Young: I didnÂ’t notice any problems associated with suiting ingress. Cabin Closeout was nominal throughout. As everyone knows, it is very difficult to reach the dump handle to dump the cabin fo the purge, but you can do it with your elbow. ThatÂ’s the way I did it. The other thing that made me nervous about ingress was the way Troy Stuart leaned over the abort handle. I know the pyros are not armed, but man, we should caution the suit technicians to stay away from that kind of stuff.
Slayton: Speaking of Troy reminds me that we do need to get a comment from Charlie here on the suiting; whether he had some difficulty, based on your first go-around.
Young: Yes. On the day of launch, he said the legs of his were tight. And, everybody just sort of poo-pooed that.
Slayton: We can talk about that later.
Young: Suit circuit check was good; ingress and cabin closeout were nominal. In fact, we were about 20 minutes ahead the whole time through the launch.
Young: [Follow on on suit concerns - originally recorded in Section 2] Charlie just walked into the room and he’s going to say something about his suiting. His legs were too short. When we walked out of the suit room you said your legs were too short and I said, “Charlie.”
Duke: Well, I was really kidding a little bit. They really felt a little tight, but I asked for them to be tight because Clyde said that they would stretch and sure enough they did. On the surface, they felt fine.
Young: IÂ’ll tell you that fastener didnÂ’t stretch much.
Duke: That was the zipper problem it turned out, not a suit fit problem. I had the same problem with JohnÂ’s on PDI day that he had with mine the day before. When you pull the restraint zipper together, it doesnÂ’t lie flat in the middle of the back. It gives a sort of series of WÂ’s, and when you try to pull it across there it takes three hands to really do it. [See 055 08 09 and 055 50 33.]
Young: Charlie, yours just wasnÂ’t making on the first day. It was coming close. It really was nervous. I thought every EVA would be the last because I didnÂ’t know whether IÂ’d make the restraint zipper every time.
Duke: The fit was fine, though, after we got out on the surface and got pressurized.
Young: Yes. The tighter you can get it, the better off youÂ’re going to be when you put that 3.5 psi in there.
Duke: But sure enough, preflight, going out, they felt a little tight to me. But IÂ’d asked for it, so I couldnÂ’t complain.
Mattingly: Had you changed it since the last time you wore it?
Young: No. Well, the problem we got into there, and maybe we could have avoided it, is that, a couple of times preflight with the flight suits, Charlie and I zipped each other just to see how hard that would be. We ran about four or five suited exercises where we donned the suits in the evening and worked for a couple of hours inside the building where the QC guys could watch the suits, and the first couple of times we tried zipping them. Maybe itÂ’s the last time you want to do the zipping, after all the adjustments have been made.
Duke: On every adjustment of the flight suit, when we got to the middle of the back, Troy had a tough time getting that restraint zipper, because of that W in the back.
Young: I really recommend that there ought to be some way to adjust that thing down so that when the two guys are alone one guy can do it, because you need to be able to pull it together like that and you need to be able to stretch it out like that which takes four hands, only you got about two. You know what I mean? You need to be able to pull the thing together to get the teeth closed. You could probably do it with some kind of restraint that pulls the two pieces together, like a tie-down ring. I am not telling them how to fix it, but I think itÂ’s a solvable problem. You really do want that thing tight because youÂ’re in a good suit when it is tight.