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.

Open the PDF at page 121 Original source ↗

“Harder”5 pages

  • p. 149 …I did notice that the suit was a little harder. I felt this type of suit…
  • p. 150 …You mean with the harder suit I was stiffer? Harder . And your. arms were stiffe:::- a…
  • p. 186 178 €0NflDENitM White McDivitt White McDivitt any harder . No . I think that shouli be t he…
  • p. 318 …We hit ten times harder than I expected to hit . The altimeter was set at the…
  • p. 320 …We really seemed to hit hard, harder than I thought EO~ ◄ Flt,Et~TI.A"L
113
White
McDivitt
CO~◄ FH:>·EN'fl7'L
whatever you want to 8all it, I wouldn't fire
the thrusters .
You asked that already wnen I was out .
Yes . I asked you if you needed it and you said
no . So , then I felt it would be better not
to fire the thrusters , because you were drifting
back up over the co~kpit . I could see that you
were going up over us . I couldn ' t see back
behind me , but I could see by the motions that
you had when you went by me that yuu were going
to continue on . I felt th~t it would be a lot
safer if we just let the spacecraft drift
unless it got into very high rates . I fired the
jets a couple of times just to bo~k ,:,.ft the
rates . I let it start drifting when y0u got
on the tether so tha~ you wouldn 1 t get back
there on top of one of those thrusters when I
fired them. From abou-: the time? you ran out of
fuel until you got back in I didn 1 t do mu-:::h
attitude controlling. I did some . Everytime
the rates got up pretty high, I 1d knock them
off . You were able to ma...~euver around the
spacecraft when the spacecraft itself had rates
of say plus or minus • 2 degrees/second in a
<;9·M'FID ENTIAl

Cases discussed

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