Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in ... - The Black Vault

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First Steps into Space: Projects Mercury and Gemini
White
That’s right. We started before we actually went to the unstowing of the stuff from
the right-hand aft food box. We went to the Suit Integrity Check.
McDivitt
Well, I don’t know where it is, but we did it when we were supposed to do it.
McDivitt
We did the Suit Integrity check before we started the Egress Preparation Checklist.
That’s when we did it, over the States.
White
I think we did that just about the time you decided to give up on the booster. We
did the Suit Integrity Check. Both suits checked out all right, It went up to 8.5 and
it leaked down to about 8.3 or something like that.
McDivitt
Same thing with mine. It went up to 8.5 and leaked down just a little bit. Not
enough to be concerned about.
White
No. Oh, one thing that we did do on that extra orbit that we went around -- I
disconnected the repress system and we went back on the -
McDivitt
Oh, yes. We never even got on the repress system, did we?
White
Yes, I believe we were, but then we turned it off. We were all ready to depressurize,
and then we went back on the spacecraft ECS system, full, and went through and
reverified the whole checklist again. The only things that I would say we hadn’t done
to my satisfaction the first time was to check the inlet and outlet positions of the locks,
and I didn’t have my thermal gloves on. It turned out I didn’t need them.
McDivitt
Also, during this period of time I alined [sic] the platform, which was completely
misalined. It was probably alined [sic] within a couple degrees, but as we went
around in Orbit Rate it got farther and farther out of tolerance. So, I managed to
aline [sic] the platform. Here again, I might comment on the fact that our initial
flight plan was so optimistic that it was almost unbelievable. The both of us worked
full time on doing nothing except preparing for EVA, and we didn’t quite get the job
done. I can’t believe that we could have possibly flown formation with the booster
and taken pictures of it and all the [4-25] other things that we had scheduled, and
still prepared for this thing and even come close to completing it.
White
Well, the way we would have had to do it, would have been without a checklist. I
would have had to just go ahead and hook everything up. I think we could have
done it satisfactorily in this manner, but it wouldn’t have been the way we would
have wanted it.