Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part II, 1965

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12.0
PRE-MISSION PLANNING
12. 1 filssion Plan (Trajectory)
McDivitt
12.2 Flight Plan
McDivitt
It is pretty difficult to debrief this pre-:-mission
planning because we had so many pre-mission plans
that we couldn't keep track of them all. I think
that we started too late on the mission planning
for GT-4 , because everyone was concent:r:ating on
GT-3 .
Then in the two and a half months that we
had to do the mission plans , we changed it about
three or four times , drastically.
We nqt only
changed the trajectory, but we changed the altitudes
of insertion; at one time we were shooting for a 87­
145 orbit and then a 87-161, and then we changed it
from 90 degree launch azimuth to a 72 deg:cee launch
azimuth.
We changed how we were going to handle the
decay of the orbit.
All in all, I think our
mission plan changed just too often.
Same with the flight plan.
We kept changing it
around and changing it around and changing it
around. It was r eally unfortunate.
Up until about
ten days before the flight we were really prepared
for about two different flights, and finally we got
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