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. 3 …It will cover systems operations, operational checks, visual sightings, experiments , pre-mission planning, mission control, and…
  • p. 70 …I felt that by then I had gotten the thing under control and we stood a…
53€0NftDEM11:At~
you're separating away from something, whichever
way you ' re going, if you point at the thing and
if you t hrust in that direction you are to take
out your relative velocity in all planes . So , it
looked like the thing was off to the left or to the
south of our orbital track by a couple hundred
feet and it was going down rapidly . Losing
altitude. After I thrusted this second time, I
knew I had more than enough velocity, much more
than I needed to kill off the 5 feet/second
we'd added . I watched it and it looked like it
wasn ' t going away from us anymore. It looked like
our relative velocities had stopped. I wanted to ··
get the platform alined somewhat in case we did
have---to come down in the 2~1. We really hadn't
had much chance to check over the spacecraft yet.
So I quickly went to as close to zero-zero- zero
as I could get . I used the zero yaw and the zero
roll off the ball and I went to a pitch at t i tude
that looked like it was about zero and tried to
get the ball to aline to zero-zero- zero . At that
time the booster was mostly behind us--mostly
back toward the Cape from us--back behind us with
respect to our velocity back there . It iwas in the

Cases discussed

About this file

Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 340 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.