Mattingly: I never was able to use the telescope for anything, except to see the LM radar and the quad, from the time we picked the LM up until we got into lunar orbit. It was due to the tremendous number of particles that were floating around that, I guess, came from the LM. It was just like everyone talked about - if you do a sighting right after a water dump. We were continually populating the environment with these little things popping off. So the telescope - except for objects like the Earth and the Moon - is essentially useless. The sextant was beautiful. The auto optics put it in there. Everytime we made our REFSMMAT change we used the same technique of going to SCS and recording the shaft and trunnion angles. And itÂ’s a good thing because the telescope was useless. The first time we did this, the auto optics did not place the stars in the sextant field of view after we had torqued it to the new REFSMMAT. We picked them up with no loss of time because we had the shaft and trunnion available and we could crank it in and press on.

Young: I had never heard of that technique before, but man I think it ought to be mandatory if youÂ’re going to coarse align that platform translunar coast.

Mattingly: It makes you feel comfortable to know that youÂ’re not going to get lost.

Young: Right. What it means is you would have to end up doing a P52 Earth/Moon probably and then going off from there. That would be a big waste of gas and time. -

Mattingly: This technique worked well. I thought that the sextant simulation was just like the real sextant. The stars looked the same, they are just as obvious. ItÂ’s really a refreshing thing.

Young: ThatÂ’s really a beautiful technique. I never did that. It never occurred to me to do it. On Apollo 10, I was too sissy. I pulse torqued it all the time.

Mattingly: The only time I pulse torqued this mission was at ground command, and darned if it didnÂ’t go to gimbal lock. I had to drive away from it. We did get a chance to do something that people hadnÂ’t done before. That was the Sun/Earth alignment. We used the Sun filter and that works like a champ. I was really impressed. You put that Sun filter on the telescope and itÂ’s all blank until you find the Sun. Then itÂ’s a nice object and you can see the cross hairs on top of it and - the SunÂ’s illumination. The Earth was about two-thirds full then. I didnÂ’t find it very difficult to guess where the centre of the Earth would be. I probably would have gotten a better angular difference had I used something small like the Moon.

Young: You got a plus 07.

Mattingly: Which was certainly good enough to bring me up where auto optics -

Young: ThatÂ’s as good as you can get in P57 almost.

Mattingly: From there on, we were back in business with no lost time to speak of. The optics calibration was a little bit different from the simulator in that it was easier to calibrate prior to P23. The system was very reproducible. In fact, I thought it was broken. I made a. couple of marks - things that I knew were way off base to see if it was really reading the trunnion properly, and it was. ItÂ’s a very sensitive measurement and itÂ’s easy to make. Right from the beginning whenever we would put the optics into zero, or move the shaft at a high rate, it really sounded bad. Sounded like something was clattering. It seemed to move in jerks and spurts - kind of like it was on a ratchet. It got worse as the mission progressed. It never seemed to affect the performance of the optics. But it was as noisy as IÂ’ve ever heard on the simulator. It was kind of discomforting to hear that thing. If you moved it slowly, it was all right. But you couldnÂ’t get on high speed at all even at the beginning of the mission.

Young: When you drove it in high speed it would go in a jerky motion. The line would go fast for a while, then it would slow down right in tune with this grinding noise thatÂ’s in there. There is something wrong with those optics.

Mattingly: It was the actual drive of the shaft that was doing initially the trunnion would overshoot like a quarter of a degree. By the time we reached lunar orbit the initial overshoot was generally the full sweep of the sextant. If you watched the star acquisition in the sextant you would see the star swing back. It would bounce. It would take three or four sweeps before it got down to keeping it within the cross hairs in the sextant. That seemed to get progressively worse throughout the mission. As soon as you went to Manual, it damped the motion immediately. The optics drift in Manual, CMC and Manual, Resolve and Direct. The drift is a great deal more in Resolve. There was no way I could find any combination that would not have drift in both the shaft and the trunnion. We got into a discussion about this preflight. They said if I went to Manual it would not move. But it does. I wrote down how much it drifts in the Flight Plan.

Mattingly: The other thing on the optics is that the eyepieces back off. I think that is unforgiveable.

Young: They float off and go somewhere.

Mattingly: You canÂ’t afford to loose the eyepiece. This is the eyepiece that goes on the removable part.

Young: They did that on Apollo 10. They said they were going to glue them on so it would never happen.

Mattingly: The jam nuts were so tight I couldnÂ’t get them loose. They werenÂ’t holding the optics in. The eyepiece screws on top of that and itÂ’s free floating. If you jam it down the little eyecup would be pointing someplace where your eye isnÂ’t. Charlie found the telescope eyepiece floating around one night I taped them, but it doesnÂ’t work because the tape is not very sticky. The tape just isnÂ’t that adhesive to that metal. Later I had trouble with the focus on both the sextant and the telescope. Stu had asked me to look at the sextant image, because he said his was fuzzy. I found that I could make mine fuzzy by defocusing it. I had the feeling that I had cranked the focus down as far as it would go. I had run into the stop and it hadnÂ’t quite cleared up the image - like I needed to go another turn on the If you backed it off a turn it got very fuzzy and it sounded to me like what Stu had described. So I screwed it all the way down and it stayed in focus because I could jam it against the end. The telescope focus was a little bit better and it wasnÂ’t jammed against the nut. I had to tape it. Even underneath the tape it backed off - itÂ’s a pretty sensitive focus. In lunar orbit, I was unable to see star patterns in the telescope at night - in the double umbra.

Young: Black night.

Mattingly: YouÂ’ve got to be able to see them if theyÂ’re there. They werenÂ’t there, and I thought we had reproduced the Apollo 15 problem. After I noticed this a couple of times I went back and played with it. I played with the focus and apparently my problem was that it has unfocused itself. When I focused it there was apparently enough concentration of light then that I could see stars. When they were out of focus, I didnÂ’t see anything. When I focused it up, the star pattern just popped out, and they were beautiful. It could easily happen. I had the thing taped and I thought it was in place. Just a small amount of movement will make it unfocus.

Young: We never had any problem with that on Apollo 10. We could see all kinds of star patterns up there at night.

Mattingly: I just made it a practice after that to always check the focus, and then it was okay. You need the telescope right now, not after 30 minutes of looking for the eyepiece.

Young: I donÂ’t want to tell you this but itÂ’s the truth. I went to sleep one night just before Ken did. While I was asleep the platform realigned itself into coarse align. Ken fixed it and I never woke up. I never knew anything about it until the next day. CouldnÂ’t believe it.

Mattingly: It was the last thing we had to do on the presleep checklist take the voice mode off. John crawled back into the couch - floodlights were all on. I was going to look at something in the optics and I said, hey John, turn the voice mode off. There was no sound. I looked back and old John looked like a dead man. All the floodlights were on. About that time, the master alarm caine on and the world turned upside down. We talked to the ground for an hour about it. We realigned the platform. John never batted an eyelash. I finally reached over and turned all the floodlights out, wrote him a note and stuck it in front of him and went to bed.

Young: I got up the next day and read the note. I thought, Ken has got the sickest sense of humor of any guy IÂ’ve ever seen in my life. He told me the platform failed that night. He must have sat up all night thinking that up. Then I closed it up and thought - wait until he wakes up. Boy, what a sense of humor. HeÂ’s worse than me. It was true, I couldnÂ’t believe it. (Laughter) ThatÂ’s funny.

Mattingly: I think you were tired. (Laughter)

Young: I really slept good that first 3 or hours. I really slept good.

Duke: ThatÂ’s really the only systems problem we had on the way out.

Young: Yes. That happened the second night.

Duke: The ground said expect the SFS light during that first midcourse. Sure enough the SPS light came on due to the oxidizer side being high, 210.

Young: Never went on again.

Duke: During the burns, the pressures were where they said they would be. It was fine during the burns. Comm worked great the whole way.

Young: Ground handling of comm at night was really good. I had a headset on many times and I never heard it. I think I was just asleep. They used to wake me up on Apollo 10. They never did this time. They stayed ahead of it the whole time this time.

Duke: They said they lost comm with us once but they didnÂ’t wake me up.

Young: Passive Thermal Control. Ken gets an atta boy for that. HeÂ’s the only guy to ever set up passive thermal control correctly the first time, and every time. It was beautiful.

Duke: Right on.

Young: It really worked good. LetÂ’s say something about LM Ingress which sort of got us off the first days timeline. When Ken was down doing the navigation sights, I was looking out his window. I was sitting there watching. All of a sudden the stuff was sorts floating off. I saw it coming out from behind this place that we tried to point out to you on the TV, when we got the TV on it. I saw this stuffÂ’s coming out like something is shooting it out of there. I was as nervous as a cat. DidnÂ’t I show it to you guys?

Duke: I saw it from my side.

Young: You didnÂ’t see it though, Ken?

Mattingly: No.

Young: Charlie saw it. It was directional. So I figured the only thing it could be was that something was making it squirt out of there You have the best guide in the world when you can look at something and see it leaking. I wondered if there was some valve we could shut; now was the time. We went into the LM and powered up the TM, and they didnÂ’t see a thing. In fact, we turned on the RCS gages and we didnÂ’t see anything.

Duke: Nominal.

Young: Boy, I donÂ’t know what it is. It could have been a thruster down in there, but I donÂ’t know why it would come off directional. like that. Maybe we got some pictures of that.

Duke: Later on during the flight, another panel started doing the same thing. It was shredding off paint, it was also directional, but it was not as much as that big panel.

Young: When we finally got down on the Moon and looked around at the LM, it looked like a shaggy dog. WeÂ’ve got the pictures here, hair hanging out all over. Cislunar nav and navigational sightings cost us a hunk of time. It got Ken so far away from the cislunar navigation preliminary sightings that he really didnÂ’t see but one horizon.

Mattingly: There was never any question in my mind about what to mark on. ThereÂ’s only one thing you could mark on.

Young: ItÂ’s worth a little OJT and not waste any more time on it.

Mattingly: The auto maneuvers never placed the spacecraft at the sub-stellar point. We took a long time, used a lot of gas on it, but it seemed. to me there wasnÂ’t any reason to take a mark unless you got it in the right place. With that big stack up there, that can just take a lot of time.

Duke: The procedure that you used for recycling through P23, is that a standard procedure that everybody uses?

Slayton: ItÂ’s part of the Flight Data File.

Young: That really saves you the gas, the ability to recycle through P23 and get right back in MARK. Ought to really be a gas saver. Midcourse Correction (External Delta-V, EMS Delta-V, Ullage Ignition, Accuracy) - all right on the money. The pressures were just what they told us they would be. We didnÂ’t notice the chamber pressure, like no one ever has noticed on the short burn. The Delta-V counters were right on. Did quite a bit of UV photography on the way to the Moon.

Slayton: You guys really handled it good.

Duke: It was a simple sequence.

Young: I hope they get some good photos. There were some good pictures of Earth, that would be worth having. One time we were looking at the whole of Australia - all in the clear.

Young: High Gain Antenna Performance nominal the whole way.

Mattingly: I wrote down all the notes on the electrophoresis demonstration in the experiments checklist.

Young: Daylight IMU Realign and Star check was nominal.

Mattingly: The electrophoresis demonstration didnÂ’t work like I anticipated it would. We allotted an hour for it. 1 think we ran it three times in about 30 minutes. As soon as I pulled the closing Mylar out of the way with the knob I got a spurt of stuff that came out and hit on the face of the glass on the box. Whether that violated the integrity of the experiment I have no idea. There were bubbles in the tubes. There was one bubble in each tube. They told us, if we had bubbles, tap them out to get rid of it. I tapped them, but I couldnÂ’t get rid of the darn things. I tried shaking the box, to put some acceleration on it and get the bubble to move. I just didnÂ’t have any luck.

Mattingly: Then, they told us after awhile, donÂ’t worry about it anymore.

Young: They were big bubbles too; they were as big as the end of your thumb.

Mattingly: Well itÂ’ll be on the photographic record.

Young: As big as the end of a pencil, or as big as the end of this match tip.

Mattingly: IÂ’ll buy that It filled the tube, and it was just about a circular bubble. Hopefully the photographi record has all of the things we saw. The experiment was conducted according to the checklist. We were in PTC. They gave us something like five minutes to wait after we tapped it, and we didnÂ’t wait that long. We didnÂ’t because there was no motion. The bubbles were steady and werenÂ’t changing any. So,. it seemed like a reasonable thing to proceed. When youÂ’ve got auto optics youÂ’ve got no problems. And when you donÂ’t have auto optics, you got lots of them.

Young: ALFMED Experiment. CharlieÂ’s got very sensitive eyes. If he didnÂ’t get enough data, they wonÂ’t ever get enough data. He was seeing three to my one.

Duke: They looked just like the experimenter had described preflight during our little briefing with him. They looked exactly like that, from white dots to fuzzy lines to straight lines, to fuzzy cloud-like haze lightning. They seemed to come in batches. Then you wouldnÂ’t see any. Then you would see three or four right in a row.

Young: Well, you can tell whoÂ’s the hard-headedest in the whole bunch. IÂ’m three times as hard-headed as you are and KenÂ’s infinitely more hard-headed than I am.

Duke: Hopefully, it worked. The motors were driving right, things sounded right on the whole experiment. I think the experiment worked right. We sure gave them a lot of sightings.

Mattingly: The mechanical part of the experiment was done properly. IÂ’ve played with the instrument before. It did all the right things. IÂ’m sure the plates returned to zero when we got through. We took some photographs of the placement on CharlieÂ’s head from three different directions before and after. I think that we have it sufficiently documented, so that they can put something together with it.

Young: I looks like they are out here in front of your eye. ThatÂ’s my subjective opinion, I canÂ’t believe that they could be back here in your head. Maybe they are.

Mattingly: I think itÂ’s all in your head. (Laughter)

Young: No. TheyÂ’re real. I never noticed any difference in frequency that I could put my fingers on. It looked like one of the pictures of ions in a cloud chamber. ItÂ’s weird. I went in there skeptical that I was going to see those things, because I didnÂ’t see them at all on Apollo 10. No, I never saw any on 10 that I remember.

Slayton: No one ever saw any until Apollo 11. Then all of a sudden, everybody started to see them.

Young: I canÂ’t close my eyes right now and see them. I thought it was psychological at first.

Duke: Once one catches your attention, theyÂ’re there.

Young: I saw them on the lunar surface too.

Duke: Yes.

Mattingly: Did you ever see them behind the Moon?

Duke: Yes.

Young: I donÂ’t remember.

Duke: I remember that first night sleeping. I donÂ’t know where we were in orbit, but I saw them.

Mattingly: Did you see any when occuted from the Sun?

Young: I donÂ’t remember that.

Mattingly: IÂ’m still looking for my first one.

Young: I think thatÂ’s beautiful. I think thatÂ’s great. ThereÂ’s a message right there, but I donÂ’t know what it is.

Young: Charlie could see so many, and Ken didnÂ’t see any. Whatever kind of shielding KenÂ’s got, we better get some more of it.

Mattingly: Send me back and see if I can see them again.

Young: I knew you were going to say that. Delta-P was nominal. I think we had a very low leak rate in the LM.

Duke: Tight LM.

Young: We pumped it up in accordance with the rules which changed when we were pumping it up there once. But it still worked out okay.

Mattingly: Ultra-violet photography went according to plan. For the record, we did use a cardboard shield.

Young: I think we had a tight 124, because every night before we went to sleep, we pumped the cabin up to 5.7. That would give you a 0.6 or 0.7 LM/CM Delta-P. The next morning itÂ’d be still the same CM/LM Delta-P. So, it wasnÂ’t leaking. Removal of Probe and Brogue - Ken finally got so good at it, he was doing it in milliseconds. The fourth time was PDI day.

Mattingly: Did you ever smell anything on the initial docking? I never did.

Young: I smelled the old burnt metallic smell when I was up in the tunnel.

Mattingly: I got a definite feel for that after rendezvous.

Young: I got the odor when I was initially up there in the tunnel. ItÂ’s a standard - donÂ’t ask me what it is -. itÂ’s a standard smell.

Mattingly: I donÂ’t know, maybe itÂ’s the probe that weÂ’re smelling.

Young: Maybe so.

Mattingly: Because it was a very definite odor, and I hadnÂ’t anticipated it after rendezvous.

Young: Yes, maybe so. I donÂ’t think itÂ’s any big thing.

Mattingly: Passive Thermal Control, one more time just as good as the first time. Sounds (Service Module RCS) - I tried to tape them. So that somebody could hear them. I couldnÂ’t get it on the tape; it was just below the threshold. I checked it once specifically during a midcourse, or maybe it was during one of our rendezvous. I think the simulation at the Cape is called - our CMS reproduction of that is probably very good. in tone, but itÂ’s too loud.

Young: You also get the physiological cue too that you donÂ’t get in the fixed base simulator.

Mattingly: You get a very definite sound when the engine is on and stays on. I noticed that during one of these translation maneuvers when I had a chance to listen for it, and sure enough there is a sound that goes with the translation. ItÂ’s not as loud as the solenoids, but there sure is a sound that goes with it. But I tried to tape it, and I didnÂ’t get a thing.

Young: Well, I donÂ’t know how it helps you in the real world, but just to know that itÂ’s there would help you if you ever had a stuck thruster. But in the simulator, it would sure be a helpful cue that you had a stuck thruster. YouÂ’re really in trouble with stuck thrusters, in the OMS because you never know that the thing is firing until youÂ’ve run out of gas almost.

Mattingly: But as far as motions in the CSM, I had the distinct impression that youÂ’d have to have an awfully big rate before you would feel it. When the LMÂ’s on you know motion, because that thing heaves and bends, and creaks, and thereÂ’s no question that somethingÂ’s happening. I think that jet monitor program is a very worthwhile thing. I sure was able to sleep a lot better knowing it was in there.

Young: ThatÂ’s that P that tells you when the jets are firing when you sleep.

Mattingly: What it does, it measures when you exceed the dead band by a discrete amount. And I thought that was a super thing to have.

Young: Resting, Comfort, Housekeeping, and Exercise.

Slayton: I think those things ought to be broken down in a little more detail.

Mattingly: Why donÂ’t we take them one at a time, because there are four separate subjects there. If you add hygiene to that weÂ’ll be here the rest of the day. Sleep, why donÂ’t we talk about that?

Young: We were really behind the first day becauseÂ’ of the extra ingress in the 114, and suit doff. What goes by the board, is your eat period, when you get into a. situation like that you just forget to eat because you canÂ’t. If your 114 is leaking, you are not going to stop to grab a bite to eat. Or if you suspect itÂ’s leaking. And the next day we were behind for some other reason. What was it?

Mattingly: That was the day we went to the john.

Young: ThatÂ’s right, we went to the bathroom. All three guys went to the bathroom, and you canÂ’t do it simultaneously. The first time itÂ’s going to run you what - 40 minutes apiece?

Duke: Yes.

Young: To do it right. Once you get good at it, you can cut the time down considerably.

Duke: My first nightÂ’s sleep was miserable. But after that I was settled down and I slept like a baby the rest of the time.

Young: I was really surprised, my first nightÂ’s sleep was good, and so were all the rest of mine, and I canÂ’t account for it be- because I donÂ’t remember sleeping very good at all on Apollo 10.

Mattingly: The first night, you commented the same as I did, that you saw every hour on the clock.

Young: Well, after the first four I saw every hour on the clock, but IÂ’d wake up and go back to sleep.

Mattingly: I woke up every hour. And that was true of every night except two of them. Only 2 nights during the mission that I think I slept straight through. And I never felt tired, I never felt like I wanted to go to sleep - that was the problem. IÂ’d lay there, and my eyeballs would be wide awake and my head would be thinking about things, and I guess IÂ’m used to being physically a little tired too.

Young: My rest period typically would run one to five hours, and sometime in there I would wake up for a half an hour and make a head run and get a drink of water, and then IÂ’d go back to sleep and sleep the rest of the night. And I donÂ’t know why, because we werenÂ’t doing any us efu]. work to amount to anything, I didnÂ’t need that sleep.

Duke: You can sit in a chair and not do anything and if they keep you awake for 15 or 16 hours youÂ’re going to be tired and you want to go to sleep, and itÂ’s the same thing in space flight.

Young: You think so, huh?

Duke: Yes. Yes, youÂ’re burning up calories just sitting in that chair.

Young: ThereÂ’s a lot of mental exercise that goes into some of those things.

Duke: I was tired. I was ready to go to bed every night.

Mattingly: You didnÂ’t have any trouble, you were able to dive under there and sack out. I just couldnÂ’t go to sleep, and had no desire to go to sleep.

Young: I - I think it would help for us all to have the same place, like Charlie was under the left couch. I slept on the right couch, and Ken slept in the left couch, and that was a pretty good standard place to be, because if anything came up we were right there at the EPS and the ECS and Ken had it controlled and Charlie had a place where he could get out of the way and sleep.

Duke: It was nice sleeping under that couch, I appreciate you guys letting me have it, because I really enjoyed that.

Mattingly: I slept the last two nights without the sleeping bag. I felt like the only advantage to the sleeping bag was a way to stay warm. Other than that, if it was inconvenient to get it out, you had just as soon leave it stowed.

Young: Yes, but I really needed it to stay warm there a couple of times.

Mattingly: We talked about it before, but I guess each of us has a different thermostat. But I felt like I was a little too warm until we got into the 60-mile orbit around the Moon. And up to then, I felt like every night I wished it was a little cooler. And after that I needed the sleeping bag and my jacket in order to stay warm enough to sleep. I tried all the things Stu had suggested about anchoring your head and doing different things that he thought would help. Charlie put his head in the sleeping bag.

Duke: I did, and that worked great for me. I liked the bag because I felt a little pressure on the head from it, and it worked fine for me.

Mattingly: I tried all of that. None of those things seemed to have any effect on me.

Duke: I didnÂ’t wear the coveralls. I stayed in my long johns the whole time and was very comfortable in that. But at night it seemed to chill, down low in the spacecraft down under the couch, and so I needed a sleeping bag.

Mattingly: One other thing on that sleeping - it sort of falls in with it. ItÂ’s really controlled for this place, but IÂ’ve always badmouthed that EL...

Young: Hey, thatÂ’s good stuff.

Mattingly: ...as being a waste of the GovernmentÂ’s money. But I found that that instrument panel was just perfect. I could turn the lights down so they didnÂ’t disturb anything, and all I had to do is glance at it, and I could read all the things I needed to read.

Young: Without waking everybody up.

Mattingly: Without waking anybody up. It was there at instant reference - no problem focusing on it. And I really thought that stuff was super. And I thought that was really a good thing to have.

Young: Yes. But the thing that I think that a lot of people donÂ’t realize, that if anybody moves around in that cockpit, it wakes up the other two guys. ThereÂ’s a couple times there when I donÂ’t think I woke up Charlie, but every time I reached for the water gun, I know I woke up Ken. Every time he reached for it he woke me up.

Duke: ThatÂ’s why we got in the habit of getting a drink and taking it to bed with us. I think thatÂ’s a good idea, just to keep from reaching over there and riding around the cockpit. Seems like when you bang something you actually do it on purpose - it reverberates the whole cockpit. We were taking the urine bags to bed with us, too - in case you had to make a head run. One of the things we didnÂ’t do was wear our couch loops. Anytime any one of us would move, it would swing the couch. But if it hadnÂ’t been loose there was some distance in there where it would have banged. We had it loose so we could get in that 382 count (?). I think if we had put the strut out we might have minimized some of that, I donÂ’t know.

Duke: Maybe this is the chance to mention we need a smaller trash bag. The jett bags are just monstrous.

Young: And when it gets filled, itÂ’s bigger than Ken.

Duke: And thereÂ’s no air rim bag, you need something about half that size that you can fill up really.

Mattingly: Housekeeping is probably one of the biggest things. ItÂ’s the thing you donÂ’t practice enough.

Young: It takes you a couple of days to get going at it.

Mattingly: YouÂ’ve got to get into the swing ot it. You need to plan way ahead to do things very slowly and take a lot of extra time so you learn the little details of housekeeping that go on. When we finally learned how to eat, we had a system where one guy would fill the bags and one guy would cut them open and mash them up. We put the trash can right in front us so that when you got through the pills were right here together. You put the pill in, drop it in the trash and get rid of things as you came across them.

Duke: That was pretty efficient. I think we were eating meals in 35 minutes or so and getting it all done.

Mattingly: But our first meals must have been an hour and a half. We were all over the place. Charlie pointed out the trash cans - thatÂ’s really true. We started out using the jett bag because thatÂ’s what we were going to throw it away in. That thing is just too big. ItÂ’s a real nuisance. You pick up a piece of trash - something floats by you and you pick it up. You say, IÂ’ll throw it in the trash can, but you got to go over to this big monster and wrestle with it and after itÂ’s about half full you sort of reach a static state. Every time you open it and put something in, youÂ’re going to get two pieces out. You want to collect enough to make it worthwhile to open the bag. We never really felt like we used the bottoms of those things because they were so deep and hard to get into. But the idea of having a set of jaws on that thing that you could just pull open and drop something in was real convenient. And I think maybe something the size of that purse you guys had is a good intermediate trash bag. When I was by myself I was using the Volkswagen pouches in the LEB, IÂ’d just fill up one of those until it was full. When it was full, IÂ’d make one run to the trash can and dump it all in. And that saved me a lot of time.

Young: What youÂ’re really saying is that we should have used that in the first place. I donÂ’t think with three guys in there if you use the Volkswagen pouches - You canÂ’t use them for anything else. Not only that, but every time a guy goes by heÂ’s going to hit them and the stuff will come tumbling out.

Mattingly: I donÂ’t think that's an adequate solution, but that kind of approach sure works a lot better.

Duke: An extra TSB would be nice, because itÂ’s got the clamp on it. We could use it for an interim trash bag. ItÂ’s deep enough.

Mattingly: The amount of trash is really surprising. We ignored one of the things that kind of caught us later. We could have kept the size of the trash bag smaller, if we had thought about squeezing the air and things out of the food packages when we got hrough with them. What we were doing is just taking a food bag, putting a pill in it, wrapping it up and throwing it in the trash. And everyone of these things with some air in them is bigger than they were packaged initially.

Duke: I was squeezing mine down.

Mattingly: Well, towards the end I was working real hard at mashing all the air out of them and rolling them up, which made a lot smaller bundle.

Young: A food package is 6 inches by 4 inches by 3 inches, vacuum packed. And after you eat it it is twice that big.

Mattingly: By the time you throw in tissues and all the little miscellaneous things that you never think about, itÂ’s really quite a bit of trash. I jettisoned two jettison bags in the LM. One of them was as full as you could get it and the other one was probably two-thirds to three-fourths full. I have no idea what they weighed. Based on what we saw after we got back it probably was a pretty heavy burden.

Young: Housekeeping. We didnÂ’t allow any time in the time line for the second day when we all had to make a head run. That got us behind.

Duke: Every morning when you get up and every night when you go to bed they have a presleep and a postsleep checklist. But thereÂ’s never any time allotted for the thing. There needs to be a period when you get up in the morning, you ought to have 30 minutes from wake-up until the first word you hear from the ground.

Young: TheyÂ’d say, "Good morning, hereÂ’s your Flight Plan update." HereÂ’s your Flight Plan update - where am I - and youÂ’re off and running. You know that it took us on the order of 10 to 15 minutes to prepare that crew status report, write it all down every morning. We did't figure on that either.

Mattingly: No one factor you can point your finger at and say, if I could eliminate this IÂ’d buy a lot of time. ItÂ’s just an accumulation of all these things. You need a chance to just go around and pick up your toys and put things away. There just wasnÂ’t any time anywhere in the Flight Plan to do that sort of thing.

Duke: We did it.

Young: There were a couple of periods we missed.

Duke: We missed all of them the first day.

Young: Yes.

Duke: We wouldnÂ’t have missed the first day but we had the LM problems and the P23s.

Young: There was another period we missed because we were engaged in post EVA or entry stowage.

Mattingly: Post-EVA stowage. I think I scrubbed one in lunar orbit, because it was that or go to the head. Really I didnÂ’t have any choice. In retrospect I donÂ’t know how to assess the value of exercise. The Exer-genie was the only practical thing I could think of. We gave a lot of thought preflight to how we could exercise.

Young: I did a bunch of big 4s and it worked pretty good. But I could tell I wasnÂ’t doing the kind of work I was doing on the ground. I subjectively could feel that.

Mattingly: I felt better when I got through, IÂ’ll say that for it. I just had a better feeling, but I just canÂ’t believe that the amount of exercise I had justified 30 minutes. I realy think IÂ’d have been just as veil off to just forget the whole thing.

Duke: Well, I got my heartbeat up to 100 or so, but thatÂ’s about the max you could do was a hundred.

Young: They said I got mine up to 114 one time.

Mattingly: I question that, because I had just checked it. If you go out there and work up a sweat, really do exercise like you ought to, the ECS will not handle that kind of a load. The ECS is marginal. ItÂ’s designed for three marshmallows laying there. It isnÂ’t designed for you to go out and do any exercise. The old Exer-genie gets hot. I guess itÂ’s not going to start any fires, but I just donÂ’t like reaching over that big heat sink.

Young: ItÂ’s the barrel that gets hot. That heat has got to go somewhere, I guess.

Mattingly: Charlie, did that thing cool off faster when you put it on the bulkhead? We should have measured that.

Duke: We didnÂ’t measure the time, Ken.

Mattingly: But it was hot to touch and that barrel got pretty hot. The other thing I worried about was laying there and banging into things. Because you canÂ’t do any reasonable exercise and maintain your body position.

Duke: You know what we should have done, I think - put the couches in the 180 position.

Mattingly: YouÂ’re always banging in to things when you do that. Kick the optics. I found working in the center couch is the best place, I could get in there pretty well.

Young: But even then, if you strapped yourself in the center couch and did a big 4, you would probably be all right, because you are restrained.

Mattingly: No, still kick the optics.

Young: DonÂ’t want to kick the optics.

Mattingly: Always have one eye open for what youÂ’re doing.

Young: What IÂ’m really sorry about is that we couldnÂ’t do them in an uninterrupted fashion. IÂ’d start my exercise period and get the 166 light on the way back. It really slows your exercise down. TheyÂ’ve got to handle the biomed harness a little better from the ground standpoint. On occasion, they wanted us to put it on and take it off waiting until after you got to that place in the Flight Plan before deciding what they wanted to do. Ken had just taken his off, because he was going to be off that night, but CharlieÂ’s wasnÂ’t reading right So the ground calls up and says, okay, weÂ’re going to watch KenÂ’s. He had just taken it off. To put it back on is 15 to 20 minutes of playing with these little sticky things in zero gravity. They just donÂ’t hang in there very good, they float all over the place. It seems to me the decision to watch somebody ought to be made long enough ahead in the Flight Plan so the guy can be expecting it, and doesnÂ’t cost us 15 minutes which we donÂ’t have.

Mattingly: Well, we really stayed on the schedule except for that, one night. As far as IÂ’m concerned IÂ’d keep the things-on rather than go to all the Mickey Mouse of changing them.

Young: The thing that bothers you about the biomed is those big flat patches. If you could leave those off -

Duke: ThatÂ’s an individual thing, now. The sensors bothered me. IÂ’ve got these little round blisters where the sensors were.

Young: I do too.

Duke: The big tape is itchy but the blisters came from the sensors. In my case, it was necessary for me to doff mine. My only complaint was that there was two minutes in the Flight Plan, LMP don biomed, CMP doff biomed. Well, you canÂ’t do it in two minutes. You need 20.

Mattingly: You can do it in 15 if everything works perfectly, but youÂ’re really making a mistake to count on less than 20.

Young: Well, the first thing you have to do is float over and get the medical kit, which means everybody has to stop while youÂ’re doing it, or else they have to reach down and give it to you. ItÂ’s not all in the same place in the medical kit. The biomedical stuff is in one side and you have to turn it over and get it out of the other side. Then you have to put the little sensors in the little boxes. Then you have to rip off the old and put on the new tapes and stick the thing on you. DoesnÂ’t sound like it takes 15 minutes, but thatÂ’s what it was running us.

Mattingly: Using those tattoos as a way of knowing how to place things is a waste of time. I used the Pen-tel. I wouldnÂ’t consider doing it any other way. I never had time to look for that stuff.

Young: The only way I could get them on the tattoo was if Charlie helped me put them on.

Duke: I did it with a mirror and it worked fine for me.

Young: The biomed donning and doffing schedule should be done well ahead, so that one guy hasnÂ’t taken his off when they still want to look at it. They just sort of arbitrarily came out and said CharlieÂ’s is not working, weÂ’ll watch Ken. Ken had already taken his off. We didnÂ’t want to argue with them, but we didnÂ’t have the 15 minutes available for that.

Mattingly: One time they called me during lunar orbit and said that I was getting a noisy signal. They wanted me to change it. I ignored it for one rev, because there wasnÂ’t any place in there to do it. They bugged me on the next rev. I had the distinct impression that if I ignored it one more rev that I was going to be talking to Chris or somebody. So I went ahead and did it, but it really frosted me. I didnÂ’t go to the Moon to change biomed sensors, and I think that sort of thing ought to be put in some kind of proper perspective. If thereÂ’s a hardware malfunction or if you get a scratchy sensor or signal, thereÂ’s got to be some judgment about when itÂ’s worth breaking into your time line to replace it.

Young: Right in the presleep checklist there ought to be a check for the guy thatÂ’s on biomed, a biomed sensor check. From then on, if it craps out completely, they ought to leave you alone, because they canÂ’t wake you up to do it. One night I was supposed to be on biomed the whole night. When I got up the next morning they said we didnÂ’t read your biomed. I donÂ’t know why they didnÂ’t read it, but nobody else asked me to check it before I went to sleep that night. If they really want to see it they ought to have bugged us before we went to sleep. Sim door jett. We saw it.

Mattingly: You can hear it. The Apollo 15 guys said they never heard it, but I think thatÂ’s because they had their helmet and gloves on.

Young: The other two LM checkouts were nominal. Concerning FTC, you ought to stow the optics to get the light out of the cockpit. Everytime you go around the light comes through the telescope and lights up the whole cockpit. I knew that from Apollo 10.

Mattingly: I’d like to give them an “atta boy” for those window shades.

Young: They really work - work good - thatÂ’s another first.

Mattingly: They did a good job on that.

Young: The gas separator on the water gun leaked pretty bad.

Mattingly: There were two gas separators, the standard cigar separator thatÂ’s been carried before, and we had the new one - the plastic the Lexan new type. I think we should have gone back and taken the gas separator off later in the flight, because we put it on when we were getting gas. That was the day before LOI or the day of LOI, I donÂ’t remember which. It was when we were getting ready for that Skylab meal when we first noticed we were getting gas in the regular food port. We put the cigar on and initially got a lot of gas. I think that was just purging the gas that was already in the cigar. After that it seemed to work pretty good. You always got more gas in the hot water than in the cold water. But once we started being a little slower about getting the water out the gas accumulation decreased, also when we started giving the water guns more time. The only real drawback to the cigar was that if you forgot to put the little plastic cap on the bottom of it, you were going to get water, and you could really get a lot of water out of it. All you do is put that cap on there and that seems to seal it. I never saw any water come out around that cap. But if you forgot the thing just for a few minutes, a big bowl of water could collect. I think we have some pictures of that to show what it looks like and where it goes. WeÂ’d put about three shots of water into it and nothing came out. I guess thatÂ’s when Charlie noticed that the thing was cracked across the top. I guess it started to put water out of that crack. We never got any water out of the bottom. Water did not come out the gas separator part either. It all caine out of the crack. When we took it off, you could find out where the water had becn because it all compressed inside there. So, we just bundled that one up into the bag and put it back in stowage and never played with it again.

Young: I thought the gas separator worked pretty good.

Mattingly: We never did have a lot of trouble with gas. I would spin bags and look at it and I was getting maybe 10 percent volume.

Young: I think 10 to 15 percent of the stuff in the bags was gas.

Mattingly: Cold water is a little better.

Young: And it varied. Some bags seemed to have less gas in them than others. DonÂ’t ask me to explain that.

Mattingly: I think thereÂ’s something in the way. You pull them out and release it. It squirts an ounce in there.

Young: I think youÂ’re getting gas in it.

Mattingly: I donÂ’t understand how it does but initially we were in too big a hurry. As soon as that thing would pop in, weÂ’d pull it back out for another shot. In fact, Charlie was pushing it in there for a while. When we were doing that we had our gas problem. When we went back to taking our time and letting these things run their full course, we didnÂ’t. I think there may be something in the technique on how you use those things. Maybe you can induce some gas from the cockpit and around that little plunger if you push it too fast. After that we started getting uniform quantities of water. For a while there we ware getting differences in quantity between the hot and the cold ounce. After we finally got on to it we were getting very similar quantities out of both guns. I think we were inducing a lot of that gas by pushing on those water panels.

Young: These are system anomalies. - the broken chlorine ampule, remember that one?

Mattingly: There was nothing that caught my eye in putting it in or I probably wouldnÂ’t have tried it. At the time I squeezed the ampule down and stuffed it in, I didnÂ’t feel anything abnormal. When I pulled it out, it was obvious that it had broken. We had a lot of chlorine in the ...

Young: Chlorine turns your hands white as everyone knows.

Mattingly: I was concerned that I had gotten some chlorine into the system so I wanted to put some buffer in. This was my mishandling of the buffer. I didnÂ’t put it in completely. I didnÂ’t jam down on the buffer ampule because I had just broken one. I was afraid to squeeze down on the ejector too hard the second time. I think Tony is right. I didnÂ’t have the plunger down tight and as soon as I opened the valve going into the port, it caine back and it went out this release ports on the side. ThatÂ’s when we thought we had a septum nut that had come loose. In fact we really did not.

Young: We had a lot of water there after a while because we were mopping up at a pretty good rate.

Mattingly: We went back and put in another buffer ampule and it all worked fine.

Young: The urine collection is no problem because we do that for the whole mission any way.

Duke: We just forgot to time it sometimes.

Young: ItÂ’s very difficult to time urine in the dark if you donÂ’t want to wake up your buddies.

Mattingly: You can time it, but what are you timing? Who knows?

Young: Another thing is those Gemini bags have a nonrepeatable backpressure on them and you are not going to urinate so fast to leak around the seal. You are going to slow it down and then if you urinate as fast as you want to and you have a stuck valve you have urine all over the cockpit. So that time is invalid. It couldnÂ’t be right.

Mattingly: I wouldnÂ’t dare let that thing run free. You have to make sure that there are no leaks. It seems to me that the timing is just ridiculous.

Young: IÂ’m not sure that you can properly time your start and stop times with a urine bag like that.

Mattingly: I always had some question in my mind when it stopped.

Young: Yes.

Mattingly: I couldnÂ’t be sure.

Duke: I think all I got was the bag pressure from the valve.

Mattingly: I was just never sure.

Duke: I had the same feeling. It was a guess with me.

Young: We were unfortunate in that we had the medical requirements document in the Flight Plan. Suppose you got up in the middle of the night, every thing is dark. The medical requirements document where you log the urine is in the Flight Plan and it is in the dark. You have to float over to it, break the Flight Plan loose from where you have it stowed, turn on some kind of light - which would wake everybody up - and log in the urine. If you donÂ’t, youÂ’re going to forget it. It seems to me youÂ’re compromising more than youÂ’re getting, from an operational standpoint.

Mattingly: That happened to us in the daytime. The Flight Plan was always busy. Somebody was always using it for something. It was very seldom that you could stop and either log your food, or urine, or fluid, or anything. That wasnÂ’t a convenient place. I think maybe we could have broken it out and put that in a separate place. That would have solved a lot of our problems. It seemed to me that just having to do something like that ... your effort. It sounds silly to say that writing down that I had a cup of coffee and two graham crackers took up much of my time but when you have keep busy all day thatÂ’s just one contributes nothing. ItÂ’s just a it and I really canÂ’t explain why it sure was enough things to do to thing that you can tell real nuisance to go through it is such a nuisance. But it sure was.

Duke: What we finally ended up doing was in the nornings, if we had the time - in the post-sleep checklist - to get that all done. If the ground wouldnÂ’t talk to you at this time that would be the place to bring all that up to date.

Mattingly: I couldnÂ’t always remember what I had the otherday. Every time you get a squirt of water, you guess how many ounces you get with each drink.

Duke: We havenÂ’t even discussed that part. I think the medical part of timing the urine was useless and timing the water was a pain in the rear end. We never did it. We just squirted it in our mouths and guessed how much we had.

Mattingly: And IÂ’m sure we overguessed.

Duke: ItÂ’s just a pain to fill those bags. Once you open them, they leaked at the end. If you didnÂ’t want to drink it all, you had a leaky bag.

Mattingly: I just donÂ’t think thatÂ’s a good way to log normal functions. If the guys that come up with these ideas would just walk around and try to do a dayÂ’s work and not let their logging interfere with them, theyÂ’d understand.

Young: They wouldnÂ’t drink a hell of a lot of coffee, IÂ’ll tell you that.

Mattingly: It just gets you to the place where itÂ’s too much trouble to do it. ItÂ’s constraining. When youÂ’re doing something and all of a sudden you have to stop to urinate the next thing you donÂ’t want to have to do is reach for the Flight Plan. You may be operationally constrained at how much time you have to urinate any way.

Duke: YouÂ’re right. As it turned out none of us went more than three times a day any way.

Mattingly: Always at the wrong time.

Duke: It was locked.

Mattingly: It was just amazing to me. It was almost a direct opposite of diuresis. I had the distinct impression that diuresis was not water.

Duke: That was not my problem at all.

Mattingly: ThatÂ’s right. I agree with that.

Young: Maybe we learned something by noticing that.

Mattingly: But it sure wasnÂ’t coming out that way.

Duke: It wasnÂ’t. Jim Irwin said he had just one all the time and the three of us, on most days, went twice a day.

Young: ThatÂ’s right.

Duke: Once when I got up and once before I went to bed.

Young: I think it was going out through the skin, because the cockpit was really dry.

Duke: Our blood plasma wasnÂ’t down any more than anybody elseÂ’s. It was down but it was normal to everybody else. I donÂ’t think theyÂ’re going to get much from the time ...

Young: I donÂ’t think itÂ’s valid data.

Duke: Now the 24 hours where we collected it all, at least they got a total volume measurement - that is we didnÂ’t dump it. We collected the whole bit.

Young: We didnÂ’t dump it.

Mattingly: We did put them all in one overwrap cause we couldnÂ’t get three overwrap bags.

Young: ThatÂ’s all right. I mean it doesnÂ’t mix. We talked about that before. While weÂ’re on urine, let me talk about the URA.

Duke: I think we ought to throw that off of the spacecraft.

Young: I never used it.

Mattingly: Well, I tried it a couple of times because I kept thinking that there must be a better way to operate it. You just donÂ’t get enough vacuum to pull fluid in and you end up with big bubbles and puddles. ItÂ’s a much bigger mess to clean up than using the bags. The big problem is you want to do every thing you can to keep that stuff contained. Yours was working properly.

Duke: The trouble is once you jettison the SIM bay, you canÂ’t use that thing anyway.

Mattingly: But my point was that for something like Skylab, it isnÂ’t going to work.

Young: You have periods of time a day that you can dump the urine. The rest of the time, you have to keep it. If you just happened to hit that perfect moment youÂ’re in business but the rest of the time you canÂ’t.

Mattingly: I still contend that the way ours was operating, given a choice, if I had complete freedom to jettison at any time, I still would have used the bag because it was a lot cleaner. When you pull that cap off thereÂ’s always a big bubble that runs around and you have to be real careful to clean it all up. It just seemed to me that it was a lot cleaner and neater just to use the bag and forget it. You never had that problem with the bag.

Duke: I have no opinion. I didnÂ’t use it.

Young: I didnÂ’t get a chance to use it either. I never used anything but the Gemini bag. I never once had the chance to dump directly into space because we were always too busy to take the time to do it and the rest of the time we had the door off and couldnÂ’t.

Mattingly: I tried it two or three times.

Young: We didnÂ’t have that problem on Apollo 10. It worked like a champ. You could go either in the bag or directly through the bag through the dump panel over the side. It worked great but we just never had that chance on the G-mission. ItÂ’s a urine collection business that is what it is.