Documents / Official release

Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part I, 1965

National Aeronautics and Space Administration · 1965-06-09 · 340 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is a preliminary transcript of Part I of the Gemini 4 (GT-4) flight crew debriefing. The Spacecraft Operations Branch of NASA's Flight Crew Support Division prepared it on June 16, 1965, from recordings of the debriefing held aboard the USS Wasp on June 9, 1965. In it, astronauts McDivitt and White describe the mission from an operational viewpoint, covering countdown, powered flight, insertion, orbital operations, reentry, landing and recovery. According to the preface, visual sightings were left for a later part.

From the source: Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: 6/9/65, North Atlantic Ocean. This document is a preliminary transcript (Part I) derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 4 flight crew debriefing taken aboard the recovery ship, USS Wasp, on June 9, 1965. Astronaut Ed White recounts seeing “sparkles” during the flight.

White
McDivitt
COl>J~IDENIIA~ 3
were going to open the prevalves and stuff. I
wasn't getting it from him . We were getting a
lot of other information that made a lot of sense
to the Booster Test C :>nductor, but not an awful
lot to us . There were cal l - outs l ikeVSequence
05003 complete." Well, thi s just didn' t mean any
thing to us . On top of this we had the Spacecraft
~es t Conductor calling out the times , and super
imposed on all of this was Al Shephard , the Cape
CAP COM, calling out events that he was reading
off that went on at certain specified times . He
called out','Stage 1 prevalves Vand we could hear the
fue l gushing downstairs and the whole booster
rumbling. He called out ','Stage 2 prevalves','and
you could hear the same thing all over again. I
thought t hat was a lot more meaningful than the
test conductor comments.
I think that was wrong, the way they were doing it .
I think we weren't supposed to be on any loop
except CAP COM at that time .
Well, I think what happened was that we got this
thing over-coordinated. Al was going to give us
all this information, but then as a result of
GT-3, (Gus and Jolm said they didn ' t get enough
-t:ON FI0 Er\JTl~L

Cases discussed

About this file

Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 340 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.