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.
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221COt'4FfDEt~TIAL {
Did it ever light?
First time I turned it on it lit and it went
"flit" , and then the light just went bzzz-bzzz.
I didn't know it ever lit.
It lit and then the light went out.
Okay. So we lost the lightbulb in the angle
readout, which made all the rest of the measure
ments very difficult. And the Air Force portion
in daylight was completely unusable. You couldn't
see the stars and the horizon at any time. In
the night portion,we initially had great large
angles between the stars and the horizon, and
we found that about 25 degrees was the maximum
star-horizon angle that we could handle. Would
you concur with that, lli.?
Sure do.
As we mentioned when we were talking about the horizon
and the air glow. We really had three horizons.
We had the true earth horizon. We had the top
of the dim air glow layer, and we had the top
of the bright air glow layer. I think that I
always used the top of the bright air glow layer,
except where I specifically called out in our 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.