I don't have anything to say on pre-launch. Everything went well right up to the launch. The SAS checkout was done as we planned. It didn't fail in pitch the first time, so I shut off ASAS and did the check over again, and everything failed normally on the work position. On monitor position, it failed normally. The yaw mode came off first and then the pitch and roll.

Down to the launch everything was good and I didn't miss that minute, I was ahead of schedule. I launched and got a good light, throttled up to 100% thrust and pulled on up. At 15°a I got a little buffet. The airplane settled back on down to 12°a and held that value just about all the way up.

I got a good check at 53,000 feet when NASA 1 called and said, pushover. My profile looked real good up to 70,000 feet and then somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 feet while still holding zero g I could see that I was coming low, and NASA 1 was calling me low. I made a couple of longitudinal corrections there. One right about 78,000 feet to get it on up over 80,000 feet just before I started to roll, and I was a little bit late on the roll. Got it in though, and the last check I made was 82,000 feet and 4700 ft/sec when I was just getting up to 15°, 16°a and about 4g normal acceleration.

Just as I got to that point, I got a directional oscillation that started to build up to at least ±2°b but it looked like it was beginning to damp out. About the time I thought about putting in more angle of attack it started up again, so I had a directional oscillation all the way through while getting the heating data. I didn't check angle of attack and the g meter again but I guess it went a little higher, because just before burnout I got the sensation that I increased normal force above 4g but I'm sure it didn't get to 6g.

I had 94 seconds burning time on the clock. It was a little more than what we expected.

I turned back to the base and started the stability work. I shut off the yaw damper and just as I gave it a rudder pulse, the roll SAS failed and ASAS came on, so I reached down and reset the roll. I cycled it twice before it reset, then I shut off ASAS, put it back on and put the yaw damper back on. I shut yaw damper off a second time, gave it a pulse, and everything was normal. I turned it back on to damp the yaw, shut yaw damper off again, turned off the yar damper, and gave it a pulse. Again, everything was normal. I believe I went through this cycle one more time with yar on, and got looking for the base again. I had enough time to do another damper off pulse, so I shut off the yaw damper and this time the roll SAS failed again, so I reset everything and started back for another pulse cycle. I think NASA 1 called me right about there. I did one more pulse after that and made my turn back to the base, but I overshot a little bit playing with the damper.

On downwind I had about 20° speed brakes out, somewhere in this neighborhood and the bank angle was probably about 30°. I had already gone to pressurize and could feel some buffet. I don't remember ever experiencing buffet in this configuration before. It was quite mild but I wouldn't have expected any buffet there. It seemed like I had tightened up in the turn, but the turn wasn't that tight.

I came on down and overshot the landing point just a little bit. Went down a little faster this time and for quite a while I had pretty good control of it on the ground. After I ran out of control the airplane deviated quite a bit. I was quite a way off the runway. I touched ground real close to the left-hand side, and it looked like I went about 500 feet off to the left.

There were the usual bangs as we were getting up in temperature, and pitch SAS tripped out on landing. I can think of nothing else .
 
 
 
 

RW:dmo

Typed: 9-6-62