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.

282
McDi vitt The update was awful , I think . As I mentioned
earlier, they updated our TRS but the TRS was
obviously not running with the ground .
6.0 REENTRY
6. 1 Reent:cy Par ameters Update
Mc:Divitt We really didn't have a reentrs parameters up
dl:l.te post-retro . We went intn black-out pretty
quick . There wasn ' t anything to update. We
were going to s t art rolling at 400 000 . Re
gardless of anything else , we had a pre•
program_~ed reentry .
6.2 400K
White We were at 400K before you got your 3 -
Minute Update .
McDivitt That's right . At two minutes a~d 38 secondA
we were through 400 000 feet. We got there in
a hurry . I rol l ed upside down, and I flew do,m
to 400 000 feet , which was to be at 2:38 , How
ever, I thought that we ' d retrofired a little
early, so I wasn ' t in any great rush to start
my rolling reentry . I dela¥ed about :another
30 or 40 secondA . The only reason I delayed
was because I knew there wasn't any rush to get
eeMfteENl-lAJ_

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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.