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…
160
attitude reference , found the Mediterranean on
my left , pointed the spacecraft on ahead ,
determined the direction I was going, picked
up the Red Sea, picked up the Suez Canal between
the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and followed
the river in. I started this quite a distance
out . I knew just about where the airfield was ,
but it wasn't coming into view. Finally,at about
20 degrees before the vertical the airfield
finally came into view. I tracked on the
airfield about 10 degrees before the nadir . I
was tracking the area in which I believed the
airfield to be , so that I had already had the
pitch rate set up that I required of my
spacecraft . As I got on the target I still had to
track in multiple axes , but I already had t he
rates built up , and I tracked f rom about 10 to
20 degrees before the nadir to 45 degrees past.
I think this will probably be the best tracking
exper i ment that I did. Later on, I had another
one . Later on I had another tracking task
against Basra in Iraw on the Pers i an Gulf. Here
again,we had the ingredients that were
necessary to pick up the target . We had a l arge
eel fF1
tBE~~TIAL

Cases discussed

About this file

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.