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. 167 …The local l andmarks were the Mediterranean on one side , the Red Sea on the other…
  • p. 168 …Canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and followed the river in. I started this…
176
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
OO~~FIDEt-4TIAL
slightly, and we went ahead and fired t he
forward - firing t hrusters for 1 second . We
didn ' t get any change in our scanner ignore
light configuration . It was out and it stayed
out during the entire thruster check. So I
guess that it operated all right . We 'll
summarize all of our scanner comments at thi s
time .
You want me to read some of these?
Yes. Why don ' t you read off some of the comments
you have in there .
They ' re in your writing. You might read the
first page and I ' ll read the second, since
they I re in mine .
We went to Horizon Scan Mode of control for
about the last day of flight , and left it in that
mode just about until we retrofired . I 'd like
to read out s ome of the comments that I made here
as we lost the scanner, when we got the scanner
ignore light . At 16 : 03 Greenwich Time , or
atout 72 hours elapsed time , I turned on the
Horizon Scan Mod e in about a 27degree nose down
attitude with a pitch up rate of about 2 degrees/
second . The Hori zon Scanner Mode added pulses
GO~~FIDE~~TIAt

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.