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[i]We were also landing on lake beds in those days. Our intent was to land on the lake bed out at Edwards [Air Force Base, California]. We would be the third landing out there. About a week before the mission, Gordo and I were in quarantine at JSC in trailers inside of that big house down there. That's where we stayed for Skylab too, over by the gym. Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft came in and he says, "Hey, fellows, it's raining in California. The lake bed is wet. Next week when you want to land there it's going to be muddy. What do you want to do?" We talked with him about it for a while, and we decided that there was only a couple other places we could go. There was a lake bed at White Sands [Northrup Strip], New Mexico. If we couldn't land there we could be the first guys to try the runway at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], which was 15,000 feet long and 300 feet wide. I wish they'd made it half as wide and twice as long, but so far it's worked real well. We know a lot more about what the Shuttle does when it comes down than we did at that time, so we were playing it safe. Of course out on the lake bed you can make a runway that's six or seven miles long and crisscross them so if they don't get the right one, they can try another one. We liked that, because we weren't totally sure that the guidance system was going to get us back exactly where we wanted to be. I said, "Let's try the lake bed at White Sands, because we've done a lot of training out there, and we know the terrain. We might not have all the navigational support out there, and there's only one runway instead of several. If the weather is not too bad, we can see from a long way out." Chris said, "Well, I can't guarantee the weather, but if you're willing to give it a shot with using the Cape as a backup, we're willing to go with that."[/i]
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