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.

35
3. 2 SECO + 20 Seconds
McDivitt
White
McDi vitt
White
McDivitt
cocked off the second stage.
We were going to $ay on the booster until SECO +
30 instead of SECO + 20 . At 20 seconds the IVI ' s
started displaying and I read them off as 20 for
ward, 11 right, and 5 down.
Right ,
This was when we were still in the 90 degree bank
position. Is that correct? Or was it after I
had rolled right-side-up?
It was after you had rolled right-side- up.
Okay. Well, then the IVI's displayed when we were
still on our side. It seems to me they were
about 25 feet/second forward , and some other
numbers, but anyway they were low enough where I
felt we were certainly in orbit. At least the
IGS was telling us we were in orbit. During this
time, as I said earlier, I tried to damp the
spacecraft rates, the spacecraft booster rates
which were quite low. I checked to see that the
OAMS Power Switch was in ATTITUDE and MANEUVER ,
and to see that Eli had switched over to DIRECT.
I told him I was going to do some thrusting but
I wasn't going to separate yet, so that when he
€ 0 ~~ FfDENT.I.Al

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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.