Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part II, 1965

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2
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
--,
I ' m not sure.
The caging of the thing with small- end-forward in
the daytime was relatively easy.
At night I don't
think it would be quite that simple.
I think what
you would have to do at night time is to point
the spacecraft down at the ground pretty much so
you can see the track across the ground,
I could
see which way the land was moving under me .
I
felt--although I never did this--that if I could
do that and then roll around to where I had no
bank angl e , and face in my yaw direction, either
small-end or blunt-end-forward , stop t he rol l t her e
and pitch up to the horizon I could cage there
within plus or minus 10 degrees for sure. It was
much less accurate at night, I felt, than in the
daytime .
You aren' t kidding!
We both felt that on those
dark nights when you really couldn ' t see anything
on the ground, pure star reference for yaw was
pretty rough.
Pure star reference for yaw was almost impossible
to use.
That was the only place where that thing
we decided not to take with us--the view of the
stars through the window--might have been of some