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
198 White McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt daylight. How about you, Ed? Were you able to see any stars? Yes. I called them out a few times. You did have to maneuver just , as carefully-- That ' s right . You had to be just exactly in the right spot. Let ' s go into the magnitude of the stars . We had set ourselves with the Corona Australis as a kind of calibrator for us , and this was composed primarily of fifth order stars. That was very clear, and I could see without a:ny difficulty stars of lower magnitude than that. I could see , without question , stars to the seventh magnitude . And that ' s exactly the same magnitude I would guess . You could probably see th~m down to a magnitude of seven. Now, another thing , though , was that the sky wasn ' t any more f ull of stars to me there than it is when I ' m flying at about 40 000 feet on a real da r k night . No, as a matter of f act , it didn't really seem to be as full of stars . co~~FIDE~ffiAL
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.