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
294
McDivitt
maybe this might associate itself in some wa;y
with something in the system prior .
I think it was prior , because we were in Reentry
Rate Command and we started the roll. Then the
yaw needle drifted on out and it looked to me
like it never got over about 3 degrees/second .
I was trying to read the 0.1 degree/second seal~
It might have gone on to 4 degrees/second with
the roll rate we had in there , and the jets just
kept right on firing constantly .
What I had done when we started was to leave the
roll gyro on, and I rolled the thing over till
I got almost full deflection on the needle . Then
I put the roll gyro off so I'd have 15 degrees
and we wouldn't tend to overrate the thing so
t hat the Reentry Rate Command was firing all
the time . What I think happened was that as
we went on down, the yaw rate needle tended to
drift on out . I don't know if you noticed it or
not , but it tended to drift out . It started at
around 2 degrees/second, and it drifted on out
slowly until it got to about 4 degrees. I
thought it never got out to more than 3 degrees/
second . Later on , when we started oscillating
CO~ ◄ ftOENf~AL

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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.