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
299
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
White
McDivitt
White
White
McDivitt
'EON·Fl0ENTIM
magnitude. (McDivitt is making a noise to des
cribe it.)
About like that.
I was really surprised the thing held on there,
to tell you the truth.
So was I. I was expecting the drogue chute to
fall off any minute.
I was, too.
It worked all right.
It held us together.
If I went through it again, I'd be perfectly
happy sitting there riding through it, to tell
you the truth.
The way I looked at it, it was rather interesting.
I hadn't quite expected that.
Neither did I. I know that Gus said that he had
a pretty wild ride and he thought the thing was
destabilizing him. He had a scheme where he just
turned off the propellent valves to stop the
propellent flow. That meant that he had to wait
about 10 or 15 seconds to get the propellent
valves back open again to get the jets firing.
Well, I wasn't going to do that. I thought
the thing to do was to turn off the electronics
COMF10cNTIAt-

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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.