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
194 GOt'4FIDENll:A:l
point the spacecraft at Typhoon Babe so that was
that . I f I had drifted around so I could see it,
I was going to take a picture of it but I never
drifted around so I could see it . I just
passed on by . A little bit later on , I was
call ed up and told that at 23 : 55 GMT my
ascending node would be at 83 degrees East an
my 6th Rev . This was just a map update . I
was tol d I should eat at some particular time .
I t hink it was 00 : 15 t o 01:00 . It was
already past that time, so, I ate \-1hen I felt
like it. The pilot was supposed to do a No .
1 Aero- Med Pass at 02 17 43. This was the first
instance of us running into a case where a ma n
was supposed to do an aero- med pass when he
was asleep . This continued on intermittently
throughout the flight .
White It seems like I was always asleep when I was
supposed to be doing an aero- med pass.
McDivitt This continued on intermi ttently during the
flight . As the flight progressed, the doctors
got more coordiarted on the ground and we got
more coordinated with them to tell them who
was sleeping and how long we were going to be
' Ctm:&¥«1'41'L

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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.