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
194 McDivitt White McDivitt area where the houses are brown and the surrounding terrain is bro~m, everything' s kind of small and it all blends together. Unless there was some type of contrast between them , it ' s pretty darned hard to pick up a city right out in the middle of the desert. We had trouble when we came to El Paso in finding it, and Cairo blended right in with -- blended right in with everything. You could see the air}!urt at Cairo--I ' m not sure if I ever did really see the city. I think I could . When I was looking in that area at Jaffa, as soon as I saw that airfield out there and was concentrating on looking at it , I saw more detail. Yes. The thing of it all is that ,geographically , you have to have a real large feature to be able to see it very far out in front of you , like the Red Sea. Now when I was trying to find Cairo one 1;ime, I looked out I was having trouble finding the Red Sea. Pretty soon I found the Red Sea about 30 degrees below the horizon or maybe a little more. As I got closer, of course , the Red Sea stood out very well. As we get closer iK FIDE~~TlAL
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.