posted 08-16-2006 04:40 AM               

John reported when his retros fired that he felt as if he was going back to Hawaii. I did not fee the same sensation at all. The firing was comparatively gentle. This loss of thrust accounted for another 60 miles of the overshoot.

posted 08-16-2006 10:05 AM               

This piled on another 15 miles to the overshoot. Scott reported at the time that he was expecting a "big boot" like that reported by JHG. MSC's voice report suggests he was sensing slightly underthrusting retrorockets. Postflight analysis, again, confirmed this subjective impression.

My sense about yaw angle and its effect on the thrusters is that, nope, there's no relationship between yaw and sensations of thrust. You could be yaw at 0 degrees or yaw at 60 degrees. Neither angle would affect an astronaut's subjective sensation of thrust. But both angles affect your eventual landing site, based on the amount of thrust produced by the retrorockets.

Finally, want reiterate that a third "mission critical" malfunction (On edit: there were three malfunctions, but only one of them — the intermittently malfunctioning pitch horizon scanner — was described in NASA postflight analysis as "mission critical." That is to say, MA-7 had only one grave, or mission critical, malfunction, which without an astronaut's intervention would have imperiled the mission) of the ASCS — autopilot — introduced the error in yaw at retrofire. And the error in yaw produced 175 miles to the overshoot.