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
197 White McDivitt an optical barrier , practically, between you and the stars . The difference between the day sky up in orbit and the day sky here is, as far as we were concerned, was practically nil, because those just weren ' t any stars visible. It didn't have anything to do with the atmosphere; it just had to do with t he optics of our window and the nose being shiny. We couldn't see any more stars in orbit than we could here in the daylight, but it wasn' t because of the atmosphere up there. It was just because we had that coating on the window tha t reflected the sunlight,and because the nose reflected sunlight into the windows , and t he same thing with the horizon or the ground . When it was lit up, it reflected light into the windows. Actually, you had to get that window in total darkness almost before you were able to see anything. Pull the shades. Pull the shades . And then when you did that , you were able to see some stars. On a few occasions when I got the spacecraft into this particular attitude, I was able to see some stars in 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.