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.
“The Advance”4 pages
151 I can increase the intensity of the gunsight by q·..1ite a bit . During the night time you can turn it down and t he brightness is just abo-1t what you need . We made this ru~ on this pair of sand spits , and t he t racking t ask was q,.j t,~ easy . Now , I just happened to pick something that was obvious t o me and tracked on this and picked it up ;"11ile we got on at abo~lt 30 degrees, u.nt il I got to the vertical ,. and then I tcacked it out to about 45 degrees past the vectical. This was-a' t a real tracking task, in that I didn ' t select a target before I got there . But, just stuck with whatever target I happened t o be pointing at and ran the tracking task . I think we learned something from this pass in that we want to be very careful about picking out targets in the mi ddle of an area where there aren ' t any good water- lmd borders ; there aren' t any good contrasting colors . There wasn ' t a really prominent feature that I could start from, that worked down to the city and eventually to the airport . So , I think that on this parti cular pass , although we didn ' t get any pictures of our intended ta~get , we learned quite a bit CC!t'(f.fii&E ►4"E h,e
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.