Documents / Official release

Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part II, 1965

National Aeronautics and Space Administration · 1965-06-09 · 290 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

  • p. 166 …So ,the next target I had was Cairo -- Cairo Int ernational Airport . Now , we'd been…
  • p. 167 this , and I had l ooked down to find Cairo. I think we had had an…
  • p. 169 …I t hink that on the tracking tasks on Yuma, Cairo, and Basr a, I managed…
  • p. 202 …We had trouble when we came to El Paso in finding it, and Cairo blended right…
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9.0 OPERATIONAL CHECKS
9.1 Apollo Landmark Identification (D-6)
McDivitt
White
The equipment we carried onboard the space-
craft really didn't apply exactly to D-6 . We
didn't have a Questar lens . The 200 mm lens that
we carried did not have the periscope mounting
for it. It did not have any way you could
aim it with a telescope , so the only aiming
device that we had onboard the spacecraft was the
gunsight mounted in the left hand window.
The cameras that we used for this experiment
were the 16 mm movie camera with.:5 mm telephoto
lens on it and the fixed mounted 35 mm Contarex
with the 200 mm lAns . The fixed mounted Contarex
was in the right-hand window, and the 16 mm camera
was in the left-hand window.
It was kind of interesting since we were in
free drift, and they told us to go ahead
and run a tracking task. But the first one that
I ran was Apollo Run No . 1, which was over the
junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile in
the middle of the delta of the Nile River.
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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.