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…
-----ceNFl0EN·;pJAL 249
believe , and that ' s when I went to sleep . I
woke Ed up and I went to sleep at this time .
White Actually we got our update while you were
asleep the time before . We got the update for
how to perform the retro . We figured that with
the procedure they gave ue, if we followed it ,
we would get a three- sigma miss distance of
70 nautical miles. We were to use an 0AMS
r etor with a manual retro . At this time , we
were going to push the manuel button . They
didn ' t know at this time that the TRS was
working all right . They later came in and
told us to use the automatic mode of time . We
were to use zero- lift rolling. We were to
start the terminal maneuver at the 400 000 foot
marker. They told us to expect to encounter
about 8 g's during the reentry . We were told
the recovery area had three to four foo t waves ,
18 knot winds , and good weather. I 1 ll cover
this more later .
White There wasn ' t much more . We got an update . I
took a few more pictures , and I di d a medi cal
pass. During that hour and 40 minutes there,·wasn ' t
CONFl0ENTIAL

Cases discussed

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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.