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.

9€Otr4FIDEttftAl
McDivitt That ' s right, I just don't think we should
scrub the flight because of fatigue.I don ' t think we
should do that. We weren ' t approaching this point.
White We had a long way to go.
1. 5 Environmental Control System
McDivitt I think we ought to get this water management
panel squared away and everybody figure out what
we are supposed to do with those switches. I
don ' t think we should be arguing about where the
switches are supposed to be on the launch pad. If
I hadn't asked somebody where the waste manage
ment switches should be we would have probably
launched with it in · EVAPORATOR. I knew that
i t wasn't supposed to be in the evaporator . At
one of the ten thousand briefings we got on it, we
were told it shouldn't be there . We ought to get·
this kind of stuff squared away before launch day.
Thirty minutes before lift-off we were arguing
about where that switch was supposed to be.
White I wasn't confident that they knew where they
wanted that switch to be.
McDivitt Well, I didn ' t think we should have it in the eva
porator. So, I think that water panel could have
cost as much as a wee~s slip on our launch because
coNFIDENTIAt-

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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.