Astronaut Scientific Debriefings, 1962-1963

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0 1 Keefe - There's a 10,000 foot peak (Haleaki) or Maui.
Dubin - How were you overall set for time?
You were up to the
sixth orbit and you had some trouble with your suit, so we found
out.
Did you have time to basically do more scientific work
than you had the privilege of doing?
Schirra - I think as we - and this is the trouble with Mercury
because this is just about phasing out - as you get your confidence
in the systems to where you don't need to monitor them as of ten, yo,
could take time for observation.
But you continually, at this stage
of the game, cannot rely on the systems running themselves and so
you keep carefully monitoring these things.
This draws your
attention away from, say a five minute observation.
The only t ime
that you could make a lengthy observation would be when you are
under this automatic control when the capsule is maintaining its
attitude for you rather than you trying to maintain it.
This is
very hard to do; to maintain a capsule attitude.
In that it ' s a
three - axis motion everytime you make one motion because each one
is influenced by another axis thrusting.
So as a result, it gets
quite expensive fuel -wise to point your field of view at an obj ect.
You have to sit there and just steam around like mad to do this.
Gill= Would you say that you ever had as much as five minutes at
a time to look out of the window?
Schirra - Oh, yes.
I think I took a fairly long amount of time
for example; observing this particular sunset that's repres entati ve
of about three or four minutes.
Even then, you keep checking thin gs
to see if what you see is really what you are seeing.
For example,