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

332
First Steps into Space: Projects Mercury and Gemini
White
This was when we were yelling HEAVE! I was heaving on the handle as I was
pulling it down each time. It felt like to me that the handle was giving. But I didn’t
give a darn! If it broke, it was going to break. So one of the points we learned out
of this was we’d like to see the bar and lanyard strengthened.
[4-53]
White
Let me say one thing about the decision to go ahead and open the latch. If we
hadn’t done so much work together with this hatch and run through just about
every problem that we could possibly have had, I would have decided to leave the
hatch closed and skip with EVA when we first started having trouble with it. We
had encountered just every conceivable problem that we could possibly have with
the hatch. If it failed we’d know exactly what it was.
McDivitt
That’s right. I personally had disassembled this cylinder and piston and spring
combination up at McDonnell prior to the altitude chamber, so I knew exactly what
it was made of. I am sure the problem was that the dry lubrication coagulated, or
whatever a dry lube does, and was causing the piston to stick. I knew how we could
do this thing. Carl Stone and I had dismantled it and put it back together, cleaned
it out, put it back together, relubricated it, put it back together, and it operated
fine. I figured out how to make the thing work with it not working properly by
using you finger as the spring.
White
That’s the exact technique we had used.
McDivitt
If we hadn’t had the training together that we had, and had not encountered all these
problems before, I know darn well I would have decided not to open the hatch.
White
Maybe we sound overdramatic about the effort we made getting me back in, and
I’ll honestly say it’s one of the biggest efforts I ever made in my life, but I don’t
think we were all done then.
McDivitt
There were a lot of things we could do.
White
We could have gone around several orbits working on closing the hatch. That
wasn’t the last time we were going to get a chance to close it. So there were things
left if we under stood, and other procedures we could have used to go ahead and
close it. When we got it closed back in, I was completely soaked wasn’t I?
McDivitt
Yes. You were really bushed.