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

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First Steps into Space: Projects Mercury and Gemini
work in pres surized suits. If you work in the zero-g airplane with a pressurized suit,
it’s pretty awkward.
White
In pitch and yaw I felt I could maintain effectively zero rates. I don’t know how it
looked to you, Jim, but it looked like I could establish a rate and take the rate out
without too much trouble. The yaw is the lowest moment of them all. Pitch was
very easy, just to pitch the thing up and down. I’m still a little suspicious of roll.
That’s the area that I would like to look into a little more. I think that you could
get yourself into a kind of balled up situation with pitch, roll, and yaw all coupled
up. It might take a little bit of fuel to get yourself straightened back out again. But
just in translating from Point A to Point B, you could care less if you rolled, as long
as you kept pitch and yaw straight. And that’s why I say I think you can translate
and correct pitch and yaw very successfully and effectively forget about roll, just as
we do in our reentries or our retros.
[4-66]
White
The question is: Was there any problem with the gun of maintaining a fairly well
stabilized attitude and still get my translation input? I did this actually three different
times, and this was what I had done when I was coming back to the spacecraft the
last time. I had to put in both pitch and yaw and had taken them out and I was
coming back. I was going to fire my last thrust toward the spacecraft. I got a little
burst. I could feel a little burst and then it petered out. But you can put a translation
in. I was also surprised that I was able to stop at the time I tried to stop it out there,
about one-half or two-thirds of the way out on the end of the lanyard. It seemed
to stop pretty well. It was either the gun or the lanyard dampening me. It didn’t
dampen me in roll, so I then it was the gun that actually did it.
McDivitt
I think that this previous bunch of words just spoken covers a lot of detail of the
first three or four orbits of our flight, and it covers that first phase of mission
sequences that I first mentioned. I think the next thing we should do is go through
the interim orbits, about 50 or 55, or however many there were, where we set about
to save up enough fuel to do something constructive, to check on our orbit to see
what it was, to see how we were decaying, what our lifetime expectancy would be,
and perform the experiments that we’d initially set out to do on our flight plan.
Although it’s not going to be of much use to go through it in a chronological
order, I suppose that is probably the best way. As I just finished saying, we’re not
going to get an awful lot out of going through the flight plan sequentially, but
we’ll do it quickly, and then we’ll come back and discuss each experiment or
operation, check an entity in itself, and we’ll discuss the systems as an entity, too.
We’ll do this, generally, in elapsed time.
McDivitt
Going back to the EVA for just one moment. I’d like to say that the use of the
manual heaters on ECS Oxygen bottle was about two 5-minute periods separated
by about 10 minutes. We really didn’t need an awful lot of manual heater when we
were doing the extravehicular activity.