fact .
right in there.

We whistled

No sweat on the times .

I guess

maybe we went to the 90 degree bank or something
like that , but from about the time of lg to the time
of guidance locking out, which is roughly 100K and
t he altimeter coming· off the peg, man , I don't
knov whether it was just because we did it for real

~hJEIDE~TlAL ..

192

but everything else worked like the Eimulator
timewise, but that time period seemed extremely
short to me in comparison to simul ator reentry.
Cooper

Yes, it sure did to me.

Conrad

Yes.

Now we can go back and look at the times and

see what the actual times were to these-Cooper

Maybe just in real time- -

Conrad

This might have been the real - time case to make-­

FCSD Rep

How about the altimeter?

Conrad

It worked very poorl y on lift-off.

It had been

very jerky and jumped all around but it was smooth
as a bell.

Boy, it came off the peg.

up at 96 000.

It locked

What was it? It did it in the alti­

tude chamber.
Cooper

96 800 feet or something like that.

Conrad

It didn't ever run to 100 000 and it never had.
It didn't do that in the altitude cha.rlber, and it
quit where it always quit- -96 800.

I t came off the

peg smooth and just wound right on down.

No jump­

ing or jittering.
Cooper

It was right with the barostats comine: down .

Conrad

Yes, it was right with the barostats coming down.
I called the altimeter off the peg to Gordo and he
put the landing arm on, which was roushl y at

193
100 000.

Then, I said, "Stand by for 70 000."

I was going to tell him to go attitude control RCS
A and B to ACME , and he punched out the drogue.

So ,

we qualified the drogue at 70 000, and then I got
the rate command, both rings on, and we were somewhere below 70 000 when we put Ring Bon.

~NFIE>EMTIAL

194
6 . 0 REENTRY

6.1

400K
Cooper

By the time we hit 400K I was at fuL lift positi on
from Retro Jett until there.

Roll command gave a

roll right and a roll command the bug just as it
a lways does .
money.

Time correlation was r t ght on the

400K occurred right to the s econd when it

was supposed to .

Guidance initiate e>ccurred just

at 280K at exactly the right time anc. it indica ted
we had a right .... the azimuth needle indicated
right and the down range needle indicated full
scale it was well up into the thing.

I would sey

maybe half deflection.
Conrad

Yes .

Cooper

The bank angle was 53 degrees left bank which was

That was full scale .

High sca]e was not - ­

our nominal bank angle which I went to a t guidance
initiate and held 53 degrees l eft .

~he rool needle

at this time the roll needle indicated off full
right and vecy shortly thereafter then . . .. before
I even got suspicious that we weren't getting down
on this , the roll needle then crossed over the
middle position and held there indicati ng we had
the r ight bank angle there for a minute and then
crossed full scale over to t he other s ide . . . .

OhJEIDENTIAL

<;GNFtf>EMftA1.

195

,,

which gave me one little old tweak of suspicion
there that something was wrong right there on the
roll bug.

At that point then, I rolled 90 to see

if I could get on that too , the down range needle.
The cross range needle moved in some from the right.
It had been out . . . not completely full scale, but
'

I

quite a ways out .
much.

It moved in slightly but not

Down range needle, let's see , I don't believe

it ever moved up · from there on and then at that
point when I saw that the 90 wasn ' t going to hold it
in there, I said I was going back to the nominal
bank angle.

I went back t o the 53 but then put in

60 . . . . 67 degrees bank right, to see if I can get the
roll bug to change .

It didn ' t change at that time

so cross range was still indicating that I should
be banked left so I went back to my bank left to
see if I can kill off the cross range.

I knew at

that point that something was really seriously
0llg and I

was just trying to hold it as nominal

as possible .

I shoul d have probably at that time

-

since I was already passed the time of reverse bank
angle, I probably shoul d have gone ahead and hel d
that , but that was a mistake, I probably should have
gone ahead and held that 67 degrees bank right, and

•

GNr;l0ENTIA~

196

held that on in .

It probably would have corrected

us out a little better cross- range- wise, but the
period of time that we were at 90 degrees

trying

to get the glide slope, to get onto the glide slope
there, is what cost us that 86 miles.

Had we held

the nominal bank angle all the way ani ignored the
computer, I think we would have hit v3ry, very near
the carrier.

But, we ... .at least we 1save the com­

puter a try.

I think that if it had had the right

values loaded in it , I think it would have done
very well by us .

The spacecraft behaved very well .

Ionization, we got into that ionic layer.

After

the 280K point, we began -to really ionize quite a
bit and got into a typical fire ball E•ffect back
there although it didn ' t seem to me l1ke it was
as much of a fire ball effect in this as it was in
Mercury.
6 .2

It seemed a lot less .

Acceleration Profile
Cooper

Acceleration profile, I noted the g ' s very early bef ore we got the 2g's on .

I noted the g ' s felt

pretty strong in there.

I could feel them fairly

severe now.

I never felt at all from there on .

I

n ever even felt like we had any amount of g's on
us until I noted we had seven and a ha:.f and I could

~0MFl0EI\JTIAL •

ONFIDEITTIAL 4
hardly believe it.

197

So , I didn't have any trouble

controlling or ... I just didn't think about having
f

it on there.

j

I

I

Pete noticed the g's more t han I did

because he wasn ' t as busy, I guess , as I was.

6.3 Spacecraft Control
Cooper

Spacecraft control was beautiful .
problem at all.

There was no

I was on single ring DIRECT and

then had gone fairly late down in the guidance
program there when the oscillations got to be often
enough in there that it was taking a little concentration to damp the oscillations as well as to watch
the guidance.

I just went over the single ring

ACME or RATE COMMAND ACME and let the RATE COMMAND
damp the oscillations and I was doing the steering,
with the RATE COMMAND also .

Still single ring .

6.4 100K Feet
Cooper

Let ' s see, at a 100K the altimeter ca.me off the peg
very shortly thereafter .

I was going to arm both

RCS rings, bringing on ring B to ACME .at 70K and
instead I deliberately, calmly, cooly, and del iberately deployed the drogue chutes .
beautifully.

And it worked

Most stable drogue chute I ever saw.

It squidde~ just like a supersonic drogue test that
were done in Mercury that I saw.

In fact, 70 was

198

the point where he put the Mercury d:t'ogue out .

It

squidded a couple of times very nicely and stabilized
out and was just beautiful . . . .We nev,3r had any
oscillations on it or anything.

It was just as

nice as it could be.

6.5 50K Feet
Cooper

By 50K we had both RCS rings .ON, jus·: letting them
feed on out and then were blipping away out there
and the spacecraft just came right s 1;raight down .
No oscillation or anything.

FCSD Rep

What kind of oscillation on drogue dnployment . . . .
what would you estimate the

Cooper

I don 1·t think we had any at all .

I c.on ' t think we

had a single oscillation real ly, wher. we deployed
the drogue, do you?
Conrad

Oh yeah.

It oscillated but the . . . . . it was sort

of high frequency and low amplitude .
Cooper

That's just what I say.

I mean it was just kind

of like .. . .. It was just kind of like -- a little
quiver on the line.

Like when you pluck a bow

string, you know , the string . . .. the spacecraft
would kind of go like this but not any- amount
of -Conrad

These guys were talking about 40 degr3e yaw angles

199
and stuff like -- Nothing like that.
,.

Cooper

I bet you couldn't make it any more than 2 or

3

or 4 degrees.
Conrad

Yes , I would say 5 at the most .

Now I don't have

any horizon or anything to reference this to .
I ' m doing is watching the drogue .

All

But I didn ' t

have any physical sensations , or -Cooper

There were no physical sensations of any kind of
oscillations.

Conrad

The frequency was too high to ever get any amplitudes
that big.

We were just sitting there and the drogue

looked steady to me , see, and all I could see was
the nose and the shrouds zacking back and forth like
that .

Ob, sort of around, and , you know .

They were

both at pitch and yaw .. .but I felt comfortable all
the time .

I didn't have any idea that we were

really going to -Cooper

It was well stabilized.

Stable as a rock

Conrad

Now, I'll tell you that RCS was really working.
Now, we were in RATE COMMAND not REENTRY RATE COMMAND, we were in RATE COMMAND.

So , it would .

mean, it was firing full time .
Cooper

Yes, it was really working.

Conrad

We were outside the rate command bands .

I

CQNFIDENTiAL

200
FCSD Rep

You don ' t use the reentry command?

Conrad

Heck no!

Cooper

No, no that's useless .

Conrad

We had fuel up the kazoo .

Cooper

We had all kinds of fuel .
into RATE COMMAND.

We figured to just go

That ' s exactly what --

Conrad

to see how smooth a reentry you could make .

Cooper

The only thing we deviated from our very carefully
calculated preflight plan was that I , ins tead of
going to dual ring RCS, I put the drog~e out at
70K.

Conrad

We just had that step backwards betwee:1 50 and 70K .

Cooper

There must be a hold over from Mercury there somewhere , too , still getting to me .

Conrad

Okay , now the next most important thing was that at
50 000 or shortly thereafter, we went ·;o repress .
Gordo turned on the REPRESS and I hit ·;he o2 HIGH
RATE , and as we planned you know , we wHr e not going
to vent the cabin or open the inlet snorkel , and
man , going through 27 000 feet that neEidle hit zero
faster than you can say "Jack Robinson."

That

cabin came down from 5 paid to nothing and I said
"Holy Christmas" ;

it came down so fast t hat I was

really humping to get the ... . . I wanted to get the

201
ll'

vent open and I opened the vent and opened the in-

,.

let snorkel and set the recirc at 45 degrees in
pretty fast order .

But, all the fancy calculations

by the ECS people are dead wrong , because there
isn ' t enough in that repress or the o2 HIGH RATE
to keep up with that differential drop off.

We

got fumes too, but not many.
Cooper

Boy, I dind't think they were hardly noticeable,
at all.

Conrad

It was noticeable .

Cooper

Just a musty smell,

Conrad

But it was noticeable . I 'm suxe it helped to have
the o2 HIGH RATE and the REPRESS on all the way down .

Cooper

But then the one thing that we did do then at 2000 .
We closed it back up .

Closed it back up and left

t he REPRESS and o2 HIGH RATE on , s o that I expect
that we had a little bit of delta pressuxe in the
cabin when we touched.
Conrad

Oh, we did .

We had about a pound.

It was very

s l owly coming up .
Cooper

It was up .....

CQnrad

We had about a pound.

Cooper

Now I think this kept a l ot of the fumes out .

202

'"
Conrad

Then we sat there in the water, very leisurely.
was still building up .

It

I went and cy~led the o
2

HIGH RATE handle OFF.

6.6

..

35K Checklist Items
Conrad

Before you leave that let's just say that at

35 000 feet for the check off list we uncovered
our D-rings.

At 30 000 feet we turneci off the RCS
I

propellant A and Band they ran out shortly thereafter.

We

6.7 Communications
Cooper

We . . . communicated with the recovery forces .

Tal ked

to them at that point twice on the wa;)' down and they
asked us for a short count.
Conrad

We gave this here.

Cooper

We gave this a short count,

They sai6. "Roger,

reading you loud and clear . "

and they had us fixed

at 270 degrees at .....
Conrad

289 , I think i t was.

Cooper

289, was it? Well, some .... ,I know you had a degree
and a bearing and a range on us at that point,

Conrad

We managed to get all the way through our post main
check off list, too,

6.8 10,6K Barostat
Cooper

Then at . . ... the baros t a t came on, deployed the

CQNf;Ur>ENTI~[

203

•

drogue just as the barostat came on.

It came on

right at 10.6 , right on the money.

I punched the

main , deployed the main just as the baros tat came
on.
Conrad

As we have already said , the main deployed .....

There seemed like an awful long time to me though
from the time you punched the main for it to go
through the sequence .

It seemed like an eternity

for the Rand R can to blow .
Cooper

Well , you could see the sequence going on out there,
all this thing trundling out and all the long lines
going out , and all the sequence happening, and then
the main coming out .

Conrad

It was really pretty though .

Cooper

Well, I guess I was anticipating.

Conrad

It was just like in that picture .

Cooper

You see all this stuff coming out, you know , that
drawing where it shows all the cy~les of the stuff
coming out.

Just like advertised.

6.9 Main Chute Deployment
Cooper

We reported when we had a drogue, when we had a good
main.

The main came out nominally.

De- reefed ex­

actly on time .... .
Conrad

Beautiful thing.
anything, nothing.

No gores out, no nothing, rips or
It was just nominal all the way.

tG©Nft0ENltAL

4

204
Cooper

It was a real pretty main, and we wer,~ very stable
on the main .
obviously.

We weren't oscillating a.t all , I mean
It looked like we were ju:3t coming

straight down.
Conrad

Yes, the whole thing damped out.

That is another

reason the water landing was so smooth .
Cooper

And when we touched in the water, as :: said, we
went to the 2000, we went to --

6 . 10

Single Point Release
FCSD Rep

Okay, single point release .

Cooper

Single point release.

How about that?

It ' s there .

I mean it's

really a jolt when you go to single point release,
but being aware of it we were both brc,ced like this
when I hit it, it oscillated us a couple of t imes
and then that is all there is to it .
Conrad

You hit the end of the strap and then you see-saw
a couple of oscillations .

That ' s exactly what it

felt like .... .
Cooper

As long as you lmow what to expect there is no problem.

I can see why Gus and John woul d lmock the

heck out of themselves .
Conrad
6.11

Not expecting it.

Blood Pressure Measurements
Cooper

Okay, we gave a blood pressure at Guaymas after
r etrofire and I told them I wouldn' t put the programer

O~F-IDENT.IA

GGNFIDEf';ITIAL

205

ON until we were on the water and I gave them three
,.

blood pressures and I don ' t think a:ny of them worked,
I don't think the bowl bled down.
6.12

Post-Main Checklist Items

FCSD REP

Okay, we g-ot the rescue beacon without lights and
the suit fans and ACME BIAS power OFF.

This is

post main check list and landing attitudes .

.,.

E@N~IDENTIAL

~GNFl&ENTIAf

206

7,0
7,1

,

LANDING AND RECOVERY

Impact
Cooper

Impact, was very very soft .
very easy.

We just hit .

We hit

We didn't go under water at all .

..

We

didn ' t change attitude one bit from t he time we
hit the water.

We went bloop.

Conrad

We just pitched down a little bit

Cooper

The nose pitched down 8 or 10 degrees but the water
didn't even come over the windows.

lhe main hit

parachute relea se, the chute drifted off in front
just slightly out to the right of us md just sat
out there in the water on the right fJr a long
time.
Conrad

We did skip this one thing here with this 6. 13
post main check off list .

We got all the way

through that and I wanted to say that I had the
decided impression that we got to the post main and
got back over here on this 2000 foot check list
pretty fast.

I mean that time happene,d faster than

the simula tor but it took us a little while to get
our heads unlocked, and after we went to 2-point
and get back on this check- off list, and boy, we
hadn ' t a:n:y more gotten through this when we were

0NFIBENTIAL

•

G0NFIDEI\ITIAL

201

over there to the 2000 Kand I was . . ..
Cooper

One thing that took a little bit of our time
there though, Pete , was the fact that the AIR
BOSS called us twice there and we were actually
busy answering that.

Conrad

We were talking on the radio and a little talking
to Houston on the radio too .

FCSD REP

Why don't you talk a little bit more about the

2000 foot that pressurized in the cabin .
Conrad

Yes, well then we went the D-ring safety cover.
We covered our D- rings but I can't put my D- ring
pin in so I didn ' t put the pin in until we were on
the water.

I can't put that pin in , in flight,

strappen in the seat.

I can't reach down there.

Gordo , can. 'Gordo can reach down and get it.
can't do it.

So, I didn't put mine in.

I

Then I

went to cabin vent UP and inlet snorkel UP and then
left the recirc valve at 45 degrees, and of course
the repress had been on since 50,000.

So had the

o2 HIGH RATE, or some altitude shortly thereafter.
The cabin seemed to be coming up very slowly.
doesn't even with repress on.

It

That's a, I guess,

a lot of volume in there or something, but it just
doesn ' t come up fast.

So we were about a pound when

CONFtDENTIAL

CONEIDENJIAl

208

F'CSD REP

we landed.
Never got over a pound?

Conrad

Never got over a pound I don ' t believe.

Cooper

Then we ca.me OFF on the repress and we opened
our face plates,

Conrad

Then we opened our face plates and tcok a sniff in
there.

It didn't smell to bad .

smell of RCS fumes.

I had a little

Now mind you we were s ealed

off at 2000 so I know it didn't come in on the
water.

The RCS fumes that were in there came in

there at 27000 when we opened the vent and the
inlet snorkel so I ' m stil l -- if the structure
would take jt, I really think you should come in
and leave that inlet snorkel and that vent
closed.

If you did that you would ha-re a clean,

cold cabin when you.hit the water.

Okay, now .

Cooper

I didn't really think it was as object ionable .

Conrad

No, it wasn't objectionable.

Cooper

It was cool.

One thing we might add ,:ight here

right now, that we didn ' t cover back :.n the preretro area was trat we went the full cold on
everythi ng.

We had that cabin so cold , and we went

to cabin fan and so that the cagin wae1 about, wha t ,
40 degrees, 50 degrees.

..

G0MFIDENTIAL
Conrad

209

No , the cabin was a bout 53 degrees .
there.

Somewhere in

It was a little over 50 , and the suit was

rll!llling
Cooper

The sui t was rll!llling about 50 on reentry so the
whole thing was pretty cool.

Conrad

It was never hot at any time.

Cooper

When we opened our face plates the cabin was still
cool, the suits were still cool , and the snorkel
and vent when we did open them and both fans came
on after we went OFF of o HIGH RATE, Repress and
2
both fans came on.
through . .. .

We were getting nice cool air

Yes, we have been hearing everybody

say, you know, boy you've got to get those suits
off, you really get hot in there.

You see and Gordo

said "Well come on we are going to be here for
awhile, we'll get the suits off" and it was
perfectly obvious that we were getting a good flow
and I said "Well, why don ' t we put our neck dams, on
and we ' ll leave the inlet snorkel open here and
get this fans running and see, just see ,

just sit

here for a second , because you get awful hot
getting out of the suit period.
we were in good shape.

And by golly

We could have stayed in tlut

210

spacecraft 2, 3 hours.
longer we stayed

As a matter o.f fact the

•.the cooler we wi~re getting

because we were just sitting back letting -Cooper

We really debated seriously about wait ing if the
carrier had been an hour or so nearer we would have
waited for a carrier pick up rather than go with
the choppers.

Conrad

Because we wer ei in good shape in theriuand we
didn't feel bad and the smells weren't bad and what
little RCS fumes where in there from picking them
up a t 27000 went right out .

Cooper

Of course we had -- let 's f ace it thotgh , we had an
ideal day on the water.
out on the water.

It was like a. mill pond

It was nice and smcoth and sunny

and everything was i n good shape , witb t he spacecraft.
Conrad

I t was early in the morning and the air was about
80 degrees - air t hat it was pulling in the aircraft pumping in our· suits, see.

But we were in

good shape.
7. 2 Checklist s
Cooper

Check list .

I thought our check lists were very

good with a few minor things we hav e m,~ntioned

CONFIDENTIAL

..

tfYENifP!

211

here that we might .. . we would suggest ma;ybe
reshuffling a little there .

7, 3 Communica tions
Cooper

The communications were excellent all the way , all
the way down until impact and from there on we
were hearing everybody in the whole darn world but
nobody apparently was hearing us .

Conrad

Now , Houston read us twice on the water, but ....

Cooper

Houston read us twice .

Conrad

We transmitted both on UHF and we transmitted on
HF.

Cooper

Our HF antenna never did extend on the water.

They

don't lmow whats wrong with it at this point, but
we went through the right procedures several times
of extending it .

Point: · of impact, we found out

fairly shortly what our point of impace was by
hearing the discussion in the air on where it was.
Status of recovery.

We were kept well informed of

that because our radio receivers were working fin e .

7, 4 Systems Configuration
Cooper

Systems configuration,ECS was excellent .
probl em at all.

No

Electrical was good, control was

good , aeromedical - - what does a eromedical have to

212

do with it here?
FCSD REP

Biomed records and all that stuff.

Cooper

The gear worked.

The one thing was, the blood

pressure bulb wouldn ' t bleed down and Pete never
could get a proper blood pressure there when on
the water.
Conrad

I took the bulb up to the helicopter .md gave it to
the doctor and told him to check it right away and
find out what happened because it wor:£ed fine a ll
flight.

7.5 Spacecra ft Status
Cooper

Spacecraft status .

There was a faint odor of fumes

in there but I didn't personally cons:Lder them

objectionable at all .
Conrad

It cleared out once we got the fans running.

Cooper

Ma.in chute was excellent.

The windowii - - visibility

was doggone good out the windows . .. ue were fogged
over just a little bit.
Conrad

They steamed up a little bit.

I coulc. see out of

t hem all right and could see the airplanes flying
overhead.
Cooper

They steamed up a little bit.

After ~-e sat there

they steamed up more than they were when we first
landed and they . . but we could see outside very

NFIDENTIAL

,.

C0~61DENTIA~

213

well and I guess the guy outside probably couldn't

.,.

see in as well as we could see out .
fogged a little.
tell.

They were

There were no l ea.ks that we cou ld

Electrical Power , everything was nominal .

o was fine.
Conrad

2
Electrical power, we,we, we, did not power .down the
squib betteries after we got on the water and we
went through the landing check list and powered
down all electrical equipment except the radios and
the beacons and a biomed recorders and the blood
pressure.

Cooper

We took a complete power down check list.
followed check list right on the money.

We
Sea condition

was 2 to 3 foot easy swells.

7.6 Post Landing Activity
Cooper

Post landing activities .

Let's see, we proceeded

to continue to try and contact and answer somebody.
We heard all the activity around and over and
around us.

The firs't thing we finatly heard in the way

of communications was when one of the swimmers
plugged in this outside phone jack and talked
to us.

He wasn't r eal clear but he was coming

through pretty well .

He wanted to know if we

,,

C..ONFIB~Nft~t

214

wanted to wait on the carrier or if we wanted a
chopper pick up.

I asked him how fal' the carrier

was away and he went ahead and told t:.s about 75
miles at that time.

We told him we relieved we

wanted to take the choppers.

7.7 Comfort
Cooper

Comfort was fine in the spacecraft.

EDSD REP

How long were you in the spacecraft in your suit?

Conrad

35, 40 minutes .

Cooper

About 35 or 40 minutes I . . . Maybe a little bit
more .

7. 8 Recovery Force Personnel
Cooper

Recovery f orce personnel and communications .

As I

say they did communicate with us with the telephone.
First of all one of the swimmers came up and looked
in the window and held up his thumb and we held up
our thumbs okay, so that took the sweE.t off them.
Floa tation collar, they had slightly more trouble than
usually getting it around but not a great deal.

It

probably took th~m maybe 10 or 15 minutEtS to get it
around there and inflated .

7. 9 Egress
Cooper

Right after they got it inflated we told them we
were coming out for the chopper.

--~

ONF-IDENTIAL

I opened the left

CONFIDEf\lTIAL
side hatch.

215

We did have our . • • we saw that they

had the floa tation collar around there and the sea
was calm and there was no problem getting any
water in the spacecraft and we decided we weren't
going to go in the water ourselves .

We did have

our neck "'1ams on but we did not have our gloves
on.

We left our helmet and gloves in the cock-

pit and decided well if we did go in the water for
unforecast reason we had our water wings and our
wrists are tight enough to hold your arms above
water and not get much in.
7.10

Survival Gear
Cooper

So, we didn ' t fiddle with any survival gear or
anything.

7,11

Crew Pick Up
Cooper

We just stood out on the nose of the spacecraft.

In fact .•• then I moved from the nose over into
one of the liftrafts.

Pete came up out of the

hatch and stood on the nose and he took the first
. . . horse co~lar came around.

He got the ho~se

collar and went up to the chopper first and they
lowered it again and I went in behind him.
FCSD REP

Oh, one thing we didn ' t mention here .
cutting the chute, the main chute?

CONFIDENTIAL

How a bout

216

Conrad

Oh, you mean jettison? Gordo jettisoned about 1
second after we touched down.

Cooper

About 1 second: after we landed I hit Hand away
it went.

Conrad

It sat right there beside us and float ed around for

quite a while .
Cooper

It sat there about 30 yards off to the• f ront and

slightly to one side of us.

RCSD REP

Okay .

_,.,
✓

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