Gemini 5 Technical Debriefing, Part I, 1965

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177
didn't have a horizon for 5 minutes after retro-fire ,
We were in the middle of the United States bef ore we
saw the groU.Ll.d.
Cooper
The first place we saw was White Sands.
Conrad
White Sands -­
Cooper
Just past the terminator
Conrad
-­ was the first place I saw when we CaJlle out of the
terminator on the ground.
Of course, by that time,
we had a sort of what you might call a discernable
horizon, but it was so fuzzy.
There is no such thing
as a horizon at sunrise, looking the other way.
I
Looking 180 from the sun you re looking into a gray,
black, fuzzy -­ boy, there's no discernable horizon.
You ' re looking at the terminator. It's not a usable
horizon.
I don't call it usable.
We were on gauges
all the way and not until we got past the Mississippi
River did we get what you would really call a horizon.
That's when the reentry started getting different than
the ones in the simulator.
The reentry was much dif­
ferent in ball attitudes, in that we were much steeper
on the ball. We were looking at more and more white
that I ever saw before.
I was hard pressed -­ if we
didn't have the bank angle index on the ball you
couldn't tell what your bank angle was.
f-lDEWJ~L