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. 149 …I did notice that the suit was a little harder. I felt this type of suit…
  • p. 150 …You mean with the harder suit I was stiffer? Harder . And your. arms were stiffe:::- a…
  • p. 186 178 €0NflDENitM White McDivitt White McDivitt any harder . No . I think that shouli be t he…
  • p. 318 …We hit ten times harder than I expected to hit . The altimeter was set at the…
  • p. 320 …We really seemed to hit hard, harder than I thought EO~ ◄ Flt,Et~TI.A"L
291
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
I said , "Yes . There are two of them , aren't
there?"
Yes, and then we waited a while longer and--
I said, "Gee, there ' s nothing on the g- meter. "
I said, "The g-meter must be broken " ,so that ' s
why I reached up and reset it . It actually
went down a little bit. So we went a little
while longer , and I said, "Ed, I feel a lot of
g ' s ", and he said , "So do I ." Then he said1
:We
must be up between three and four. "
If felt like that.
And I said, "Yes, I think we're up about that
high too ." And the g-meter was still reading
zero for all pratical purposes . Pretty soon it
started building up slowly . It went up to
2 , 3, 4, and I called out at 2 , and I called
out at 4, and I called out at 6, and I think I
called out at 7.
About the time you called out the 2, I knew we
had been had.
Yes. It's just that we were super-sensitive to
g's and the load pulling us into the seat was
on .the order of a tenth of a g .
It ' s true .
CONFIDENTIAt-'

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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.