Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part I, 1965

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272
White
McDivitt
want to p,mch it off ahead and have t he retro­
rockets go off early, but I figured that it·
wasn't in a hurry that much.
But if it c8Jlle
on much earlier than that, i t was really going
to make us short. So, I finally decided that
we'd go ahead and ann the Auto-retro Button at
about three seconds so that we weren' t going
to be any more than 15 or 20 miles short as a
result of the retrorockets going off early.
We'd still get the auto- retrofire, signal
through, so that if something went ·,:rong with
the manual retrofire signal we'd still get the
retrorockets fired .
I felt that three seconds
early would be better than a possible 15 or 20
second one in case we had to go through some
non-nominal method of firing the retros in case
the manual button didn't make it work.
I told
Ed to arm the auto-retrofire, a.nd he did this
at about three seconds and i t fired automati­
cally at between two and one seconds, I think,
in the count.
Yes.
I felt that we got a one-plus second early
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