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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McDivitt
White
McDivitt
Scorpi and the third star up in Scorpio in the fi
first series.
Again , we found that the angle that we had
selected to operate between was too large, and
we ran our first group of stars in about 12 1/2
degrees, and for the second pair we tried to
pick stars that were farther apart so t hat we
could get a better feel for l arger angles. This
pair of stars was a little over 21 degrees apart.
We were too optimistic about the angle between
stars that we could see by looking through the
spacecraft window. What do you think about the
voice r ecorder usage during this experiment,
F.d.?
I don't know why we had to do i t .
No, we actually hand-recorde most of t he infor
mation here . The one t hing that certainly delayed
the experiment was the loss of the lightbulb
within the readout. We changed the batteries and
bulbs from the cross-hairs and never could get