December 23, 1963

OK, I don't have anything to say about the prelaunch. Everything went fine on the prelaunch all the way through to the analyzer check and that went off real smooth. One thing that I noticed here in the check that I haven't noticed before, the ball nose kept jumping around all the way through the check, and it started immediately. The ball nose jumped when I first started moving the controls after I got the APU's on, which I couldn't figure out either, I'd never seen that happen. Down to launch no problems, everything went along fine. The engine acted just the way it did on the engine run. All the pressures were good. Launch and into the climb I let go of the angle of attack just before I got to theta. I looked down at chamber pressure and angle of attack slipped on down to about 8° but I was already on theta so it didn't make any difference. On through and into the profile it just came level at 66,000 feet and held zero vertical velocity and didn't get this trend that Jack was giving me that I was going down hill. I watched it the first time he spoke and the second he spoke I decided they are seeing something I can't see on my instruments. When Jack spoke the first time I took a look at q and I had 1400 which was about what I expected for the condition 66,000 feet and a little over Mach 4. The second time he spoke I had almost 1500 q so even though my inertial instruments didn't show that I was going down hill, I figured I must have because I had increased speed more than 100 feet per second, and decided to pull up. Right at the end I pulled and I did get a rate of climb of about 100 feet per second. From there on the profile was just about the same as I practiced. I got up to 8°, shut the yaw damper off. The airplane didn't move a bit and I shut the roll damper off and got no movement out of the airplane there except a very slow roll off to the left. In order to get any stability information I had to move the airplane to see what it was going to do. It acted pretty much like it did in the simulator, perhaps a little bit better. From there on everything was as planned. I could see that I was off track about 5 to 10 miles and that didn't present any problem either. I think it was in the coming back down hill from 82,000 feet that I got a real strange noise in the airplane. It sounded like a canopy seal had let go, I couldn't figure out what it was. I couldn't feel anything in the cockpit but it was audible. In the traffic pattern I got the airplane up to about 12° angle of attack at .9 somewhere around 35,000 feet and got into a mild buffet area. Apparently I've never pulled it in quite that high before because I've never felt it right there. But I would expect it would be there. Everything else all the way down was real good. When we flew base the first time, I had elected to land a little bit long and get onto the part of the lakebed that looked light brown, looked like it was more dry so I would guess that I over flew the normal touchdown point by a couple of thousand feet. Had a low rate of sink touchdown, everything seemed fine. The minute the nose gear came down I got the distinct impression that the airplane canted to the left, so I put all controls in to counteract this and for a while it did, but after a hundred knots it was just off on its own.

(?) I can tell you what it was at launch and somewhere during the altitude part of it, on the heat part I couldn't remember what it was. (?) I called out what I think is 1° on the markings on the face of the instruments, it was a little less than 1°. (?) I didn't see it over that mark and I do recall one time that I was leaning on the left rudder pedal and got off nose right. (?) If the first dot on the face of the glass is 1°, it was about 3/4 of that. It was 3/4 of the way to the first dot. (?) I wouldn't swear to that, you would have to look at the film.