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.
“Cairo”4 pages
161 Cf3JS(FIOE~J body of water , a river leading up to a lake, and then the airfield sticking out in a very prominent way. Now I ' d never seen the Basra Airfield before ·I t r ied to take thi s picture . But the landmarks near it were sufficient so that finding the locat i on of it was not difficult. There wer en ' t any towns around . It was pretty obvious from the bodies of water where I should look for the airfield~and I picked it up also 20 degrees before I got to the nadir and was on it by the time I got to the nadir. I tracked it from there out to about 45 degrees past . Once again I had a reasonably good t r acking task. I t hink that on the tracking tasks on Yuma, Cairo, and Basr a, I managed to keep the target within the center half- degree cirl e of the sight . I used the 16 mm movie camera with the 75 mm telephoto l ens on each one of these cases . Did you have any other targets , Ed? White No . McDivitt I don' t believe you di d . I think the big thing here is that you ' ve got to be able to have a landmark that stands out long before you get to the target . You have to have a lot of contrast .
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.