Astronaut Scientific Debriefings, 1962-1963

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35
everybody thinks that all you see is Perth!
(laughter) Well,
we see a lot of other places as well."
To go back, I was · trying
to re -establish this phenomenon in my mind so I had passed over
Africa and I was darkened within the vehicle.
I was drifting.
As I was drifting - we like to say that we can see a city because
the people of the city get quite excited about it as we know Perth
did - and I was proceeding across the Indian Ocean drifting, so my
attitudes cannot be defined, I wanted to say to myself, oh·, · I see
some more cities below me.
Now I wasn't convinced in my mind that
I was over the Indian Ocean, yet with the attitudes · not carefully
defined, I might well have seen cities ,
These I said, ah, those cit ies
are quite constellation setups.
They looked like constellations.
Then I said, my gosh! they are constellations.
They are stars
and this was below what I then, in my mind at least, had planted
as airglowo
Again, a lump term, meaning a lighted horizon, and I
looked above this brown smog effect and saw more stars again.
Then
I could see through this brown effect, stars, but they were · dimmed
considerably by it.
Now, I did not have the opportunity in that
the attitudes were dynamic to trace an individual star or planet
through this particular areao
I wasn't at this point too interested
in knowing what constellations I was looking at.
In drifting fli ght,
you don't really have a requirement to navigate, that is, to know
where you are in relation to a star field or surface.
Roman - So you don't know what you were looking at?
Schirra - So any particular star or constellation, I could not
identi fy at this timeo
If I needed to, I would then have to destroy