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
303
White
McDivitt
6.9 Conununications
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
could see that too well, could you?
No, I couldn't see the chute out. I saw it
finally when it deployed.
I saw the thing hanging up there just the way it
was supposed to, and then the thing dereefed,
came billowing out just the way it should, and
:'said, "We ' ve got a good chute". One edge of it
collapsed and came back in and collapsed about
a third of the chute. We've seen a lot of movies
of these chutes corning out, so I wasn't really
worried about the thing collapsing . It went
in and came back out.
There weren't any communications that I could
tell were there? Maybe we received some trans
missions on the drogue, but I'm not really sure.
As soon as we •deployed the main chute the antenna
came off. So we couldn't talk to anybody after
that .
I don't think we got anythi ng on t he drogue.
I ' m not really sure that we did.
I don't think we did.
Shoot! We were getting thrown around so that
we couldn't have heard anything anyway.
C8t--.J·F ID-ENTIAI:
I

Cases discussed

About this file

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.