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…
McDivitt
241-cet"'4FIE>Ei'JTIAL
I elected'to make a similar pass through on the
following orbit, watching the stars and making
sure that I had a good small-end-forward. I
found out that the first pass through was pretty
good until the tail end, where I thought the
stars were in the wrong position . It turned out
that this is just the way they came up, and I was
good for both of them except for the tail end of
the first run through, I logged in two small
end passes through the South Atlantic Anomaly.
I also ran the D-9 Experiment and I found that
by using the fuel and having the H0rizon Scan to
hold when you wanted it to hold, the use of the
sextant and horizon in making measurements was
considerably easier. I made what I feel was a
good Apollo D-9 run. I ran the D-8 Experiment.
I had two times to run the D-8 Experiment. I
ran it at the Greenwich Mean Time of 01:30, I
was to look for Pegasus at O2:28,straight up at
268 nautical miles, and I was all hot to watch
Pegasus go over and was just approaching my
straight up attitude when--
The sun shined on the window.

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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.