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. 224 …I got another update that said : "Over Cairo on the 26th Rev I ' d have rny…
  • p. 225 …Well, anyway, Cairo and Alexandria were both clear , but this was the first time we'd…
  • p. 255 …I did the second one on Cairo . This was a good run . I went through some…
219
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDi vitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
Whi te
actually looking at the camera when I was firing
it, so I - -
Did you see anything in the ground glass?
Not very much.
Were you trying to t rack that way or were you
just looking out the window.
No . Just looking out the window. The point that
I brought out is that they gave me four targets .
The t argets should be far enough apart so that
you can actually get set for each one. I had
four targets here but I could only use- -
Oh, that was when you zapped from Tripoli to
Alexandria to Tel-Aviv to --
Tel- Aviv and a whole bunch of them all in a row.
You could have a thousand miles between targets
to evaluate. You finish one and you're starting
to take pictures of the other ones .
I had them at 10 61 51, 10 21 50 , 10 25 30 and
10 30 15 . Well, that was a beautiful row of
t argets in there but--
A pair though or every other one would have been
enough.
And we were still being very parsimonious on fuel
if10-ENTI-Al

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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.