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.
“Red River”2 pages
171 got to a position where we were outside the attitude constraint of the scanners. White There were a couple of things . As far as the initial rates were concerned, they were 3 1/2 degrees/second roll - right, 3 degreed pitch-down/ second, and 2 degrees yaw- right/second . The final orientation that Jim came to was such that his pitch was on, his roll was on, and his yaw was off by 18 degrees. We found early in the flight that a yaw reference at night on the stars, particularly on a dark night , was very difficult. McDivitt Yes . I still thought that the quickest yaw re ference was to go to the ground . White As far as the day check , we decided that the night was by far the tougher case, adn it didn't seem to be too diff icult. So , we thought that since the day was so easy we wouldn't even go ahead and do it. The orientation by day was a quite easy t ~,ing. 9. 3 One Attitude 1'hruster Failure Check McDivitt Okay. We'll just go right through the debriefing here . It was not difficult to establish the rate as long as we had the roll jets in the other axes . We could damp out the
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.