The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Sweet words indeed. With the completion of the turnaround maneuver, I pitched the capsule nose down, 34 degrees, to retroattitude, and reported what to me was an astounding sight. From earth-orbit altitude I had the moon in the center of my window, a spent booster tumbling slowly away, and looming beneath me the African continent. But the flight plan was lurking, so from underneath the instrument panel I pulled out my crib sheets for the flight plan written out on three 3 x 5 index cards, and Velcroed for easy viewing. I could just slap them up on a nearby surface, in this case the hatch, covered with corresponding swaths of Velcro. Each card provided a crucial minute-by-minute schedule of in-flight activities for each orbit. They gave times over ground stations and continents, when and how long to use what type of control systems, when to begin and end spacecraft maneuvers, what observations and reports to make on which experiments. In short, they told me, and the capcoms, who had copies, what I was supposed to be doing every second of the flight – every detail of which had been worked out, timed, and approved before liftoff. A brief investigation of these cards is enough to suggest constant pilot activity. But to get the best appreciation of just how busy we all were during those early flights, read the voice communication reports between the capcoms and the astronaut.

It was time to open the ditty bag. Stowed on my right, it contained the equipment and the space food for the flight. First out was the camera, for I needed to catch the sunlight on the slowly tumbling booster still following the capsule. The camera had a large patch of Velcro on its side. I could slap it on the capsule wall when it wasn’t in use. Velcro was the great zero-gravity tamer. Without it, the equipment would have been a welter of tether lines – my idea, incidentally, and not a very good one, for John’s flight. He had ended up in a virtual spaghetti bowl full of tether lines and equipment floating through his small cabin.

Also in the ditty bag were the air-glow filter, for measuring the frequency of light emitted by the air-glow layer, star navigation cards, the world orbital and weather charts-adjuncts to the earth path indicator (EPI) globe mounted on the instrument panel. The EPI was mechanically driven at the orbital rate so that it always showed the approximate spacecraft position over the earth. There were also bags of solid food I was to eat (a space first), and the densitometer.

But the most important items at this point in the flight were probably the flight plan cards. I had been tracking the booster since separation, maneuvering the capsule with the very good fly-by-wire system: “I have the booster in the center of the window now,” I reported, “tumbling very slowly.” It was still visible ten minutes later, when I acquired voice contact with Canary capcom.

Carpenter: “I have, west of your station, many whirls and vortices of cloud patterns. [Taking] pictures at this time – 2, 3, 4, 5. Control mode is automatic. I have the booster directly beneath me.”

The brilliance of the horizon to the west made the stars too dim to see in the black sky. But I could see the moon and, below me, beautiful weather patterns. But something was wrong. The spacecraft had a scribe line etched on the window, showing where the horizon should be in retro-attitude. But it was now above the actual horizon I checked my gyros and told Canary capcom my pitch attitude was faulty.

Carpenter reported: “I think my attitude is not in agreement with the instruments.”

Then I added an explanation – it was “probably because of that gyro-free period” – and dismissed it. There were too many other things to do.

John had also had problems with his gyro reference system. Kraft described it in an MA-6 postflight paper, where he wrote that the astronaut “had no trouble in maintaining the proper [pitch] attitude” when he so desired “by using the visual reference.” All pilots do this – revert to what their eyes tell them when their on-board tools fail. But future flights, he said, would be free of such “spurious attitude outputs” because astronauts would be able to “disconnect the horizon scanner slaving system,” called “caging the gyros” in these future flights. Because my flight plan for the follow-on mission called for so many large deviations from normal orbital attitude (minus-34-degree pitch, 0-degree roll, 0-degree yaw), I was often caging the gyros when they weren’t needed for attitude control.

The Canary Capcom picked up on my report, and asked me to “confirm orientation.” Were my autopilot (ASCS) and fly-by-wire operating normally?

Carpenter reported: “Roger, Canary. The manual and automatic control systems are satisfactory, all axes…”