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…
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McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivit t
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
Yes . This is where we did D-9 i n drifting flight
only .
Yes , and again t ha t was like taki ng the car out
of the garage without gasoline .
All it amou:~ted to was looking t hrough the window
and picking out two stars that you can see and
t aking a sighting between them. Jus t a qualitative
check t o see what the sextant woul d do . We di d
t hat . D- 9 turned out to be a qualitative , rather
than a quantitative experiment , except in a very
isolated instance . We weran ' t even stabilized .
You were t rying to talk me through some of the
thines , but I had the helmet off and on--
This was when we firs t discoverad that. the light
bulb in t he readout P'Jrtion :,f the sextant was
burned out or something was wrong.
Right .
We couldn ' t read out t he angle .
We called down, but we nevar got a call up on
t hat or any instructions.
Well, there weren't any . Ha ha ha . Okay , then I
have in my notes here , as I mentioned earlier:
" 'Ed went t o bed at 20 :15 , got up at 22 : 15 and went
GONA0ENllA I..

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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.