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
315
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
I went through one call, a.nd then I went through a
short count on the HF. I heard nothing and received
nothing from anybody else . This was about 5
minutes or so after we had been on the water that
we actually made the HF check. Maybe it wasn't
even that long. As soon as I got all the switches
where I wanted them, I went ahead and-
I saw you put the antennas up, and you went ahead
and put in a transmission pretty quick.
Right, I didn't make another check on the HF.
I hadn't been too impressed with the operation of
the HF up to this time, and things were getting
pretty busy. Five or 10 minutes later we had the
recovery people on• I guess we're going to get
to that. I heard them say we had a helicopter
almost overhead,
They called just after we retrofired, I think, and
before we got to blackout--called and said that
they should have a helicopter over us in 5
minutes. We didn't get any onboard data . The
ground information that I got was, as I said, from
Gus. Then right after we hit, Omnibus said, "I
got them in sight. I'm 48 miles out on TACAN
radial..: ",something or otl-1.er. So, I figured we

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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.