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. 73 …Finally , we could see the sky starting to get a little gray ~NflDENTb\L
57
fashion . It was all over. It looked to me like i t
was rotating in three axes in a completely unpro
grarnmed manner . It might have been that the roll
nozzle was flopping around and the fuel was turn
ing it around in different directions. And as a
matter of fact, at this time we should go back and
draw a picture of what the fuel looked like and
what was coming out of the no zzle. The booster
was tumbling and you could see the fuel squirting
out of the roll nozzle in a big fan like this. I
had the impression that if the booster were per
fectly stationary, the fuel would have been comi ng
out of the nozzle in a great big cone the way you
would expect it to, but because the booster was
tumbling so rapidly it was coming out in a long,
twisted- - l ike a horn of plenty. It was very ob
vious ; you could see it, and ther e wssn ' t any doubt
about the fact that there was a lot of fuel coming
out . Whether this was contributing some thrust to
it or not I don't know .
White I want to comment on something that was quite an
experience for me. When I called out to you, I
was looking down at what I thought , since it was
pitch black, was the sky. I could see little
cet-4PIDfNT~AL

Cases discussed

About this file

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.