Documents / Official release
This is a preliminary transcript of Part II of the Gemini 4 (GT-4) flight crew debriefing, prepared by NASA's Spacecraft Operations Branch, Flight Crew Support Division, and dated June 18, 1965. The debriefing began aboard the recovery ship USS Wasp and ended at the Manned Spacecraft Center. In it, astronauts McDivitt and White discuss how the spacecraft systems performed, including the platform, OAMS, RCS and control modes. They also cover operational checks, visual sightings, experiments, mission planning and training, and give recommendations for future crews.
From the source: Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: 6/9/65, North Atlantic Ocean. This document is a preliminary transcript (Part II) derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 4 flight crew debriefing taken aboard the recovery ship, USS Wasp, on June 9, 1965. Part II of this document contains the “Visual Sightings” section of the debriefing (pages 196-224), where astronauts James McDivitt and Edward White describe their observations while aboard the spacecraft.
8 McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White percent for so long. We were pretty miserly with that OAMS fuel . We set out to save the fuel and we sure did it . I think that in future missions , if they permit the crew to use the Puls e Mode in a saving-manner they could do a lot more with the mission--if you could use Pulse Mode instead of just free-drifting around. In other words , line yourself up so you can make some decent observations. Shoot! We were in Horizon Scan Mode when we got the last data, and I don ' t think we used any more fue l than we were when we were in free drift. That ' s right. We certainly got more out of the orbit than we did when we were just drifting free. I 'll tell you one record that we ought to hold. We've looked at the earth from more different angles than anybody else in the world. Well, maybe not . I guess the Russians did , but we sure got a lot of different views of that earth as we rotated around. I thi nk the ground information that they called up on the status of our OAMS wasn't as much as they could have called up to us, but I 'm really satis fied that our OAMS was staying pretty constant .
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 290 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.