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. 225 …We could find the Red Sea and we could . find the Mediterranean, obviously. You could see…
208
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
That ' s right. Okay , I think we've already
covered our HF Checks , which were part of the
regular flight plan .
Yes , we did that .
I said they were between 16 58 30 GMT and
19 07 00 GMT .
Right .
We scrubbed the Apollo Landmark Investigation at
28 :40 and again at 29 : 10 . We were allowed to do
the D-9 at about 29 :30 in irifting flight o~ly.
Doing the D-9 in drifting flight means that you
look outside w:ith the sextant and you pick out
whatever two s~aTs are there and you measure an
angle betw8en them . It was a qU1:1.litative rather
than a quantitative type investigation for the
experiment . I ' m telling you , with D- 9 it was
mostly qualitative throughout the whole mis s i on.
We did a few quantitative things , but the number
of quantitative things that w~ ·quld do were very
limited .
The HF Test took us one and a half orbits .
Yes . It took t wo hours and 15 minutes at least .
I t hink around 28 : 30 , we had a call up for D-9 .

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.