Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part I, 1965

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55
White
McDivitt
s tayed there for about another ten or fifteen
seconds and went to Orbit Rate,
I knew I didn ' t
have a good alinement on the platform but I knew
I couldn ' t stay there any longer and have the
booster anywhere nea r us .
So, I flipped around
and pitched right straight down and here's where
the problems started,
To get down to the booster
in a long rendezvous type maneuver, what I should
have done was to jus t stay horizontal and fire
retrograde and take some total velocity out of the
spacecraft.
But , when you do this the booster
continues to pull away from you for a whil e , and
then eventually you are going to drop down below
it .
Then you are going to be in a l ower-altitude
orbit and you are going to pick up and catchup
with the booster.
Well, with the station-keeping
we had to do and the fact that the darkness was
only a matter of another few minutes-­
Boy it was fas t !
It wasn ' t any time a t all.
I didn ' t have time to
play a rendezvous
game with it,
I had to over­
come this relative velocity we had with sort of
brute force , so I thrusted right at the booster
again.
I got going down and I used about 5
"CO t'-' FIO~NT+Al.