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.

26
McDivitt
Whit e
McDivitt
White
McDivi tt
2 . 15 RGS Initiate
McDivitt
'COl'4FIDEl'ff IA-t
I didn't really get much of a cue out of it at all,
except the lights went out and I could feel a
li t tle bit of acceleration.
The acceleration decreased. Another thing I
didn't get--I got absolutely no pitch-up associ-·
ated with the--the way the centrifuge does you at
the end of an acceleration. I think that is
associated with the cab on--
Yes . I think that's the way they rotate t hose
gimbals when you come on down. If they rotate
them a certain way you can get that pitching-up-
A very safe forward-type deceleration.
I think that pitching up on the centrifuge is not
a malfunction. It ' s just the programing that's
hooked into the gimbals during the stop program.
You've got to get them all going the same way so
that you keep the vectors through you . During
l aunch the vector is right t hrough you. It 's not
varying around , but in the shut-down on the cen
trifuge those darn gimbals aren't a lways syn
chronized together. They get shifted back there
and it gives you that peculiar sensation.
Well, I was really watching closely but my rate

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.