Young: TLI burn was nominal, but I agree with Ken. I think that buzz increased throughout. It seemed to ramp up. Did you get that feeling?

Mattingly: I felt the frequency remained stable, but the amplitude was increasing.

Young: S-IVB performance - What a champ. What was the first Mid-Course?

Duke: Twelve feet per second.

Mattingly: That was after we skipped the Mid-Course 1, though. It had been pointed out in memos before, but everybody knows the P15 shutdown time calculation is not going to be valid until near the end of the burn because of the changing acceleration. It appeared to me that it was off by far more in powered flight than it had ever been in the simulator.

Young: Hey, there was something wrong back in Earth orbit systems checkout. The problem we had there -

Duke: The Temp In valve.

Young: The Temp In valve, the auto position of the glycol evaporator Temp In valve was cycling Min to Max. I forgot all about that. We put the flow on manual and adjusted it on 381; and, we didnÂ’t touch it but a couple of times from then on.

Young: IÂ’m glad that fixed it. Because if we had to do that in lunar orbit, we would have been behind the power curve, to go down there and twak that thing every time it ca,uie around.

Mattingly: That valve is exceptionally sensitive.

Young: Yes. WeÂ’ve known that all along. On Apollo 7, that was the big thing, to go down there and do a manual adjustment of the Temp In valve to get it to do its thing. It is exceptionally sensitive.

Mattingly: ItÂ’s even more sensitive than the adjustment of the Direct O₂.

Young: Okay, but thatÂ’s a systems problem. I guess somebodyÂ’s going to have to work that one. Maybe they wonÂ’t do anything since it didnÂ’t bother us. Okay, TLI burn, nominal. S-IVB performance and ECO, nominal. Maneuver to separation attitude was nominal. During Orb Rate, we got some pictures. TheyÂ’re really something. You could see all of the United States. If the pictures come out, there will really be some pictures.

Mattingly: The Earth was right there in the window. And centered right in the middle of the Earth was the United States, without a cloud over it.

Duke: All the way from the Great Lakes to Brownsville.

Mattingly: Just as if you had drawn it and set it up so you could take a picture of it.

Duke: You couldnÂ’t see the northeast, Maine and those areas.

Young: That is something we should show at the press conference. That will be a good picture.

Young: The S-IVB maneuver to the TD and E attitude was nominal. We discussed the ramp buzz. It was too high a frequency to be characterized as a pogo. The amplitude was so low you couldnÂ’t characterize it as pogo either. It didnÂ’t seem like anything was in danger of coming apart. I was more worried about it quitting. Separation from the SLA was nominal. In fact, we saw one of the SLA panels floating away. How was the high gain antenna lockup, Charlie?

Duke: Easy. It was just as advertised.

Young: Formation flight? Why donÂ’t you talk about TD&E, Ken?

Mattingly: ThatÂ’s got to be the simplest maneuver performed in space flight. That was exactly like the simulator. When we pitched over, the crosshairs on the COAS were almost exactly centered on the target. It was just a matter of pushing it, sitting there, and waiting for the two to come together. I made one lateral correction and one vertical correction. We didnÂ’t do another thing until contact. Whatever gas we used during TD&E we used after I hit in trying to get it recentered. They busted the 15 guys about forcing it in. I tried to center it up and that is a pretty expensive operation. ItÂ’s very inefficient when you have your nose hooked to something youÂ’re trying to push. I was using the translation controller and I was really surprised. Either the friction on the probe head or something is a lot more than I expected. It was very, ineffective.

Young: It seemed like you used about five times the fuel that you normally use to get in there.

Mattingly: I felt like I used 50 percent of the -

Duke: It took a long time.

Young: It took a long time and we never allowed any time for this. All the time we were closing in on it. When you pitched around, you were only about 60 feet out.

Mattingly: Or less. It was nominal.

Young: It couldnÂ’t have been very far away. He was right there. I was three times that far away on 10. We went on in and docked. All the way in the particles were coming off the S-IVB and the LM. I had never seen anything like it. They were really streaming off. I didnÂ’t know whether they were SIVB particles, LM particles, or what they were at the time. It looked to me as it they were coming right above the ascent propellant tank.

Young: IÂ’m sure they will be in the film.

Duke: They were jetting off. They werenÂ’t just floating away.

Young: ThatÂ’s the way it looked to me, too.

Mattingly: It sounds as if you saw streams of particles coming out and, I donÂ’t think thatÂ’s what they were. They were just large clouds of material out there and they were coming away from the SLA. I couldnÂ’t see a source. I didnÂ’t think it was anything that you could pinpoint. It was just a lot of debris.

Young: Thermal coating inspection - We didnÂ’t know it, but, thatÂ’s what we were doing. We were watching the thermal coating float away. CSM handling characteristics during transposition and docking.

Mattingly: If you donÂ’t touch the controls, youÂ’re doing good.

Young: Extraction.

Mattingly: That went as planned..

Young: EMS behavior during TD&E. You had that big drift in there at that time.

Mattingly: It had a high drift. I didnÂ’t use it. I hadnÂ’t planned on using it, anyhow.

Young: Sounds at SEP, RCS, retraction, and extraction.

Mattingly: Let me say something about the sounds of those engines. I think our impressions were different. I didnÂ’t hear any RCS sounds when I got off the S-IVB. I didnÂ’t hear any sounds during the turnaround; and, I didnÂ’t hear anything on closure until I got in real close. I would swear - I know itÂ’s not possible - but, IÂ’d swear, I could hear the jets impinge on the LM before we docked. And you could certainly see it. Maybe I was visually seeing the skin of the LM kind of flutter and I knew that should make a noise. I heard the same noises every time we fired the engines after that. I donÂ’t know if there could be enough local atmosphere or whether you can get a reflected shock that you could hear. I donÂ’t know how it is, but, I know I could hear reflections off the LM before we docked.

Young: I think that is possible, Ken, with the mass going out and coming back and bouncing off your vehicle. There are a lot of particles in there.

Mattingly: And, it was at this point that your TV monitor went out, wasnÂ’t it, John?

Young: Yes. The TV monitor failed for the first time. This is no big thing, because it doesnÂ’t mean youÂ’re not getting a picture. It was intermittent and they should take a look at it. The attitude control you had to do once you got docked cost some gas. You said something about the ripple fire.

Mattingly: When we retracted I had the feeling that we had seen the two vehicles come together and I hadnÂ’t heard a latch. I was starting to get worried about what had happened. The motion looked to me as if it had stopped, and then the latches fired. It seemed as if it was very slow. Maybe they really hadnÂ’t come together. I had the feeling that those latches were very slow to fire.

Young: The work in the tunnel was nominal. All the latches were made and everything was nominal except Latch 10. The bungee was just a hair outboard. When you looked at it, it hadnÂ’t made -

Mattingly: Subsequent to this (we didnÂ’t see it then) when we were going into the LM, I took a look at latch 10 and the bungee, the little cap thatÂ’s on the top of the spring bungee, was recessed about a half to five-eighths of an inch. This, as I understand it, is typical of a latch that hadnÂ’t fired. When I looked at the latch I could see clear underneath the latch and it was not making contact with the tunnel ring at all.

Young: This is not the kind of inspection you can make with the probe in.

Mattingly: You have to have the probe out to see that.

Young: The separation and evasive maneuver was nominal. The S-IVB was just where they said it would be when we finally got around to looking at it. The S-band performance was nominal.

Duke: You couldnÂ’t see anything but it slowly moved out of our field of view.

Young: We didnÂ’t see the dump because it had gone by then.

Duke: It did all it was supposed to do. The last time we saw it, it was doing what it was supposed to.

Mattingly: This was the last time we were on schedule.

Young: Climbing out of that suit is really something.

Mattingly: We had a hard time getting the suits into the suit bag because we were trying to be careful of them. I donÂ’t know if taking our pockets off would. have helped us or not.

Young: Taking the pockets off is another 10 or 15 minutes per suit. The way they put those things on, theyÂ’re on there to stay. The best way to get them off is to cut them off.

Mattingly: The only point IÂ’m making is that I have stowed suits in the bag in stowage exercises and itÂ’s not a big deal.

Young: ItÂ’s entirely different in flight and I think there are a couple of things that are different. One is the suits which we stowed here never had the pockets and all the paraphernalia straps on. The other thing is you have an old beat up suit thatÂ’s a rag. You donÂ’t care if you step on it, kick it, or what you do to it but when youÂ’re on your way to the Moon, youÂ’re being ginger with those things.

Mattingly: The bag is just too small for the suits.

Young: HereÂ’s sonthing I feel pretty strong about. We havenÂ’t had any problems so far but I think that the crews that are going to have to take these suits off and stow them in a bag should be given a demonstration on how to properly roll up and stow an A-7LB full pressure suit by a suit technician close to launch so they donÂ’t forget what theyÂ’ve learned. Course, thatÂ’s just another square to fill close to launch. If you damage that suit by stowing it in that bag, and I can see how you could do that because you wouldnÂ’t believe the kind of kicking, shoving, grunting, and heaving you have to do in zero 'g' to get that suit in there, and if you damage it, there goes your mission because you canÂ’t fix it.

Mattingly: I think you should point out, we only stowed two suits in a three-suit bag.

Young: Yes. We only put two suits in there. We got three suits in there on the way back and then found out we werenÂ’t supposed to have three suits in there. We were supposed to stow one of them under the couch. And, we only put two in there on the way out. We stowed KenÂ’s suit underneath the left couch. But, I was always concerned that maybe we had folded a suit in the wrong direction and put some undue strain on the zipper. We had zipped the zipper up, but, we hadnÂ’t zipped the pressure sealing zipper up all the way. But, we zipped the restraint zipper all the way up and we put the neck ringÂ’s dust cover over it.

Mattingly: I think itÂ’s a. shame to take a chance on the suits on your way to the Moon. I think you should make that bag bigger.

Young: ThereÂ’s about this much room between the bag and the front hatch which is not used and I donÂ’t see why they donÂ’t make that big enough so that a guy is not ruining his EVA by stowing his pressure suit. Now, maybe the CSD people will come back and say you canÂ’t hurt those pressure suits. But if I know Ed Smiley, I reckon he feels that way about it, probably.

Mattingly: Well, the other thing is, when you fold these on the ground and you got one g helping you pull it up into a. little ball. In flight, it is whatever you could get with your arms.

Young: The other problem is that J-mission spacecraft, with those boxes under you, only one man can get in there to do the job at any one time. You canÂ’t get two men in the space to push the suit right. Well, it was of some concern to me in that we were treating suits properly when we stowed them that first time. We set a new world record for suit donning and doffing in zero gravity and 1/6-gravity seven times, something I would just as soon not have. We were behind the first day. We didnÂ’t have enough time in the timeline to doff the suits and stow them. We didnÂ’t have any time in there. With one man in the middle of suit doffing, another man is handicapped because heÂ’s helping. So, that leaves one man to mind the store.

Mattingly: We actually had time in the Flight Plan for doffing the suits. We just didnÂ’t have adequate time. We had an hour or less; and, we used almost one hour on the first suit.

Young: That was one thing that put us so far behind going to bed that night. And, when we did that -

Mattingly: By the time you go to the bathroom, which there is no time for.

Young: - which took us by surprise. It is something we think we should eliminate preflight.

Mattingly: That put us another hour and a half behind, on top of that.

Young: It was just the suit doffing that got to us.

Mattingly: I took a lot longer on the P23s.

Duke: That took a lot of time. Min impulse took time lining up. remember writing that comment in the Flight Plan.

Young: We were late starting P23s.

Mattingly: We were late starting because of the suit doffing.

Duke: No, we were behind because we had to get in the LM.

Young: Oh, yes. ThatÂ’s what really put us behind.

Duke: That was not in the Flight Plan. We had to take the probe and drogue out and we had to go into the 121 at about 13 hours.

Young: I forgot all about that.

Duke: Because of the thing spewing particles. It was during the P23s, stop the P23s and letÂ’s get in the 111.