Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part II, 1965

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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sextant in there . We found out that to do the
star to horizon measurement, you had to be
right - side-up. If you tried to do it upside down ,
the filter blanked out the star and not the
horizon . I think that there are a great number
of measurements in here, but I do feel that the
Air Force portion of the D- 9 Experiment was more
qualitative than quantita tive . Maybe I ought
to talk about the Apollo portion. We made one
Apollo run where we used two stars . I held the
spacecraft fixed to within about plus or minus
2 degrees, and Eld took a great number of
measurements . Ed made a great number of
measurements between two stars . And we got
our 30 runs on one pair of star s that
were quite close together . Then we
started out with about another 20 sight
ings on another pair of stars that were
further apart .
White They. were all in Scorpi . I think they
were about 12 degrees on the first one and
about 22 degrees on the second one . There were
Antares and S0 orpi i n the second s er ies , and it was