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…
263
White
McDivitt
White
~ IDENTIAt
drift off just a slight amount, around a degree .
It wasn't deviating a lot so I was making smal l
corrections. It would deviate in yaw so I would
control it back. It tended to deviate slightly
to the left all the time. I control l ed it over
to the right and I would bring the ball back
underneath the dot . Then I would even go back
to zero . Then I would release it . I would
bring the stick ·back to neutral , and for a shor t
time , the rates would bui ld up and the silence
would be deafening. There would be no noise
whatsoever . I would think , "God bless it .
Have the aft- firing thrusters stopped firing?"
Then the thrusters tended to yaw the spacecraft
some more . As it came around , it got past
2/10 1 s of a degree/second deadband and the
Rate Command started firing Main.
Okay, that ' s what I heard . That ' s right .
That was Rate Command . When I yawed back around,
it was really going. I'd come back to neutral
and it would stop .
All right . Then I couldn't hear them. I didn't
hear them when we took the check on them.
ceNFIE>ENTIAL

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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.