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
295CONFt-DENTiA-1.
White
McDivitt
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
around like we did, if the thing were out at 3
degrees and started banging back and forth at
all , the yaw thrusters would be on constantly;
and also that ' s the side that they'd be on . It
would have been on the right-hand side. Are you
sure that it was red that high up, or did it get
red when we started getting down where we got
all those oscillations? Because there I ' m sure
it was firing all the time.
It was red for a long time , Jim,
Was it?
I was actually watching it, waiting for one of
them to bust loose, because it was really firing
a lot more than I thought it was out there. Jim
asked me about the frequency of it, and I could
n't tell whether it was on or off . It was r ed
all the time. The other one was hardly heated
up at all.
Shoot . There wasn't any need for any kind of
firing then.
It would be interesting to see if the other yaw
thrusters were.
Well, it ' ll be interesting when they cut these
things apart to see what kind of life cycle --
(!IQl'IFIDENJIAL.

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.