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.

White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
JeG~-1DENT-IA~ 13
up l a ter on was not the thing to do. We had to be
all done at a certain time. We had to be with the
booster when we came back into daylight. That was
it ; that was the thing . We had to be with the
boos t er , because we had to take those pictures .
Then we had to be with the booster again an hour
and a half after that so that we could do the EVA
right next to it . And with those kinds of time
constraints you don ' t have time to perform a ren
dezvous . You've got to get with it right then, but
we just couldn't get with it right then .
\
You know another thing too ; I'm darned glad we
didn ' t use any 10 feet/second initially to sepa
rate with. I think we could have used something
in the terms of 1 or ·2, feet/second and that
would have been fine. Don"-' t you?
I cut it short . I only burned about 5 seconds,
and I stopped.
You have been doing that in all your simulations
so I knew you were going to do that . You can even
cut it less . It was amazing to me the sepa r ation
you get i mmediatel y.
I t almost seemed like we had a posigrade rocket
on the spacecraft and a retrograde rocket on the
GQ;NFt0ENllA~
\

Cases discussed

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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.