John Company

Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part II, 1965

NASA-UAP-D017 · page 168 of 290

Page 168 of 290 of NASA-UAP-D017

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attitude reference, found the Mediterranean on
my left , pointed the spacecraft on ahead ,
determined the direction I was going, picked
up the Red Sea, picked up the Suez Canal between
the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and followed
the river in.
I started this quite a distance
out .
I knew just about where the airfield was ,
but it wasn't coming into view. Finally,at about
20 degrees before the vertical the airfield
finally came into view.
I tracked on the
airfield about 10 degrees before the nadir.
I
was tracking the area in which I believed the
airfield to be ,so that I had already had the
pitch rate set up that I required of my
spacecraft .
As I got on the target I still had to
track in multiple axes , but I already had t he
rates built up, and I tracked f rom about 10 to
20 degrees before the nadir to 45 degrees past.
I think this will probably be the best tracking
exper i ment that I did. Later on, I had another
one.
Later on I had another tracking task
against Basra in Iraw on the Persi an Gulf. Here
again,we had the ingredients that were
necessary to pick up the target.
We had a l arge
eel fF
1tBE~~TIAL