Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part I, 1965

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300
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
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and see if the thing was going to become unstabl~
This is what I did .
I turned off the RCS elec­
tronics .
The thing was that they didn't get
any worse . It didn ' t get any worse .
I watched it.
I could see enough of it to tell that we weren't
becomi ng wistable.
It was unstable to a point and then it stabilized
out in this oscillation .
That ' s right . It was really gyrating around .
By that time we were down to 20 000 feet and I
called, "20 thousand feet. Pull down the handles" ,
or something to that effect .
You called out 28 .
Is that what I said? And then, I pulled the
propellant valves, as I had planned to do, and
turned the oontrol node to Rate Command rather
that. Reentry , because I wanted to burn up
all the fuel that I could out of those manif olds .
As a matter of fact, I was interested in burning
up all the fuel I could bef ore I got to the
ground .
I have a question.
I thought you put it in
Rate Command before you turned off the valves ,
and it pretty well damped itself out on the
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