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.

  • 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
117
White
Mc Divitt
White
..CE>-NFIDENTl~ l:-
I bet we used a little more than four , because
I think we came out earlier th'll1 we thought .
No , I sta~ted the event timer to time it .
Well, this is where m:r control difficulty
began . As soon as my gun ran out I wasn I t
able to control myself the way I co-..1ld with
the gun . With that gun , I coi.lld decide to go
to a part of a spacecraft and very confidently
go . I think right no·,. that .1. wish that I ha:i
given Jim t he gun ,u1d taken t he camera off ,
Nov, I was working on taking some pict.1res
and "lorking on the tethe:r dynamics. I immediately
realized what was wrong. I realized that our
tether was mounted on a pl ane ohlique .to the
angle in which I wanted to translate . I
remem·i:cL' i'.c-•.1::n our air-bea:::-ing work that every·-
time you got at an angle from the perpendicula-:7
where yom.· tether wafl r:iounted , it gave yo.1 a
nice a::-cing trajectory back in t he opposite
direction. You I re actuall y like a weight on
the end of a str ing. If you push out in one
direc;tion , and you ' re at 911 angle fron ~he
perpendicular , when you reach the end of a
tether , it neatly sends you in a long ar.c ba:k
e6NFIDENrlA c--

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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.