Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part I, 1965

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103
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
and that puts a pretty good size force on it .
I had a real tight hold on the hatch closing
device , and when it popped open I was able to
snub it .
It didn ' t really open with much force , did it?
Well, it did. It opened with a fair amount .
It
popped and I couldn ' t stop it the first inch
or so. Then, of course , as soon as it opened
that much pressure bled off.
I just sort of
snubbed the thing to keep it from flying all
the way open.
Now if I hadn ' t been holding onto
it, I don ' t think it would have gone open more
than two or three feet .
This is another point too.
There ' s more force
on the hatch actuator than I thought.
I didn ' t
just flip the door open with my hand.
I had to
actually forcibly push it open, similar to the
force with which I opened the hatch laying on
ti
II
my back under one g .
That ' s about the force
that I had to put on the hatch to open it .
This extra force that we are talking about is
due to the 0-rings they put in the pyres that
are used for jettisoning the hatch.
This is
something that they put in just before the
Ee-NFt0ENTIM.