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.
“Mons”1 page
220 White McDivitt White McDivitt White Well , in the Air Force portion of it , we can start right off by saying that the stars they wanted Ui to run the operation on--I think , Series No . 4-- No , that was the last one . They gave us Series 1 to start wi.th. --which was the daylight . The daylight operations didn't prove feasible at all . We couldn ' t see the stars and if we could have , we didn ' t have a good horizon to r un them on . So it became apparent to us that that run was los t right in the beginning,when we first came out of the darkness and lost all the s t ars . We also got t he big picture t hat t he sext ant was not going to be too easy to use . It was going to be impossible to use without using some fuel , and it was going to be dam hard to use when we used just pulses of fuel . We needed some kind of stabiliza tion . At least I thought so . We might say that the lightbulb in the cormter readout for the angle was burned out . That burned out within t wo seconds a fter we got up there , I think .
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.