Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part I, 1965

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90 feet/second .
I had numbers in all three of the
windows, and of course since I was changing atti­
tudes and thrusting in different directions those
numbers were going all over the place.
So I made
up my mind then that i t looked like a hopeless task
and that we had better stop this stuff or we were
going to lose all the fuel for the whole mission.
We probably wouldn't be able to catch it, and we
wouldn't be able to do what we were going to do.
I think the only thing we could have done to save
the whole thing would nave been for us just to go
forward on the local horizontal and retrograde a
large amount on the order of 20 to 30 feet/second,
fall down below the thing and catch it .an orbit
or so later and actually perform rendezvous with
it.
But because the flight plan was such that we
had to get all the EVA done in the first three
orbits , and because Chris and I had talked this
over and decided the EVA was the more important
of the two things , I felt t hat the best thing to
do woul d be to abandon trying to catch up with
the booster.
White
Let me interject something else, too.
See if you
had the same feeling.
I had the feeling that the
~QNFIDENT.IAL