Gemini 5 Technical Debriefing Part2 1965

22 Authority: NW 91526 GEMINI V Technical Debriefing Part ~I_I__________________ j CLASSIFICAT:ON CHANGE L~A o_~ o_ ----.......,,_~ c s:..;;...: s 1F :...::...,::. 1E -=-= By authority of • o I G !>- .2. - / - ? "'t.. Chanied by C ' ~ ~ , Date NOV 2 0 NOTICE: This document may be exempt from public disclosure under the Freedom of Infor­ mation Act (5 U.S.C. 552). Requests for its re­ lease to persons outside the U. S. Government should be handled under the provisions of NASA Policy Directive 1382.2. THIS MA TE ,-IAL CO NTA I NS INF09'MATION AFl"£ CT IN G THE NA TION" L DE FENSE OF TH t: U NITED STATES W ITHI N THE MEANING OF TH£ ESPIONAGE LAWS . . TITLE 18. U .S.C. SECTION 793 AN D n• . THE T9'AN S­ MISS IO N OR REVELATION OF WH ICH IN "N Y M"NNIEl'I TO AN U N ....UTHORIZ£D P'E ASON IS PIIOHIB IT E D BY LAW. GROUP 4 DOWNGRADE D A T J YEAR I N TF RVALS CECL ASS IFIEO AFT£9' 12 YE ...,,-5 l 973 COt~FIDEt~TIAL PRELIMINARY GT- 5 FLIGHT CREW DEBRIEFING TRANSCRIPT PART II Prepared By Spacecraft Operations Branch Flight Crew Support Division September 2, 1965 This material contains information affecting the national defense of the United States within the meaning of the Espionage Laws, Title 18. U.S . C. Section 793 and 794, the transmission or revela­ tion of which in any manner to an unauthorized person is prohibited by law. Group 4: Downgrade at 3 year intervals Declassified after 12 years co~~FIDEt'4TIAL (' PREFACE This preliminary transcript was made from voice tape recordings of the GT- 5 flight crew debriefing conducted August 30, 1965 thru September 2, 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 contai ns a transcript of the second part of the total debriefing. A prel iminary transcript of the first part was publi shed on September 1, 1965 , and it contains the crew' s description of the mission from an operati onal standpoint. ; CAts4flOEt!!IIAb TABLE OF CONTENTS Page number Par agraph 8.0 SYSTEMS OPERATION 8 . 1 Pla t f o:rm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . . • • 1 8 . 2 O.AMS •• ..... . ....... . . . ......... . . . .....• .. •. •• ••••• 16 8 . 3 RCS •....... . .. • ....•..... . . •. .••. .. .... . • .•••••• • • • 47 Environmen t a l Control System ·•· •·• ··•·••· · ··•••••• • 54 8.4 8 , 5 Comm.1.lllications .... . . .. ............... . .. . ...••••••• 66 8 . 6 Electrica l Sys tem ... . ... . ......................... . 80 8 . 7 Computer ..... . .. . ... ... ......... . ........ . .. . . . ... . 82 90 Cr ew Sta tion 8. 8 .................. .... ................. 9,0 OPERATIONAL CHECKS 9.1 Apollo Landmark Identifica tion • ••• • ·••·••·•••• • •• · 132 9 . 2 Cabin Lighting Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . . • . • . • • 146 9 . 3 SPADATS Tra cking Check . .. . .. . .. . . .. . . . . .. • .. • • . . .. 147 9 . 4 UHF Antenna Pa ttern Test ..... .. . .. .. . .....••.•.••. 147 9 . 5 Thrus ter Illuminat ion Checks ........... . . •....•••• 148 9. 6 Dual Command Transmitter Tes t ....... . .. .... ...••• • 148 9. 7 9. 8 Radar Test s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . • • . ID1 Eva llla.tion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • • . • . 148 150 10. 0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS 10 . 1 Powered Fl ight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 10 . 2 Orbital Flight ...... . ... . ....... . .... .. ....•• . .• . . 153 10 . 3 Reentcy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 11.0 EXPERIMENTS 11 . 1 Visual Definition of Celesti al Objects (D- 1) , Nearby Object Photography (D- 2) , and Terres t rial Features (D- 6) ••···· • ·•·• •· ··• · • •• · • · ··• •••• •• •• • · 210 11. 2 Cel es tia l , Space and Terrestria l Ra diometry ..•.••• 222 11. 3 Synoptic Ter r a in (S- 5) and Wea ther (S- 6) . J?rl.otography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . • • • • • • • • 228 11 . 4 Vis ual Acuity and As tronaut Visibi lity (S-8/D- 13) and Vision Test (M- 9) .......... .. ..... . ......... . . 233 11. 5 Electros tati c Charge (MSC-1 ) .......... •• . . •.•• • •• • 242 11 . 6 Zodiacal Li ght Photography (S- 1) .... .. .......• •• .• 243 11. 7 In- flight Exer ciser (M- 3) ........... . .... . ........ 243 11. 8 In- f l i ght Phonocardio gram (M- 4) ••••··•••••••· • ··•• 244 11. 9 Cardiovascular Refl ex Conditioning (M- 1) . •••••••• • 244 11. 10 Cloud Top Spectrometer (S- 7) •·•••••··•••·•• • ••· ••• 246 11. 11 Miscel laneous ............. . . . ... . .•...... . ...••••• 248 CQ t-4 F-1 DEt-4TIAL 12 . 0 PR.EMISSION PLANNING 12.1 Mission Plan (Trajectory) .. . .. .. .. ..... .. . ......... 255 12. 2 Flig}lt Plan .. ... .. ... ... . ..... . . ..... .. . . . .... . .... 255 12.3 Spac ecraft Changes . . .. .. ..... . ... .. .... ... . . .. .... . 255 12.4 Mission Rules . . .... . . . ..... ........... .. ...... ..... 256 12. 5 Experiments .. .... . .. . . ...... . .. ..........•......... 2 56 12.6 Training Activities . . .. . .. .. .. .... .. . ....... ...•.. . 257 MISSION CONTROL 13. l GO/NO GO ••. . ... •. ....... ... ... . . . . ...... •• •. •• • ... . 261 13. 2 FLA and CLA Updates .. .. .... ... ... ....... . .. ... .. . .. 261 13. 3 Consumables .•.. . .. . . . .. ... ....... ..... .. . . ......... 261 13.4 Flight Plan Changes •. .. ... . . . . ... . .. ....•.. ... .. . •. 264 13 . 5 Systems .• •. .. ... . ............ .. . .... ..•.•..•• . . . . .. 267 13. 6 Experiments Real - Time Updates .. .. ........... . . . . .. . 268 TRAINING 14. 1 Gemini Mission Simulator . . ................. .... ... . 270 14.2 LT\T , DCPS • , . ... .... . . . . .• .. . .........•• . .••. . • •. .• • 284 14. 3 MAC Engineering Simulator •• • ••·•·••· • · •·• ••••••· • •• 285 14.4 Centrifuge ... ...... . ... . .. . ........................ 286 14.5 Translation and Docking Trainer ••• · •····•·• · ··•••·· 286 14. 6 PlSlletaritllD. .. . . . .. . . . .. . .... . .. ....... . . ... . ....... 288 14 . 7 Systems Briefings . .. .. ...... . . .. .. . .. . . .. .... .. . . . . 292 14 . 8 Flight Experiments .. . .. . . ... . . .... . . .........•. .. .. 293 14.9 Spacecraft Systems Tests . .. .... . ... .. . ..... ........ 294 14 . 10 Egress Training ..... . ..... . . . . . . . ...... .... . .. ..... 296 14.11 Parachute Training ......... ... ... . . .... .. .......... 297 14. 12 Ia.unch simulation ............. . . . . . .. .. . . .... .. ... . 298 14. 13 Network Simulation .. ....... . ... .. ... . . . ...... . .. ... 298 14. 14 Reentry Simulation . ... . ... .. ...... .. ... .......... . . 298 14. 15 Simulated Network Simulations . . ... . . ....... . ...... . 298 14.16 Zero "G" Fligh.ts ............ . .. . . .... . . ........ .. . . 299 14. 17 Flight Plan Tra ining ... .... .. . . . . . . .. ......... .. ... 300 15. 0 CONCLUDING COMMENTS 15.1 Crew Qu.arters .... ; ....... . .. . .. . .. . . .. •.... . .... .. . 30 2 15 . 2 Physical Training and Aircraft Flying . ... ..... ..... 303 15.3 Sea I.a.b . . .. ........ ... ....... . . ... .. . . .. . .... .. . ... 304 15. 4 Wa tches and Clocks . .. . .. ....... . ....... ...... .. . ... 304 15.5 Miscellaneous Discrepencies •• · ··•·• · ·· • • ••••••••••• 306 15. 6 Medica l Aspects .. . .. .. .. . . . . . ........ . .. .. .... . .... 310 1 8.O SYSTEMS OPERATIONS 8.1 Platform Cooper By day we used standard procedure of finding a zero yaw, which is a little easier to do down at about retro position. The nose is a little bit in the way for determining zero yaw unless you pitch down just a little past nose low in zero­ zero- zero position. When pitched down just a tiny bit, zero yaw was very readily apparent to within a fairly reasonable degree of accuracy, and then ease it right on up . We had lines for the zero­ zero position to give us our pitch and roll on the horizon. This was the regular day alinement. Night was pretty much the same except we 1 d get zero yaw by a star, get roll and pitch by the zero lines on the window (or knowing where they were approximately) line this with the top of the air­ glow or the horizon. At that point you'd go into Cage, hold it there at that position until it caged) then uncage the platform to BEF or SEF whichever the case might be, and then to to Plat­ form and Attitude on the FDM and FDI's. Then aline the platform fine aline SEF or BEF by keeping , 2 the needles zeroed. It would slowly gyro torque itself and correct out the small errors for fine alinement. Conrad Anything to add, Pete? Well, I didn ' t hear all of that, but I think the alinement is straightforward. One thlng I had not read in either the GT- 3 or GT- 4 debriefings on this subject on out the window alinement was that we have a window gage that you can us1i t hat will put you right on in roll and pitch ancl, of course, for yaw you still have to use the same out the window reference. Cooper One thing that I think that should very definitely training wise be readily available anc. we looked and looked and looked and couldn't fir..d any was an actual scale picture of the left hand wi ndow and the right hand window with what the hcri zon should look like at zero-zero-zero and at retro attitude and at minus 90 degrees left and 90 degrees r ight and at 60 degrees left and 60 degrees r ight and this type thing . I've never seen an a~tual drawing showing the horizon line on a window a·'ld what i t should look l ike . 3 Conrad Yes Cooper I think this would be a tremendous benefit and shouldn't be difficult to come up with. Conrad If you place your eye so that it goes through the lower left corner of the right window or the lower right corner of the left window and run that eye position right through the front RCS yaw thruster, the lower yaw thruster in the front ring, I guess that's ring A, anyway, you take a line between your eye, the corner of the window and the front RCS yaw thruster, right through the middle of it, and put that line on the top of the airglow or the horizon. Then the spacecraft, and this looks like an excessively nose up attitude, but it's not, you're zero degrees in pitch then the window frame is just about vertical to the horizon and it forms a perpendicular angle. Cooper The inside edge of the frame . Conrad The inside up and down edge of the window corner makes a perpendicular angle to the horizon and you can use that as a roll gage. If you set it up 4 that way that platform isn ' t off 4 or 5 degrees i n roll or pitch. Cooper So, i t r eally looks like, when you fir3t start lining it up, it appear s to you that f ::-om the left seat that you ' re actually rolled l eft , Conrad Yes, that's right . Cooper And f r om your seat it would look l i ke j t was actuall y r olled right . Cooper It doesn ' t look horizontal at al l, but that ' s due to the fact t ha t you 're sitting off by thi s offset . Conrad One other thing that you might say about platform alinement is that if you ' re not on in roll and pi tch, mainl y roll, t his really will ea t you up in alinement time . Cooper Roll and yaw are t he bad errors creator:, . Pitch you can be off a l ot i n and it' 11 corr ec:t r ight out. Conrad Not if the other two (roll and yaw) are off . Cooper But if you 're off in roll and/or yaw th€n it really takes a long time and its real rcugh . 5 Conrad You don't want to be deceived by the fact that the needles are holding in the center pretty well. Cooper That's right, one thing that we found when we were going through this real, real long platform alinement prior to getting all l i ned up for retro­ fire was that we had the needles all alined, t hey were sitting all glued out . But you have to s i t there with them for a little b i t glued out . They sit there all zeroed out, it looks like everything was all alined and al l of a sudden yaw begin to ease off quite a bit showing that we weren ' t alined. Conrad At one time we went to Orbit Rate when we had not pulled the yaw all the way in and, boy, it showed up in r oll as we started moving around. Cooper Orbit Rate and Horizon Scan. Conrad I mean it shwed up in the roll axis . Cooper Oh, yes. Conrad You have to take t he time and be careful with the Right . platform alinement, no doubt about i t. ° CSf*fDEt◄ TIAl , 6 Cooper And i t takes t ime to do it and do a r ~ally good job on it . Modes . The only thing I can say about Cage is that it takes an excessively long tim1; to Cage . Conrad I ' ll comment on this even though we d:i. dn't get a chance to do the rendezvous , but even in simula­ tion, it was apparent and the l i ttl e bit t hat we did in flight caging the ~latform, getting ready for alinements and t hings l ike -;hat, it was very time consuming . I think tha ·; you could find use for a f ast slave cycle . Cooper Very much so. Conrad Fast Cage cycle is what I should say. I 'll say it's a luxury item but it sure could be helpful . Cooper SEF and BEF worked j ust like advertisEid . SEF for fine aline and small- end- forward, BEF for reYersing your phase angles so that you ' re still steering to and fine alining blunt encl forward . Conrad J i m and Ed made the comment that t hey never alined BEF, that t hey a lways alined SEF. We alined SEF normally through the flight and when ,:e were ready 60 ►◄~ ~ 7 to retro, we wanted to save as much fuel as possible, so we alined BEF and I think alining BEF is easier than in SEF. Cooper Yes , Conrad I think you can tell yaw better going backwards than you can going forward. Cooper Yes. Conrad I don't know why, maybe it was just psychological . Cooper I agree with you, I really think you're right. I think you can tell it better. It streams away from you a little more . Conrad Yes. It was easier to pull in in yaw . I thought it was a little more comfortable feeling . I enjoyed the riding around alining the platform BEF much more than when we alined it SEF, and I felt we were closer to being on most of the time when we pulled it in in yaw. Cooper Of course, we had a little better control system there, it does help. Conrad Yes . Mt ◄ FIDE►~TIAL • ~NftDE~~TIAt·,_ 8 Cooper I think either way (SEF, BEF) is good, both worked very a dequately and it just depends on which way you want to aline for what you ' re going to do . BEF is certainl y a t least as acceptable as SEF. ORBIT RATE was not bad off a t all . We di dn't have any l arge errors in it due to t he f a ct that we had more nearly circulari zed our oroit from t he burns that we did . Conrad We were about at 171- 60 at that time p<=:riod . I don't know what t hey ha d picked as an orbit rate number at the end fina lly for the REP . Cooper We were about 107, 166 . Conrad Yes . I was really surprised with how ,..,ell the platform stayed on after just t a king a quick look at zero- zero- zero, not even trying to ali ne these. We j u st passed freely through this in dr ifting flight and uncaged the platform right into Or bit Rate, and it didn't get off five or ten degrees in any of the three axis . Cooper For about 20 hours . 'i0 ►~FIDE►~TIAL G©t◄ FIDl!~~TIAL Conrad 9 Yes, for about 20 hours that we drifted around . It was finally off the most in roll. It got about 15 degrees off in roll . Cooper Orbit Rate worked very well . Conrad Other than inertial work, I just didn't see any big advantage in free. You'd still think in terms of the local horizon up there most of the time. Cooper Yes . Conrad We just never had much occasion during the f light to use FREE. Cooper Platform displays . Conrad Bal l oper ation through the poles was just fantastic! It was so smooth. The only way you could tell that you were going through a pole is you could see the roll index, vehicle is on the ,, roll gimbal, flip . Cooper Yes. This is something we had trouble finding out, whether this was the case or not and we deliberately ran several specific checks of this. <!rJ~~FIDEt~TIAL 10 Regardless of which way you approachec. it from, whether you approached i t fast or slm.- or whether you 're going through the 90 or 270 pojnt on the ball, you can go right smack through the middle of it, you can sit right in the middle of it, you can move up or down, r ight or left and the ball doesn 't jump, doesn't j itter, doesn't do anything . It's just beautiful . Conrad Yes . Cooper We did a burn right through each one of the poles . I think the controls are pretty simila-r to what they are in the s imulator . There are t wo exceptions, one of which I think i s valid and which I think may be influenced by the fact that we had a lot of s low degredation in ou:~ OAMS system. I thought that the PlJISE system in the spacecraft had a lot less torque, a reasonable amount less torque and it got a lot leBs, as we went along it got less and less and leHs . Conrad Yes . Cooper But even i nitially, it felt like thP- PlLSE system 11 had less authority in the spacecraft than it does in t he simulator. On the other hand, I felt the RATE COMMAND system had a heck of a lot more authority in the spacecraft than it does in the simulator . Cooper That RATE COMMAND just flat snaps you in. In the simulator, when you come around in RATE COMMAND and you let off it will go through 5 to 10 degrees. You have to let off on it 5 to 10 degrees early. By golly, in the spacecraft you didn't have to let off even a degree early. When you let go, it stopped right there jus t like you put on the brakes. Conrad Yeah. Cooper It was so tight that you almost had to - - Conrad That was OAMS Rate Command. Cooper You almost had the feeling that the OAMS Rate It was good and it was tight . Command was almost bending the Adapter Section . I t had such high torquing rate . Conrad On day 2 and 3, our OAMS system was working completely correct. I was extremely impressed • 12 with how nice a control system i t was. We made several maneuvers using this control Eystem and didn 't have any gripes on that sys tem at all . As Gordo said we were really impressed wjth the Rate Command system. FCSD REP When you turned around 90 degr ees in crder to get rid of the REP, did you use the 8-ball ? Cooper Yes . Conrad FDI 's are on this Gimbal flip bus i ness too, you see . They do that in the trainer, but they were steady as a rock in the spacecraft . Cooper Yes, we used the FDI's for t he fi ne al ine . Al­ though to get there we used the 8- ball . Conrad We had trained to use the IVI ' s . FCSD REP That 's right. Cooper We used the IVI ' s , not t he FDI' s . We used t he I VI ' s as the real fine measure of being l i ned up . We used the FDI 's too . Conrad You can use anything in the spacecraft. • Cooper 13 You can't use the FDI 's or the 8- ball as a reference in the mission simulation because you have this gimbal flip which just gives you fits . .. We didn't use Ra te Command very much, mainly just for the burns . In fact, t he burns are the onl y times we used Rate Command. I used the Dir ect system several times and I thought the Direct was really good. It was good and crisp and you had good authority with it. Conrad I had the impression that the spacecraft was a lot more stable vehicle in Di rect than it was in the simulator . Cooper Tm t' s right . Conrad In t he simulator you tend to sit there and go too much and go too much . When Gordo'd stick a shot of Direct in to go someplace, it never showed up in another axis . An equal shot i n the other direction would stop it r i ght now . Cooper Yes. Conrad The effects momentum of the spacecraft didn ' t seem to be as great in flight as they were i n the ~f:HDEt◄TIA ~ "t OMFtDE~ ◄ TIAL 14 simulator. Cooper You didn ' t have to lead a :, much. That's right . The Direct system was a much more precise system in the spacecraft than it i s in the s ' mulator . Conrad I thought it was quite easy to fly, but there's no doubt about it, boy, that Rate Corrunand eats up the fuel . • Cooper Direct uses quite a bit of fuel also. Conrad We did use a little fuel t hat one day. 15 We were doing so many experiments in a row that we had to very rapidly get the spacecraft back to a zero­ zero- zero or a pitch down 30 posi tion. When you track one of these targets and come through the nadir and keep on going, boy, you're really smoking towards a rearward direction. Cooper You're sitti ng i nverted BEF. Conrad That's r i ght, you ' ve got rates built up going away from you and you ' d have to use Direct to stop those rates, get yourself moved all the way back up here and s top them again. Maybe it'd be so tight that you'd use Di rect to get down and start on it, and then switch to Pulse and track in Pul se and then r i ght back up and start doing something else. Well, we di d eat up a lot of fuel that day, but we got everything done that day. We hit darned near all targets. Cooper Di rect i s a real responsive , real fine way to maneuver. 60t~Fl0Et.t:tAt 16 •i Q:M f~Cf1stI IAla Cooper .. Platform controls were very straight fc,rward. I thought they all functioned as expected. Conrad The Platform took the full 25 minutes to go through the fast heat, and the first time on it was really cold and took another 3 minutes worth before start of the Cage Cycle. After that, it seemed to stick right around 25 minutes to get the platform up and on the line and start into Cage . Cooper Right now, I've got extreme confidence in that Platform. Conrad I really think it does well. '.Ihe platform did an outstanding job during the entire flight. Cooper I t sure did. 8. 2 OAMS Cooper We fired the OAMS on the pad and it was mushy. couldn't hear them fire just gas mainly, You About the third round of firings however, you could really feel them fire off, they were all good. Cooper During flight the OAMS started out very good and in about the third day began to degrade. ~:he f i fth day ~ l i U iiAL 17 i s when we found the two thrusters that were not operating correctly. Conr ad 'Ille number 8 thruster was working real good when we found that the number 7 thruster was out. So we shut the sys tem down again and had a big talk with Houston about this . We went one more revolution and they gave us some tests to perform on 7 and that 's when we di scovered 8 wasn ' t working. Conrad 'lwo of them quit , within an orbit of one another. Cooper We had already run complete tests on it and number 8 had been working on the previous tests and quit on the next one. 'Ille story of the old OAMS inflight system was that gradually as the days went by there was more , and more that went wrong with it unti l f i nally at the end we had less than half the thrusters left and they were pretty bad. Conrad I realized a couple of heater blankets were probably out on the OAMS system, but I'm still convinced unt i l somebody convi nces me otherwise, that the thing that shot the OAMS system down, was the decision to turn off the OAMS heater. I had ques­ ioned the decision in the air to only point that 18 I could. I didn 't think we were in that much trouble for electrical power. I still think it was a mi stake be cause I think even with a couple of blankets out, if we'd have kept the ,3ystem warm wi th the rest of the heaters, we'd have never froze them up. Cooper 'llie thrusters themselves were actually ·vorki ng because you could actually get a glow off of them. There was a little bi t of fuel or oxidiier coming out of it and burning , but it wasn't getting the proper amount of mi xture ratio. Conrad Now, they could have been dirty. That :ould be it, but it was purely in the valves i n the thrusters themselves because they were putting out thrust even at the end. I f you wanted to hold it i n full D:Lrect wi th 7 and 8 circuit breaker e ngs.ged , you were getting wet f uel thrust. Cooper Yes . You were getti ng a little wet thr~st. Conrad let's go into how the whole thing occurred. We had shut the heat er down a long time ago and we really hadn't agreed wi th that, but there wasn't much we could do about it. We were i n the mi ddle , 19 of doing experiments on the fifth day, and we had had a little trouble alining the platform. What was happening, apparently was the number 7 thruster was getting cranky, but we also knew we were vent­ ing hydrogen and we knew this because we were getting some torqueing out of that . At the t i me Gordo was having trouble ali ning the Platform, we thought it was because the hydrogen was venting. Finally Gardo said, "There's something wrong with t the control systems. " Once we deci ded there was something wrong wi th the control system, that ' s when it went just like back i n the simulator. We shut everything down, went to Direct, thought about it for a second and turned off all the circuit breakers , turned them all back on one at a time , tested all of the thrusters and, sure enough , when we got to number 7, it was out, completely out. Conrad So then I tri ed secondary ACME bias power. We tried the seconday yaw and the secondary attitude drivers with no effect so we were relatively as ­ sured that something had happened in either the hand controller or the fuel was not feeding. We decided to power down r i ght there , which we did , and we advised flight of what the problem was . £ 8.M&HW~Jl~i I 20 think that's about the time we really decided the s canner wasn' t a ny good , or had we already tol d them about that? Cooper Yes. We 'd already t old them about that. Conrad Yes , you ' re right. I know what it was . That's when we discovered that the voice tape was out. We were right i n the middle of s everal experiments and it occurred approximate l y like 16:30: 54 on the f i f th day. We r eported to Houston that the voice tape was out, the number 7 yaw L~ft thruster was out and that I had turned the OAMS heater back on. I was suspicious of that all the ·;ime . That's when they called up a nd gave us this m:i.nimum power down. Why did we go i nto that? They had us power down everything. Cooper At about the same time that we came up with this, they came up with this idea that the hrdrogen was boiling off s o fast that we were going t o be out of hydrogen by about the end of the f i fth day at the rat e we were goi ng i f we d i dn't power down and stop the usage of i t . .iO~~FIDEMTfffl: • 21 Conrad Yes. That's when we came around on the next revolution. 'Illey had us fire up everything again to take a look at i t and that's when we found out number 8 had just gone down the tubes too. But number 8 was still givi ng us something; number 8 was stil l burning, but it was burning off mi xture. You could see a flame . Cooper You could see a glow out of it. Conrad You couldn ' t hear it like you could hear the other thrusters, but you could see lights on the ni ght side so you knew something was coming out. 'Ille drivers j ust weren't openi ng all the way or some­ thing. FCSD REP The fifth day at 16:30 is the first problem you had with the OAMS, is that right? Conrad No, earlier. When we first powered the system up, we were having trouble with that very f irst platform alining and we felt we were having some hydrogen venting problems. 'Ihat's when we drifted way off, and Gordo said, "'Ille Pulse system isn't going to hack this hydrogen venting. " He went t o Di rect and blipped the yaw l eft thrusters . • 22 All kinds of garbage came by the spacecraft. It looked like we blew a whole bunch of junk out of it. I remember distinctly seeing gold balls . Cooper Great b i g balls of l iquid. Conrad So it must have been raw fue l . Something at this time wasn 't working right , but I guess number 8 was putting out full thrust and number 7 was still work i ng but not all the way. Now mayb<? right then and there if we'd have really worked that system over; fired all the thrusters in Direc1; and a couple of good healthy loads throug it ,., and put the h eater s back on the line, we might have sal­ vaged thew vaged the whole system. It must have been right at the point of freezing up. Cooper This was early i n the fifth day. .£:Obi:EIOEttllAL 23 Conrad We didn't hit the direct thrusters long enough to heat them I don't think. I do distinctly remember saying to Gordo "We blew all this junk out of there . " Conrad We ' d never seen anything like that before and we'd been up there 5 days and seen all sorts of things . We could see liquid oxygen when we vented it, if we vented i t under the right light conditions . We could see when we vented hydrogen under the right lighting conditions. It would all float by the spacecraft and at low sun angles, either at sunup or sundown any one of these quantities, ECS o , 2 CRYO o2, or RSF hydrogen, you could see it come whistling by the spacecraft. We were continually floating around in these old silver balls of either hydrogen or oxygen. Cooper Okay, well that was pretty well the background of what happened. Some thrusters that had checked out good would subsequently check out bad or be completely inoperative as the days went by. So finally we wound up with maybe half of the total OAMS thrusters still operating properly. 24 • Conrad We had some thrust remaining in every axis but yaw l eft . We had some in yaw left if you just wanted to dump raw fuel overboard . I don ' t know whether it was fuel or oxidizer. Cooper Generally, what we'd do is roll and pitch to get our yaw left . Conrad I f we were tumbling and wanted to damp we just waited until we translated into the right axis in whi ch we had some authority . Cooper The one axis that always seemed to work pretty good so far as control authority was pitch. Conrad Yes Cooper Pitch up and pitch down seemed to work reasonably well all the time. Conrad Yes . I wonder i f that had something to do with the pitch thruster lines on the manifold being close to the source. Pitch was always good . Our trouble was mainly coupling in the yaw thrusters both right and left. Cooper Source pressure was easy to monitor . SJurce temper­ ature we could monitor and it was too CJld . 25 Conrad It ran down in the 48 degree area . Cooper It showed that it was running too cold . That's why we questioned turning the OAMS heater off , Cooper Regul ated pressure was fine . Conrad Right on the money . Cooper Propellant quantity seemed to read r easonably good until it got down towards the end. At that point (from about 10 percent on down) the propellant quantity just went on down to the bottom of the scale . It was reading below zero and yet ground readouts indicated OAMS propellant quantity remaining . Cooper Monitoring of OAMS propellant r emaining onboard information was fairly good . Conrad Yes. I thought we were fairly close. Cooper Gr ound i nformation agreed fairly good with onboard information in general . Conrad The whole OAMS sy stems got to be reviewed . I think that they think we wasted a lot of fuel and I think that on day 3 we probabl y were a little overgenerous with our fuel usage. ret◄ FtE>Et.~TIA ~ I But I ' m still COt--1 FID Et◄ :r IA~ 26 ,; convinced that because we went so long with the OAMS heater off that we were not burning a nominal fuel to oxidizer ratio. Cooper Yes . Even though we were in a rush to get a lot of ... these things done, I was still extremelr conscious of fuel usage . Although I'd used Direct to get i t started, I wouldn't just fire all the way around in Direct input, let it coast around, a~d then stop it right there. Conrad Yes. I never saw fuel usage in the sim1lator like we saw in flight . Cooper I t just seemed to go down very rapidly on the gauge during that one period of time. Conr ad And yet we went night after night all night long in Horizon Scan or in Pulse and would hardly use any fuel at all . As a matter of fact, the ground gave me the figures. Thi s was when we were ::unning all ni ght long in Horizon Scan so that we had a nice reference . a night. 11 They said "You' re using about 2 pounds Now, that seems like a r easonable amount for what we were doing. • 27 Cooper We were using it for Attitude Hold and for getting pictures and to get through the day side . Conrad Oh Yes. We never used Rate Command except for the maneuver burns. Cooper We were tracking the missile using Diredt. Had to get on it in a rush so I went to Direct . Conrad I questioned propellant quantity prior to lift- off. It was 87 percent at lift- off, I thought we were supposed to be 100 percent on the gage at lift- off . I thought we had propellant quantity loaded to the maximum? Cooper Well, they said we were about 50 pounds under . Conrad Yes, they said we had about 50 pounds less fuel than we were supposed to have. Cooper We asked them about this before we l ifted off, Cooper At about 4 or 5 minutes before lift- off, we asked them about this. Conrad We got a "We ' re checking" and that's the last we heard from it. And off we went . 28 Cooper So then we asked again when we wer e in orbit, "About this under load on GA.MS fuel" . I su spect t hat something was fouled up because we didn ' t get a full 0AMS load . Cooper That was pretty bad . I think monitor ing onboard of propell~mt r emaining t o compl et e the mission was pretty good. The fore­ cast fuel for mis si on completion of GE,m ini V ought to be reviewed because somebody didn ' t quite come up with the right fuel figures . Twenty- six percent remaining after the REP would not havE been nearly enough to have ~one the r emainder of the mission . Conrad Yes . I t hi nk t hat in computing the a.mount of fuel used t o perform a maneuver, they figure out how much to get the r ates going but they must s top there . They must not f i gur e how much fuel it takes you to . get back to, say, zer o- zero- zero . Appirentl y t hey assume that whenever you get done with a tracking maneuver, you j ust drift to get back to zero- zero­ zero. Over the U. S . we had maybe 6 or 7 minutes be­ t ween a 30 degree pitch- down target to the next 30 degr ee pitch- down target . You ' ve got to t r ack it all t he way through, bing the spacecraft all the way back up and then go to and track the next target . 29 Cooper And stop your rate at the back . Conrad As a matter of fact, that's about twice the fuel usage . it. Cooper They may take this into account, I doubt They're very conservative on their estimates . Selector controls and switches were all right . Attitude controller was fine . ( Maneuver controllers . We had every intention of checking the right one and we never did check it because of other problems . Inflight malfunction irregularities we've already covered pretty well . Cooper Attitude Control Modes, Rate Command was excellent . Reentry Rate Command we never checked . Conrad I don't even think you need it . Cooper And I think it could be removed from the spacecraft as far as I ' m concerned . the simulator . Conrad I never used or need it on I never liked it. Pilots aren't going to tolerate these higher r ates . They will damp before these rates are reached. Cooper Direct is a good mode. wrong with Direct . There ' s nothing at all I thought it was much crisper, much crisper in the spacecraft than in the simulator 30 shows that it is . The Pulse mode was very economical on fuel and I felt that in the sinru.latc,r you had a little more authority than you actually did in the spacecraft . The spacecraft had slightly less authority in Pulse than the sinru.lator does . Inci­ dentally, you can use Pulse just for a month of Sundays and never see the fuel go down on the 0AMS gage at all. You can use Pulse all day long with using little fuel usage . Horizon s can, the primary Scanner was inoperative as was stated e3.Tlier . Secondary Scanner worked fine. The The sca::m ers, I think, operated quite satisfactorily. We had a lot of scanner dropout in the primary and eiren in the secondary. We had some dropout in the :iecondary when we first were going in and out of i;unlight areas . Conrad But then it seemed to work allright . Cooper Horizon Scan Control Mode worked fine . Conrad It's a loose mode but it still works fir..e . Cooper It's got wide limits on it of course, -which i s okay . The mode itself works fine. Real good. There was s ome­ thing really fouled up in the platform rnode . work at all like it's supposed to. It didn't The platform mode is supposed to be plus or minus 5/loth of a degree . .. it was plus or minus 10 degrees I ' ll eat my hat . • If 31 Conrad I thought it held to about a degree and a half . Cooper Not in yaw , you remember . It allowed yaw to wander off by probably a good 10 degrees there. Remember it allowed right yaw to wander off by about 10 degrees and just sit off there in right yaw several times. It wouldn't even bring it back. Conrad Yes . FCSD Rep Do you think this had anything to do with your con­ That was the trouble . trol problem? Cooper W-ell, it may have been . It may have been that con­ trol was somewhat intermittent right there . know, but it might have been . I don ' t But Rate Command sure worked good using those same controls. Conrad Yes . I suspect that being the first time that it was cranked up since spacecraft number 2 , it may not have been tweeked as well as it could have been. Conrad It certainly didn't work like it did on the simulator , I ' ll put it that way. Cooper It didnlt work properly, and it was no good the way it was. We never used it after we originally tried it out and after we 1 d tried doing this one burn on it to see if it would hold. The one that it did hold on, our first perigee adjust, it held beautifully. During the next one, it got so bad it wasn I t any 32 good . Ther e again , it might have been a f unction of the thrusters going out . In any event , I think that 1 s an error ,;hat somebody needs to look i nto . I ' m n ot sure that pl atfor m mode is doing what i t should. I know that , t heoretically , and by t he diagrams on it and the limit s that it ought to be a ver y pr ecise control modE! . Cooper Spacecraft separation at SECO + 20 couldn ' t have been better , jus t fine . Translat i on per igeE! adjust went like cl ockwork. Conrad Tha t was our fi r st r eal burn and I thi r.k we got something like 9 . 6 f t/sec on t he IVI ir.stead of 10 . 0 , but t he burn wasn ' t that crit icaJ . Conrad I checked accelerometer bias and it seE•med like the accel er ometer bias incr eased l a t er in the f light . I specif icall y checked it f or the REP end it was okay . I 1 d just set up zer os in the wirdow and went to Catch-Up and they stayed zero for 3 or 4 minutes or longer . So that satisfied me . I checked it l a ter on in the f light and I don ' t think we r an more than a minute and we clickEd up a f oot per second on the fore - aft window . be checked on the tape . That can In the beginning it was entirely acceptable for the REP . • 33 Cooper I think we had some bias, just how much I don ' t lmow. The timing of the translation was fine , updating was fine. Operations and checklist were okay. Computer usage, okay. Conrad It was easier to make a burn on the simulator that had no up- down or left and right in it than it was in the spacecraft . Gordo did a real good job of tracking on every burn and I didn't see it wander hardly at all . Cooper And all the IVI ' s would be zero . Conrad And all the IVI 1 s would be zero, but we'd have .4. of 10 a foot in one axis and ~O in another. Conrad Yes . 8 The worst cross- coupling, we had 10 in one axis, and when we burned in the platform mode, but we were checking that . It could have been accelero­ meter bias again, or, the spacecraft is more sensi- • tive to picking up up- down and l eft - right velocities than I thought it was . Conrad Gordo did a real good job of tracking. He tracked as well as he did in the simulator and we never had this show up in another axis in the simulator . Cooper It would be zero , zero , zero in the simulator. Conrad It was hardly worth my time checking address 81 and 82 in the simulator because I could just tell he 34 wasn't going to have any velocities in there , and very seldom did . But we never fail ed t o have fairly si zeable ones , like fa and fo fps, in another axis and I'm not quite sure how it got therE·. I guess the spacecraft is extremely sensitive . If you ' re going to make pr ecise burns , you I ve gotta really burn precisely and i f you want to take out the errors , take out the addre ss 81 and 82 errors so that you don ' t introduce anything else . During the difficult ren- dezvous maneuvers, you have to plan on more f uel usage because you're going to have to take it out with the up- down thrusters . Cooper I think what you ' re going to have to do is stop short of burning off all your forward or aft velocity, particularly the forward velocity, and then use the canted thrusters to burn off the right- Left and up- do,m and that will take out part of the remaLnder of the forward velocity. If it hasn ' t taken it all out , then bleep out the rest of the f orward . I think that 1s the only way you can do it if you want to burn them a l l t o zeros. I don ' t believe you can t r ack any more precisely if you keep all your IVI ' s zeroed right down the money. If you burn it off and stop just at the right time so that everything should turn 35 ;CO tsifH0E1t~I IAL • d up wi· th .1_ , 2-, or up zero , then youst i·11 win 10 10 6 in all your windows. 10 I just don t t know how you I re ever going to do any better than that . (Unless you use the above procedure). Cooper Translation REP deployment was passable . FCSD Rep This one you didn ' t . You didn ' t fire back at the REP after jettison? Cooper No. FCSD Rep Let's replace this maneuver with the simulated opera­ tion (phantom rendezvous). Cooper We did deploy the REP and the radar did operate properly. FCSD Rep Originally when the debriefing guide was made out, this section covered the translation back after REP deployment and the subsequent translations . Cooper Okay . FCSD Rep We ' ll just have to use the translations that they made on the simulated run . Cooper We kicked the REP out at 90 degrees right yaw . Conrad We kicked it out at 02 07 + 15, or 15 seconds l ate . Cooper The reason we were 15 seconds late , as we stated earlier, was that going into the night side the night before , after all our careful platform alinements , all of a sudden the horizon scanner began to drop out on us and we began to drift off in yaw. Conrad Dropping out wouldn't have been bad, but when it dropped out it also commanded some thrusting. Cooper We got some real good blips out of it . Conrad We were alining i n the Horizon Scan Mode and I got the impression that it pitched us up . Cooper We wer e already alined , and we had gone to Orbital Rate and Horizon Scan, just to come alcng there in time to go in . As soon as we had the Ilatform all al i ned , and before we went in on the night side , I decided I would realine the pl atform ji.:st very briefly . So I had gone to SEF and to IULSE and I was checking and pulsing it . • But becai.:.se t hen in SEF position all your torquing is done f rom your Horizon Scanner. When t he Horizon Scar,ner began to drop out we began to get real erratic needle display and it looked like our platform alinemEmt was deter­ iorating. I was trying to correct thiB , but obviously, it was really kicking us off . That was when we went t o CAGE , tried desperatelr to get it caged and realined in time , and thought we had i t realined . We may have had it reasonab:.y well alined by the time we f inally yawed right . it was . I ·; looked like The needles wer e all zeroed out and everything was settled down . .was working at that point . The Horizon Scanner It quit working properly after we turned to yaw right . We had already gone into Orbital Rate, so we could care less about the scanner at this point . already in Orbital Rate . We got it alined, and we ' re We yawed right , got squared away and 15 seconds late ejected the REP on the IVI's all zeroed . We then used a couple of DIRECT pulses , zipped back around , picked it up going around to the 270. It was going right straight out to 270 on our ball . We could see the REP light whenever we were passing through the 90 degree point . I could see it flashing on the nose . On my side, By the time we got around it was in quite close, we could see it going out with a very slow tumble rate, flashing . FCSD Rep What would you estimate the tumble rate to be? Cooper It was tumbling very slowly, I would say maybe a half to 1 degree per second . Conrad I 1 d say a degree per second. Conrad I couldn't tell what it was in roll . It didn't seem to be tumbling in more than 2 axes . Cooper That was ha.rd to tell . Conrad When I saw it , you could see the dipole come around . We couldn 1 t tell anything about roll, but it was not 38 tumbling in the other axes. The blanket was sitting _r ight next to it . Cooper The blanket went out and was sitting ri1sht by it. went right on out with it . it . It That was thi~ funny part of The blanket was between the REP and us . Conrad Yes. Cooper The blanket goes out first. The REP ha:3 a lot more mementum , apparently the REP had gone b;r the blanket: Apparently it had either hit it or moved it over or something because the blanket was betwe,m us and the REP . Conrad Yes. I don ' t know exactly what happenecl there . Cooper It was just a few feet outside of the REP . The REP went straight on out to 270 , radar was working fine , r eading out everything just right , lock1~d on, and went out to the point where it should have s·~arted s l owing down . Conrad This is where I had a mistake in the fl:.ght plan and didn't catch it . The computer was in PHELAUNCH and I was wondering why I couldn't get any digital readout . I t took me a few seconds to catch on to that one and I realized that I had to get the computEir into CATCH- UP. We had never run into this problem where we'd gone through a complete insertion checklist 39 which calls for putting the computer to CATCH- UP. I had gone through and zeroed 25 , 26, and 27, talcing the ascent routine numbers out of it . So that I knew that we were getting the right readings . I had put the computer back in PRELAUNCH, also had this discus­ sion at that time and that ' s when I didn't blow the cold IR doors until the REP was out . Cooper I've said it before, and I also said it after my Mercury flight ; that is , "If you continually shove things in on people very early in the flight, the quality of it is going to be degraded." You need the first two or three orbits to check the systems over, to get oriented , learn how to aline the platform, to learn how to use the systems , to learn where things are, to do these things before you start giving -p eople complicated tasks . You just aren ' t going to get the quality out of them unless they're flying exactly the same vehicle for the second or third time and they 1 re very experienced in it and they 're familiar with everything that 's onboard and there ' s no change in equipment , no change in control system, no change in any of these things . Then , perhaps they could leap right off and go right into the first orbit and do these things . iottf ~~ But to put somebody into • 40 a strange vehicle, with strange control systems tha t you've only simulated as about best you can , and no visual simulation available for doing anything out­ the- window ; you just cannot expect people to stay right on top of things when it occurs ir. the firs t part of the flight . This is an ideal eYample ; we had worked and worked and worked and worked and worked to have our timing down just rigl:.t. If noth­ ing had happened , we would have had our timing down just right and everything would have gor..e just per­ fect . Pete would have been right on hi~ checklist and blown the cold IR doors right on tirre. Cooper I I d have been right exactly on time on g·etting the REP out and everything would have gone reach- keen . Just that one thi ng , the Hori zon Scanner failure , really threw the skids to the thing and caused us to be running s l ightl y late . There was added con­ fusion in trying to f igure out how to get t hings going and salvage the whole thing really threw the skids to it . Cooper The REP went out and it continued going out instead of slowing down as it should. It cont i nued to move on out at quite a separation r ate . The thing that still has us a little puzzled , instead of slowing 41 down and coming to a null out there , it appeared to s t art moving s omewhat at the same separation rate to the south of us slightly towards a trail position very slowly. We tracked it f or a long t ime . We were track­ ing it straight out and then all nf a sudden , it began to loop around slightly to the lef t . 1 Conrad It di d something like I d never seen before! Cooper I d never seen this happen in the simulator, and 1 it still doesn ' t seem quite f easi ble to us that this could ever happen . Conrad One pos sible answer, and it ' s r elated to something that we saw later in the flight , Gordo , where we alined the platform and had -yaw error couple into roll . Might not this have given us bad steering in­ formation as far as our radar needles were concerned if the scanner wasn ' t working properly? We didn ' t have the platform alined right . We went along 30 minutes , almost one- third of an orbit . I f we di dn ' t have an alined platform, that would start coupling up in some other axis like roll and we woul d be off in yaw . Then when we thought we were pointing at the pole , we reall y weren't. Maybe it didn 1 t reall y drift behind us , maybe it stayed out on our wing. We must have put it out fairly well 42 out of plane , in that it hung around us so darned long. Cooper It stayed with us for 20 orbits ! Conr ad We saw it until the light burned out . f ar away from us . I t was never During five night cyc les it was close enough that the flashing light illuminated the spacecraft . At the proper times, when we would get nodal crossing, when we turned around and actually s aw the REP it was very close . Cooper We t hought we were going t o hit i t . Conrad It was bright enough t o illuminate the spacecraft and the flashing light r eally impress ed me . FCSD Rep Did you take pictures? Conrad Ye s , I think we have some 70- mm Hassel blad pictures and I took 16- mm moving pic tur es . Cooper That was the last of the REP exercise . Conrad I understand all t he movie film came out, too. So you ' ll have pictures of it . Cooper At this point , we wer e rapidly running out of cryo­ genic fuel cell oxygen. We decided t hio.t the only way we were going t o salvage the f l i ght waE to stop using it at this rapid a rate . We had to make the choice whether we were going to power down and con­ t i nue the f light , or whether we were gcing to end the flight very abruptly if i t continuEd going down [email protected] 1!9 l!l'it~~. 43 at this rate . Cooper We had a short discussion on t his and decided that we ' d better power down and forget the REP because we were in trouble . Cooper So we tearful ly decided to give up the REP and power down . Houston agreed with us when we got in touch with them that we had done the right thing. REP. That ended the We did see it for quite a few orbits later . Then Houston came up with the simulated Agena ren­ dezvous exercise , which they put on one of their computers . The three burns they gave us to do went off very satisfactorily, the thrusters worked very well . They would not allow us to use anything but the aft firing thrusters because they wanted to keep the cryogenic oxygen in the right position in the cryo tanks . Apparently the burns went to their satisf ac-· tion too . They seemed to feel that it put us right where we should be . Cooper We tried one of these burns with the Platform Mode . It did not work satisfactorily so I used Rate Command which worked very well . Conrad 1 We t ried to take the errors out and thats where we got fo error left and right and a fo error up and down , so Gordo fired off the fo into trouble . We had about a tG~~FIDE► ,•♦♦ L. 44 left and r ight . We wound up wi tr. too much going forward and we s tarted to back up and suddenly we remembered we couldn't back up s o then we decided well , we 'd j ust leave thEi errors on the burn and burn i t the best we could because no matter what happened He're going to translate i nto forward and what we should have done and we didn't think of i t at the time--but you learn--we shouldn ' t have burned all the forward--we should have burned down to about a foot of what we were supposed to have forward ancl then taken out the left , right , up and down and go ahead and burn the forward again. FCSD rep The updates that they sent you on-- Conrad That worked fine. There was no problem. We copied the numbers down , entered the computer. We had plenty the maneuver. of t i me to make We btuned r ight on the cl ock as advertised and we seemed to have gotten approximately i n the positi on they wanted us to get to . FCSD rep What burns did you s i mulate? Conrad Well, we did a-- I ' ve got them r ight here. @oM~lA Al co~~r,ocr~r,At , Cooper 45 We did a separation burn and we did a cl osing burn and a coelliptic burn . Those the ones we did , Pete? Conr ad Well , i t was-- Cooper We did not a standard coelliptic--it was a-Conr ad No , we did a maneuver burn , which as--wait a minute--we did an apogee adjust maneuver which was a retrograde of 20.1 feet , then we did a phase adjust maneuver which was a forwar d burn of 15 feet . No . Cooper Yeah. Conrad 15 . 8 feet , then we did an out- of- plane burn , yawed left 900 of 15 feet and then we did a reverse coelliptic burn- - Conrad We burned- let's see--we burned 16 . 4 feet forward and we di d four burns altogether. FCSD r ep Aft thruster s for all? Conrad Aft thrusters for all- -on out- of- plane- ­ and that was the only t ime that we did ever , ever f l y the translat ional l eft , right , up, down thrusters. We used them to take out some of the IVI readings there a couple of times. And they were very straight forward--left, right , up, down . Cooper We even fired the forward-one quick l ittle blip . Conrad We fired the forward one then we suddenly remembered we weren't supposed to . FCSD rep What kind of visual out- the -window did you see on these translations? In other words-Cooper Left/right lights things up real w?ll- ­ I could see the glow from the aft--they were- - Conrad J. B. is referring to visual cues )n the horizon and we were on the gages-- Cooper They were at night--middle of the night-­ everything we did was in the middl 1~ of the night--this spacecraft only ran in t he middle of the night (laughter) . Conrad I really don't remember making a burn-­ Cooper We never did anything in the day-- Conrad Yeah , I think one or two of them were on the day side--but by and large-- Cooper I never did so much night work in rzy- life-- EONFIDEt~ AL,. COt~FIDE~~TIAt FCSD rep 47 OK- well , I don't think there is much we can add then--did you get all of these readings out of-- Conrad 8O- 81- 82- 58- 59- 69- Yeah, that stuff works just like the simulator. Cooper We got the readings . OK - On to 8 .3 - RCS . 8 .3 RCS FCSD rep Let's go into the RCS - yeah , I don ' t think there is anything more-- Cooper This is all-- Conrad Yeah, this is all we can do on the REP . Cooper OK- RCS Operational Checks - We did just like we had planned in our little book. We a ctivated the RCS and Check Ring A and ACME and direct--al l three axis- Ring B - Check Ring Bin ACME and direct--all three axis and they worked beautifully. FCSD rep How about the pad checks--were they-­ Cooper Negative FCSD rep No pad checks? Conrad Not with the sealed system-- Cooper A sealed system - I'm glad it was-­ Cooper Control Modes - We used pulse and we used horizon scan-- tQEt◄Ttl<L 48 Conrad We didn ' t even check reentry rate command-­ Cooper We used direct, UBed pulse . rate command . Conrad We uned the We used hori zon scan . I know what it was--why don ' t you tell them about this--and I ' m going to see if I can get the fuel f i gures-- Cooper OK. And they all worked very ade quately. I thought the rate command system, I mean the RCS system was an excellent system. It was really crisp and just really, I thought, it was a real good solid system. Rate command was much more-FCSD rep What about the retrof ire - how did i t hold retrofire? Cooper Beautifully , it was just no effort at all- ­ hold-- FCSD rep + 1 degree or less? Cooper Oh, yeah , easily. We had a litt le offset in number 3 and number 4. I could feel them offsetting us . I just cranked in a little bit of RCS : Boy, it just glued it right in there, it just wasn ' t about -I felt like we could have had four or five times the offset we had--and never have ,. GQt"EIDE~~TIAt budged it off there . 49 RCS , I mean the rate command--One thing on rate command before retrofire and just after retrofire, waiting for retrojet , and then starting the pitch up to go up and roll over inverted and go to zero lift , the dual ring rate command is just mor e than you can handle. It ' s just a lot more than control authority than you want--you tend to over- shoot on things because there is just so much control tor que in there . As I had stated, after I f ired retro and jettisoned the retropack and pitched up to roll over then from ther eon I went to s i ngle ring pulse, and used that . use . Reentry rate command--we didn ' t Direct - used direct t o do the reentry on single ring direct and used the pulse mode from r etrojet to 400K. FCSD rep On the single ring direct reentry did you have--did you feel like you had all the authority you wanted? Cooper Yeah--until very late--as I stated some time down , oh, half way thru the reentry ,_C~ Ji Hl:EttT 50 where you really begin to get the high g , after your high g , in fact, along about coincidental with a real high g, when you begin to get some fairly good oe1cillations , very r apid rate, I had no problE'ms damping them at all but I didn' t have tt.e time to keep switching back and forth f rom rate to attitude and go back to rate anc. damp them real quick and then go back to &.ttitude and decide where I was on the guide and then go back to rate and damp them and go back to guidance , so I finally--they got to getting fairly good where I had to devote a l i ttle bit of time to damping them , and I f i nally just went to guidance and stayed on guidance andJust flicked over tc single r i ng rate command to damp the oscillati ons and then used the attitude control i n the rate command to steer the computer steers . Which worked out versJ well and there was--there never was really any oscillating-you never really--I could go to rate on there and you could hardly ever see the rate needles CQNftO Etsi:filA L -.. .. CO t-ct FIDEt'<ITI AL 51 jiggle--single ring was holding i t just as tight as could be . . Retrofire attitude control - I had already mentioned on there­ dual ring. Rate Command, reentry attitude control-- I had already mentioned how we shot the reentry. No primary heater lights . Heater lights on the RCS - they were on practically--we had the heater on 99 percent of the whole flight. We turned it off, got heater lights on Ring A first, brought the RCS heaters on then rechecked-heater light went off and turned the heater off and about five or ten minutes later-fifteen minutes later, the heater light came on and then it was on Ring Band we turned the heater back on and this went on five or six times and finally we just turned the heater on and left it on the whole flight. I monitored the temper~tures f~equently throughout the whole flight in the RCS Ring A - temperature ran about 70 degrees or about 65 degrees and the RCS Ring B temperature ran about 70 to 72 degrees the entire flight . <::.:.€0►~FIDE~~T I A L At 52 one time I noted the RCS Ring B was up to 80 degrees. I watched i t quite closely for a while and then it never went beyond that and came on back down to about 70. And they stayed there essentia.lly the whole flight . I think you need thoee heaters on obviously the whole--all tt.e time--I'd never have any of them off at all now. Thruster firing colIDllents . When the RCS thrusters fire at night they clank out what­ ever you are l ooking at in the night side. The only way you are going to use any night attitude reference i s to watct. what you are doing, get l~ned up in a reference and then f i re a thruster and pl an on ws.iting a few seconds before you can tel l wt.ere you are at again . They really light t ~ the place . When you are firing them at night . FCSD rep How far does the flame stick cut? Cooper The plume goes out about-- appear s to go out about 4 feet and the plume is j ust the width of the outside diameter of tha.t thruster as i t comes out --it has a little bit of expansion ratio as it comes out and it goes -'>►4 FlDEfi~Tfii: l' .; b4~1DEt◄ TIAw 53 r ight up just about that size--it grows very slightly but not a heck of a lot and s o it's just about something i n the order of 4 inches diameter. Something like that--it has little expansion ratio--i t expands as it comes out the nozzle slightly, and the~ it just goes sort of like a column and it fans out very s lightly but it goes up something in the order of 4 to 5 feet distance from the thruster. FCSD rep Did you ever get any pictures of that? Cooper No, we didn't . We had all our cameras stowed at the time we got that cranked up . We intended to. Systems Shutdown - It worked just like advertised and we turned the prop valves off , very shortly then it rtms out of f uel and stops firing and you notice that there is a little burning around all the nozzles. There we got a little residual fuel--not much--just a little bit-it dribbles and fumes after i mpact- -probably very neglible. I don;t really think we got them after impact , I think we got them while still airborne . But they were almost i o+◄ FtOEP◄ IIAl 54 neglible-- you had to really b3 looking for them to tell they were t here . There was just a very s light musty odor in there- - fume. Not sure-- I'm not sure that p~rt of this odor isn 't part of t he ablati:1g going on because fiberglass ablates with pretty high fume rates. Some pretty pungent fumes off- ab}ating fibe:rgJas s · 8.4 ECS The mobility of the suit is nJ better or no worse than any other suit . It--suit definitely cuts you down and iecreases mobility. In anything you do , i t just limits you i n what you can do, limits the movements you can make and I 1 :n talki ng about unpressurized mobility at thi3 point even . We didn't do any pressurized ·Nork in the cockpit but t o unpressurize t ·:1e suit definitel y cuts you down a gr=at deal in your mobility and where you cm reach and takes up a great deal of r oom. Pressure - Are they talking about pressu rized suit work here? FCSD r ep Well , since you didn't do any pressurized , how about the €'01QF1 und and-- a@8t◄ ftef~tJtl Cooper 55 Yeah, when you are sealed up in it it gives you about a half a psi in pressure in there which doesn't decrease your mobility a great deal over what the regular suit does . Temperature in the suit, I certainly can't complain there. eat crow on that . consistently. I had to sort of That suit circuit ran We had to really shut it completely down to get above 55 degrees t emperature on the suit heat exchanger outlet and generally it ran around 50 degrees which just froze my rear off and I had my suit flow . . the general configuration we had was both of us f".ad the suit flow rates quite a bit back . I had mine clear back to almost a minimum position and we had the suit coolant loop shut down to where it was just about a half to one notch open from the fully OFF position. I really got quite concerned that they were going to freeze us to death. In fact one whole night side I had my suit inlet exhaust hoses off and laying down alongside the seat because e ~ as C iust too cold in the suit . ►fF 9Et-~,l'AL Humidiv. 56 The suit seemed to run pretty ,iry . I wasn ' t conscious of any great amount of perspiration in i t at all. A couple of tim1~s when we had fairly heavy work loads I 1;as aware of the feeling of cool air and folt like it was drying sweat . or 3 indications of CO 2 CO2 . We got 2 on the PCO 2 gage . One thing, whenever a station nends you a calibrate, well, you get a big jump on that gage but there were other timeB when we weren ' t even near a stati on when that gage came up and began to give an indication and one time it gave such a poBitive indication for quite a period of time that we got a little concerned about i t because it was right when all this other stuff was ' going, on day 5 and we I d shut c.own control systems had failed and we were destined for 3 deys of drifting and the PCOr started up . ~ So we pulled out one of the ta;es , one of the CO2 tapes that we had onboard . lt showed it was below 2 nun of mercury, below that anyway. It was this usually erroneous €:age . suit comfort is no darn good. ~ mNffl>Et◄ llA ~ The It is worse than any 57 other suit but there just isn't any way of having comfort in a pressure suit . Darn thing gives you pressure points and bulges and gouges and cuts down, scrapes you here and there, prevents you from being able to stretch and scratch and have any comfort. There isn't a;ny comfort in a suit . I don ' t giv e a darn who says so . There just isn't a;ny real comfort in a pressure suit . In the configuration that we flew in from the time we got 6-4 GO , our helmets and glove s came off--were stowed in the footwell , and they were never put on again until just before retrofire . We ran the whole flight in just the basic _pressure suit torso with the neck dam on and the wrist dams on and with the light- weight headset and I guess the comfort was as good as you could possibly have , but it still wasn't a;ny good and we cuffed the pressure suits plenty of times. 58 Cooper Humidity. The suit seemed to run :pre·;ty d:ry. I wasn't conscious of any great amount of :perspiration in it a t all. A couple of times we had fairly heavy work loads , I was aware of any :.ittle cool a:ir:' and felt like it was kind of drying sweat . CO2 . We got two or three indications of CO? on the PC0 2 gage. One thing , when ever a station gives you a I cali.brate well you get a big jump on t hat gage . but there are other times when we weren't even near a statiun when that gage came up and began to give an indication and one time it gave such a :positive indication for quite a :period of ttme t hat we got a little concerned about it because it was right when all this other stuff was going on , day 5 and we had shut down , control systems had failed and we were destined for three days of drifting and the PC0 started up . So, we :pulled out one of the 2 tapes , one of the CO tapes we had on board and gave 2 a check of the suit circuit there and i t showed that it was below 2 millimeters of a,., two milli­ meters of mercury was what it was .. . below that anyway. We probably assumed it was tr.is usually 6j@t4FIDE ►◄T IA-4 • , ...,CQt~FH)Et~TIAf • erroneous gage . 59 The suit comfort is no darn good . It ' s no worse than any other suit but there just isn't any way of having comfort in a pressure suit . The darn thing gives you pressure points and bulges and gouges and cuff dam scrapes you here and there and prevents you from being able to stretch and scratch and have any comfort . There isn't any comfort in the suit, I don't give a darn who says so, there just isn't any real comfort in a pressure suit . In the configuration that we flew in,from time we got our 6-4 Go, our helmets and •• • gloves came off, were stowed in the foot well and they were never put on again until just before retrofire . We ran the whole flight in just a basic pressure suit torso with the neck dam on and with wrists dams on and with a light-weight head set. I guess the comfort was as good as you could possibly haV@, but it still wasn' t any good and we cussed the pressure suit plenty of times . controls were good on it . The No problem there. The o Demand Regulator , as far as we could tell, worked 2 fine. We had no real occassion to reall y stress it much or anything. The suit umbilical was always in the way. Both my inlet and my exhaust ~~9i►,•f.A~ 60 • made my whole chest and rib area sor E• f rom the mainfol d , the end i nside the suit being gouged over , being cantilevered over and digging in side ways on me . So , it 's a real pressure point. It was the worst pressure point I had were from the suit hoses, and I had my suit hoses deliberatel y longer ,, than people said they should be so I ~ould get away f rom this effect . prevent So, I di d have sla~k to ~hem from getting drug over ·but even so they bothered me. Finger tip lights ·,1ere good and I kept one glove out and kep t it over on a piece velcro o,.l t he side to use in the event we had any kind of cabin light failures. When P(~te was asleep I frequently used my finger tip lightB on that glove to light up some of the gages to look around with. Ca bin pressure sealed off high on our gage . This i s under s ection 2, Ca bin. Our CE.bin pressure a t launch sealed off high a t about 5, 5, which it always did i n the a t titude chamber in a ll t he runs we made, in f ac t , in just exactly the same way. Then i t bled down slowly t o about 4 , 9 and never budged from there the whole flight . right there . It stayed We never saw one flick out of it a t all. Cabin temperature ran 70 to 75 degrees and humidity ran about 62 to 67 per cent the who l e flight . We have the figures somewhere here . We can get in here and get those ou t , but we have the figures where we mn daily checkr:i; H.:. 1,~i i ,1 t; once a day and generally t wo or three times a day ,of the wet and dry bulb readings . FCSD Rep Okay. We have that back in the original check . Cooper Okay. CO . 2 good. It was very seldom that you really got any The cabin, I thought was just really smell in the cabin a t all . We thought the cabin would have a dark green cloud evolve out of it when they finally opened it, but I think the cabin, to the time we landed, was still a pretty fresh cabin. It seemed to scrub the odors, defication odor s would linger on for two or three or four hours perhaps , but it even scrubbed those out . You CO ; we had no--any 2 Comfort day or night . The cabi n couldn ' t smell them at all . kind of co . 2 ran too cold at night , particularly when we· were drifting and had some fairly high drift rates the cabin got quite cold and in fact even froze up the windows. The cabin fan we never used at all until we turned it on just before retrofire ; 62 about 45 minutes before retrofire we turned the cabin fan on and let it run for about 30 minutes and i t decreased the cabin t emperatu:ce about 20 degrees . Got it down about 50 degre,:)S and then turned it off prior to starting retrofire . Cabin pressure relief valve; never actuall;r did we . . . the cabin pressure dual regulator , the release side of the cabin pressure regulator was the only one that ever . . . . We never heard the cabin relief valve actuate after launch . During launch we were going up we heard it moan a couple of times . The cabin vent val ve . Th•? cabin vent valve, we actuated it on the way down once since we couldn't maintain positive pressu:~e we actuated the vent and the snorkel. Cabin rep:~essurizati on . We never checked it because we didn ' t need to. Cabin air inlet valve . We actually never ran any check on it . Cabin air recirc , we had open the whole time . Fully open . Pri mary o2 . monitoring, system monitoring was ea:3y. o2 was very good. System Primary The only problem we had with it, it kept yawing us around when it was venting. Whenever it would get up to vent pre:3sure and vent, why, it would give us a bit of a yaw, left yaw. Build up to any rate you wanted to . Over a period of time , one time we got up to about 12 degrees per second. You just sit there, and drift it will build you up more , and more and more . You can really hear it pop off back there . can hear i t "shhh". fiel d of stars go by. You You see this tremendous big If i t ' s in the early or lat e night you just , the whole sky is just complet ely covered with this , just millions of stars .. . part­ icles, liquid gases ... I guess . ~uantity measur­ ing system; worked perfectly satisfactory. rates were good. fine . Flow Pressure was . . . pressure was It got up ; I don ' t think you ever need to use, unless you are doing something like EVA , I don't think you ever should consider ever using a heater on that oxygen system because i t all by itself fairly rapidly gets on up there to boil off pressures . Boil off temperatures I should say. FCSD Rep How about BJC.Jp, UTE, Di d you ever use that? Cooper Used O Hi gh Rate when they were purging the cabin. 2 It worked f ine , reset fine. landing. We used i t then for Manual heater we never used. The controls ; we did very little as f ar as doing anything wi th • the Secondary O . Mine was ope:1, Pete' s 2 was closed the whole flight . That's the way they stayed, just like for the check list . Never saw one quiver in either one of them the ',1hole mission. FCSD Rep Pressure stayed right? Cooper Pressure stayed right where it was on launch. partial pressure . CO 2 The gauge was some·,1hat erratic and gave us two or three readings that we had CO partial pressure~one of which we finally 2 checked and found we did not have and so then we disbelieved the gauge . . . : After that, although it generally read down at zero . Coolant : Coolant loops worked real fine . w~ were -running two coolant loops ON most of the time sin,Je we had fuel cells running . For 2 twenty- hour per iods we had fuel cell, section 2 of the fuel ,)ells shut off , and the coolant loops shut off. In one period of time we had ci rcuit breaker pulled on coolant loop number 1 coolant loop . Secondary cool­ ant 1 oop , then we were running on pum:? B and with bYJ>ass ON. BYJ>ass ing it around so we were heating before bringing the section 2 back nn the line after long shut down peri od we bYJ)assed the cool ant loop , the secondary cool ant loop , in order to warm -€8-t◄ FID[pqf6tL_ ~ COt~ft0E~~TIA l up the fuel cell section and then went to normal configuration right on the line . ation: for 45 minutes the the suit. Evaporator operOh , t his i s not 45 Yes , this ie the water evaporator . minutes after launch we got yaw deviati ons from the evaporator and after that they stopped. $ornewhere just slightly beyond 45 minutes they were gone . By the time we got around one or bi t anyway, I didn't notice any at all . Water management . Well, we ran the water management in t he normal mode all the time. In our configurat i on t he normal mode is the drink mode . We r an NORMAL , NORMAL , NORMAL and OFF the whole time . The only t i me we went to OFF was when we went to over - board and the FLUSH position on the uri ne heater system and they all worked fine . No problem at all, and the water was excell ent water. It was ful l of air. It had a lot of air i n i t , a lot of air bubbles , but they didn ' t s eem to effect us adversely. We decided to go ahead and just ignore i t and drink it and i t seemed to work out f i ne . The wat er was really nice and cold the whole t ime , so i t t ast ed good . No objectionable t a s te to i t at all. thought the water was excellent . .GON£Hil Et~TJ.il:s I Humidity sensor . 66 Yes, we took it. It worked fine . It dries out very rapidly; you have to refill it with water frequently, but that is no problem . gun fills it very readily. accurate . The drink I t seems to be pretty Stowage , of course , is always a problem and we obtained readings at least once a day on it . 8,5 Communications Cooper Communications . Interphone : were excellent. UHF performance : operation and quality cJuntdown was excellent , orbit was excellent, md recovery was excellent , except that nobody was receiving our transmitter in the recovery area. However, they were receiving it back here in Houst)n. Twice AIR BOSS finally shut up talking long enough, said "some other station calling : me, say"' , and then immediately he'd launch off int) another long spiel and I don ' t know whether he was just drowning us out or whether they just never got us. At any rate , nobody was getting us , except Houston, a couple of times. But the UHF perfonnance in gen­ eral throughout the whole flight was excellent . And even AIR BOSS received when we w,~re on our way down in the parachute. us on the way down . He got two steers to Voice tape reco::.-der worked wQOhU,IDEN+t1'<~ fine for two cartidges worth and then quit. FCSD Rep Was i t two or four? Cooper I don't lmow, it was some l ow number. four . Maybe it was Anyway, it quit fairly early in the flight . The tape recorder was finished. DCS . Ok8iY , until the last 30 minutes of the flight , the DCS couldn't have been better. The updates were good , the ground coordination was f ine on i t . The things they gave us to put in the MDIU were given in a good manner and were put in. No problem. Pete got them all loaded in fine . No problem at all until that last up-date we got from Carnarvon which they updated us with our compu t er a~d reentry con­ figuration, after we wer e all ready supposed to have our last update from Houston and without telling everybody to look on his board and see what mode our computer was in, he sends this update which is just about ... blew our cork there . And which I think at this point right now, having experienced this one occasion of this happening at the worst possible time it could happen in, my recommendation right now to flight crews is that they fly the DCS circuit breaker in the OFF position. FCSD Rep I concur. ee~◄ F tDe~ Al~ 68 Cooper That's a drastic move to make , but just that one experience was just enough to convince me that if you can ' t 100 per cent trust everybody and the system isn ' t going to work, then you just don ' t dare trust it at all. I wouldn' t even think of not flying again wit h that DCS circui t breaker ON . Conrad At least for reentry. Cooper At lease in crew ... . Conrad You couldn't have hurt us any better than by sending t hat load up . Cooper Real- time t ransmitter,delayed-time trmsmitter, fine . Stand-by t ransmitter ... . Conrad We were out of fuel on Ring A. And we had 4.9 and 4. 6 left in Ring B. Which is good. It says that Ring A ran out sometime after Ring B ~ame on, which says we went around the world 1 1/2 ttmes and re- ­ entered on Ring A by itself . That's :9retty impressive. 33 pounds of fuel It al so shows you how much fuel we used in Ring B. We tested Ring B and turned it off and didn ' t turn i t on u1til sometime less than 70,000 f eet and turned it back off again at 30,000 feet so we used the majorit;r of the fuel on RATE COMMAN]) in Ring B from 65 to 30 which says it probably fired continuously all thi? way down , 08-~~FIDE~~T.I• 69 damping those rates . But it sure was steady. We used almost 80 percent of the , yes , 80 percent of the fuel in Ring B from 65 to 30 . Cooper 65 down. FCSD Rep On this voice tape recorder. Didn't you say ·it broke after you got 4 tapes. Conr ad Yes, what happened was that the thing worked j ust · 1ike advertised. Two minutes before the tape ran out you get the little flicker on the tape recorder l i ght which is now up on the caution and warning panel, and at the end of the two minutes the TAPE OUT light comes on steady and that operat es just as advertised and then one day I put a new tape in it and Gordo and I held a big debriefing on it , About what all our storage was and present configuration that we were in in the spacecraft , and what we thought the six, I mean , 'that the seven troops would want to know about how we were using our storage and we thought the best place to do it was in flight right there while we were using it and we really put down some good dope and we also had some thoughts on Apollo on the darn thing and I figured we talked at least an hour on the thing, and I couldn't understand why it hadn 't run out and 70 I looked down in there and I marked ·;he t ape , you know with my pencil , and put it back in the tape recorder and turned it on and sure enough it wasn ' t running. recorder. The motor burned ou·; in the tape Now, when I turned the tape recorder switch ON and OFF I could see a slight rise in the ammeter but I think what was happening was that we were getting the amplification part of it , but that the motor to the tape recorder was not running, tt wasn't driving the tape . That seemec. to be the f ailure . FCSD Rep While we're here why don't you flip back a couple of pages while you were out and see jf there is anythi ng that you want to add. Conrad Okay. Yes ,. Gordo covered the h~ater operation on the ECS . Okay, they came on pretty early in the flight and we kept checking to see that it was truly working and it was . System check covered the fumes and we got fumes at 27 ,000 and we were very light because we did have the ... . Cooper Under EX:;S I covered how you loved your pressure suit for mobility and comfort . Conrad Yes , okay. I won ' t say anymore on that . Conrad Finger tip lights . Listen, now there ' s a very in- .-o►,fJOet>Jflltt co~~FID EtiTI-A L teresting thing. 71 The finger tip lights were the only darn lights we had in the spacecraft that we could move around, which is ridiculous . We kept holding a glove up once in a while looking at lights all night because we Cooper They sure were ... . Conra d We had the gloves stowed a.nd I broke my auxiliary light because it was too ha.rd to hold there. When I pulled it out, the very first time I pulled it out I shattered it a.nd Gordo never used the one on his side because it's just not handy. What you really need in there is, we've got to quality one of those little pen lights . Cooper One of those little pen flash. lights . Conrad A g.zy- really needs one of those little pen flash lights up there a.nd I really wish that we had ta.ken the ones along but we couldn't get them qualified. They had an open switch in them a.nd we couldn't get them qualified for 100 per cent oxygen. Cooper You really need a little light that doesn ' t have a.n electric cord fastened to it that you ca.n just s tick in your suit or on a pieoe of velcro where you can just get to it and use it, you know. 72 I Conrad There is plenty of time at night when you are flying. Now the worst thing a t all wa s a guy sleeping. If you turn on your instrument panel lights it only lights your instrument and the· thing is you are interested in most is that ce,n ter panel with the cabin press and the secondary o and 2 all these things in it. So , the big thing is that you need an auxiliary light in t here, like a pen light. Cooper Yes, you did. Conrad The umbilicals: I had about the right fit on the umbilicals and all that s ort of jazz. The cabin press was great. .The thing locked up a little high on lift off like it was supposed to but then a 4.9 never moved. We covered the co 2 bit. Did you c·o ver the comfort day night and how the high rotation rates that effect us? We m~ver used the cabin fan except just prior to l:Lft off where it is cal l ed for in sequence SJ1d when we put the cabin cooler to the full cold po::11tion and brought on the cabin f an and fl ew it through Primary o did vent quite a 2 You covered that. entry that was it. bit. Cooper ' -re­ Yes . .:i~ fid:DE~~Tl&Li 73 Conrad I'm sure that's all for now. us, of ~ odor. It never bothered The normal type venting system worked fine. Cooper I covered that on the CO Conrad Did you cover the coolant splashing all over the 2 partial press . . . . nose of the spacecraft just after adapter s ep . That must have been coolant, it's the only thing I can think of that wouldn't be frozen up there. But it was liquid and it actually splashed on the nose after adapter sep and retrofire. It ca.me around behind the spacecraft and I saw it splash and the marks are still on the nose of the spacecraft where it hit . Water management I thought was great except it had air in it. It did have air in it but pressures were good, the wa ter was cold, it tasted good, but we did have air in the water and it wasn't the amount that we had at the factory, but there was air in the water. You could see it when you filled your darn rehydra­ table food bags. Cooper Yes. Conrad But, it was good water. Cooper I covered the humidity sensor, we used it ... com­ munications, I don't think you say anything but 74 excellent on that. Conrad They were great. Even the UHF worked wnll. I mean HF . Cooper Voice tape recorder. covered tha t . Conrad Then we were on. I just It didn't work. Did you cover the . .. the exact detail s on this DCS? How we didn ' t get the light. The only time we didn't get the light. Cooper No, I didn't cover the details on that Eixcept just that we had gotten DCS unforecast over Carnarvon after when we already had our load in from Houston, and then it came on unexpectedly, not ev-en checking to see what mode we were in here, We we•r e in re­ entry mode and sent us this DCS updatin€' our TR and updating our load, DCS load there, and just as he said he was sending, why rapidly then we switched out of reentry to prelaunch but never got any DCS l i ght on either the TR or the load. Conrad Yes , he s ent two s eparate commands, and theoretical ly the light should come on each time but I never got the lights, so I'm highly suspicious of what hap­ pened and I've got to have an explana tion why this load.... Cooper Which he verified to the cores and they checked out ak0tr4f.lDEt-4TIAL 75 all right. Conrad Yes, it was address 03 and address 10 and they ver­ ified okay and that seemed to convince everybody except me that the load was correct and my mistake, in retrospect, I should have made them ,transmit the load and either satisfied myself that the DCS light had burned out, or that the operation did take place truly in the ma.mter in which it was supposed to and it did light the DCS light . He knew the TR was right because he had his TR clock synched in with the spacecraft TR. Cooper And he assumed the load was right because he got maps back on it, but ... . I'm not too sure I .. . . Conrad Yes , that's pretty dangerous. Pretty dangerous . Cooper I think this is it as I jus t pointed out to J . B. and we were discussing in the corridor here, my feelings on it are right now are real strongly, that my recommendation would be to piloia during really critical time periods, "I'd just turn the DCS circuit breaker off." I wouldn't even fiddle with it because that one violation that of everything we had agreed on has just completely destroyed my confidence in the whole set up . That's all it takes is that one time just to completely foul you up . 0'8HF+9E►.IW.L ~ 76 IDEtff Conrad Big Brother. Cooper Yes. sir. I do feel that way, I really do . Okay. Let' s see, all this real time, delayed time, s t andby, that all worked fine, I thought. Cooper Yes, we had real little trouble . Conrad The coordination with the ground really in general went excellent. Conrad Yes, the only guy that had any problem ,.,as Guaymas doesn't have a command system so , poor old Guaymas was stuck when he was first to pick us up coming into the states with having to call us a.nd tell us t o turn on real -time and ack and then th,~ Rous ton people would have to remind us t o turn :Lt off again but the rest of the flight the command 13ystem ran t hat telemetry and dumped t elemetry and everything else just fine as f ar as I was concerned. We were glad not to be bo thered with it. Cooper Communications control and switches . The vjc . Man I tell you, that really worked s lick, e:ccept thos e darn rubber guards on there. Conrad Yes. The cabin is dry enough. Those havH got to go. The onl:r reason I can see they need them on there is in case you had a catastrophic water spillage which you do very easily have. ... £QMF--1De~JIA~·• 77 Cooper Yes , I pulled my ear plug and put the ear plug right in the bottom of my ear where it was barely hanging there and I could hear anybody calling then . I put the plug back in. Then I thought the quality of the communication.ewas really, as far as we were concerned, in the air a:n:yway, was excellent. Conrad Our beacons worked satisfactorily both adapter and reentry, C band beacons most of the time they were in the command position, the people used them as they wanted them. Cooper Let's see, the s l eep configuration, we covered that , yes, that worked fine . Conrad Antenna selection. I went to adapter and I really couldn't tell much different and then we decided we would go back to the check off list which called for reentry. Oh, I know how I got in adapter position. Cooper Somebody asked you .. . . Oh, it was that test. Conrad Yes, it was the UHF test that we pulled and we were switching from reentry to adapter, from reentry to adapter, and I finally left it at adapter one time and the thing was working just great as far as I could tell . Cooper Yes , it was there for a day or so. Cooper Yes, it was there for a day or so. I really 78 Cooper You could dUlllp OUZD or something. Conrad Yes, I ... . Cooper But the neoprene things are hard to s ee· through , you could actually push them up to the control knob to read what you got on there. Conrad Let ' s face it Gordo, once we got those controls set, we never moved them. Cooper Yes, that ' s right, Once you set t hem you very seldom ever set them from there on. really isn ' t too bad. Sc,, I guess it It's kind of a :Mickey Mouse thing..,, -..net iit works-, I guess. Conrad Those light weight head sets , Those PlEll'ltronic head sets that we had, I don't think 8J'tybody can argue about the voice quality and they are really comfortable up there.