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Aviation History
1963
1963 - 1273.PDF
1HT International, 18 July 1963 101 drains off enough perspiration to require some sort of storage tank. In the course of my 34 hours aloft, I sweated away more than four pounds of water. We installed a tank underneath the headrest on the couch, figuring that by the time it was full my drinking water tank would be empty and I could then use that for additional storage. If need be I could fall back on the stored sweat, semi- purified by Halazone tablets, for emergency drinking water. But there were problems from the outset. First of all, the tank under my head for some reason wouldn't fill to capacity. Then, since there is no gauge on the drinking water tank, I did not know how much I had consumed or, more importantly, how much there was left. I waited as long as I could and then began transferring the perspiration water to the drinking tank. For the last third of the flight 1 was relying on still another source, a reserve water supply from my survival kit, to satisfy my thirst. I also had trouble with the food supply. I was unable to force water into the plastic bags that contained my dehydrated meals, such as beef and gravy. It turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, especially since by trying I was spilling water globules all over the cockpit, which I then had to mop up with a handker chief. So I tried the bite-size sandwiches, but I found they had crumbled inside their plastic packages. That left me with only the little dessert goodies. I ate nothing but brownies, date nut bread and fruit cake throughout the trip. It was like going a long way for dinner and having nothing to eat when you got there but dessert. Despite these difficulties with eating, drinking and keeping cool, the flight went well through the first 18 orbits. Flying in the weight less state is amazingly comfortable. And the only thing that bothered me at all was the slight bind of the pressure suit on my knees. This became fairly annoying during the fourth orbit but I discovered I could relieve it by stretching my legs up into the tower of the spacecraft or back behind the instrument panel. I was quite happy with the way my assigned experiments were going and observations ffom the spacecraft were successful beyond my wildest hopes. I was very lucky to have almost ideal weather all around the globe. It was so good, in fact, that after we finished my weather briefing just before I boarded the spacecraft, Al Shepard J^ During his twelfth orbit, I8hr 6min after lift-off, Cooper took this photo graph of the Bangkok area with his Hasselblad camera my retro-pack during the third orbit. This was to test an astro naut's ability to distinguish light sources and gauge distances, useful knowledge for future space rendezvous. It went into a slightly different orbit from my own and I was unable to spot it that time around but, on the night side of the fourth and fifth orbits, I saw it clearly. Its elliptical orbital pattern made it appear to be coming straight up from Earth as I came up on it—as if it had been launched to intercept me. Since its velocity was greater than mine, it soon travelled on out of sight. During the fifth orbit I observed the high-intensity light near Bloemfontein, South Africa, which had been placed there as a test for lunar navigation. But I was much more impressed by being able to see the lights of the horse-shoe-shaped city nearby. I decided that light patterns will be a great deal more helpful to Moon voyagers than single points of light. I was amazed at how much detail I was able to see on the Earth. Before the flight I hadn't expected to be able to make out specific objects distinctly at all. On the first pass over Africa, coming down over the Sahara desert and on toward Zanzibar, I was able to locate rivers, lakes, mountains and islands. I even noted the wake of a boat moving down a river that may have been the Nile. But ' was in the water only 36 minutes ... I apologized for having missed the third elevator, thus making it necessary for them to come get me, but I requested permission to come aboard . . ." s'gned my map with the traditional pilot's notation "Cleared VFR on top"—visual flight rules all the way. We began the onboard television test transmission even before launch and ran it periodically thereafter. I'd always been sort of "ckled by this idea, since it occurred to me that I would be the first Person ever to conduct a show as producer, director, photographer a " actor, all in one. I even carried along some TV test cards, on w nich 1 had printed slogans like "Go for 22" and "Please stand by, network difficulty." As soon as I entered the first night side I saw the haze layer Wally ^chirra had described after his six-orbit flight. It appears as a I™1*) band running parallel to the Earth's horizon and it tends Wot out lower-magnitude stars and dim the brighter ones. I Jo saw the "fireflies" John Glenn reported. I am certain they are 0lstl!re Particles formed by hydrogen peroxide vapour coming 1 of the capsule's attitude-control thrusters. I could see one of JL°*n thrust nozzles and each time I fired it out streamed the Particles, ejected the flashing strobe-light packet which was mounted on
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