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…
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
McDiv:i:tt
175
scanner ignore lights . The next step is the
Hoon Scanner Check. We did this with the
moonset and , Ed , you might add the time that we
did the Sun Scanner Check.
The Sun Scanner Check was at Greenwich Mean
Time of 11 : 50 , We ' 11 have to correlate that lat er·.
I think that we were supposed to be in the blunt-
end to the sun configuration at 11 : 54 and star+-· ~b c-.re,
but I 'm not really sure about tha t . Okay, the moon
check was performed just about like t he sun
check. We started blunt- end to the moon and
made t wo cycles . Blunt- end t o small-end and back
to blunt- end , and small-end back to blunt end .
Ed , go ahead and read the data.
Okay. On the moonset , we started with the moon
quite high , so we had a good moon. We started
at 12 : 17 . We had no scanner ignore lights for
the first 180 degrees and,actually,throughout
the next cycle we had no llll'llocks or any lights
for two cycles .
So this was completely normal.
The Thrusters Check No. ; --we turned the
spacecraft , since the thruster f iring wouldn't
influence the orbit except to change it

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.