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.
10 I White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt Pulse . It seemed to wor k all right in Pulse. don't really have any comments to make on the atti tude controller . As a matter of fact, I didn't ~se any Rate Command . Didn't you really? We didn't use the Rate Command . I got to use Direct a couple of times . I used Pulse a lot . Everytime you 'd go to sleep, I ' d rea lly have a bal] I could tell that by the wiggling. No . That was real ly great--flying that spacecraft . That ' s right, and I think Pulse is the mode . You ca.n do a lot with it . With a little bit of planning you could get to the attitude--if you start out 5 or 6 minutes ahead of time. That's what we were doing. At 10 minutes before I was supposed to be at a certain atti tude I ' d start, and one or two little pulses and you'd--boop, boop, boop, boop-- th€ bad thing was if you were in an attitude where you couldn ' t see the horizon and didn ' t know where you were. You would give it a couple of pulses and nothing would happen, and you ' d have to give it a couple of more pulses. It ' d t ake a long time sometimes before you would get to where you could see . As a matter of fact, if at 5 minutes before @i~FfDENTI>4ct
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.