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.

41
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
pletely intact. There was nothing wrong .
Okay. Let ' s try to follow this insertion activi
ties list here . I jettisoned the fairings , as I
said , as soon as I started turning around . Then
Ed went through the checklist for us . After I
fired the fairings I turned off the BIA Switch and
the retro rockets when he called. I was probably
doing this before Ed called, wasn ' t I?
We did things just like we had been doing them on
the simulator . We don't just take a checklist
and run down it item for item because there ' re
things you have to be doing , and it just doesn ' t
go in a sequence like that . I realized this was
the way it was going to go, and I actually took a
pencil and checked items off. If you did an item
I checked it off, and if you didn't I left it un
checked and we got it later. You just can' t ex-
pect to run down the checklist item for item because
you ' re not ready to unstow your life vest or to
get up out of your seat belt. You don't do that
for some time . I think the logic on the check-
list we have here is a very good sequence--.
We reviewed that checklist 50 times. That's
00tq ftf)ENftA-t-

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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.