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.
18 White a lot of firing , too. I started out checking the Rate Command , so I thought I might possibly have one bad pitch thruster that was causing a rolling moment that was bei ng counteracted by the yaw-roll jets. When I did it in Direct, however , it wasn' t doing that . It wasn't rolling either , so I felt that it must just be a very tight deadband that was trying to hold us in there. So , the operational checks were all right . The only thing we had to monitor on the system was the temperature and the pressure of the propellant . It seemed to hold pretty well . I have some comments on that. I kept a running log of them as we went along . The tempera ture started out at 75 degrees and 3000 pounds . It held that way pretty well until about the 65th hour , when the temperature gradually went down. The temperature decreased to a point where we started getting the RCS heater lights that we noted earlier. We got about eight series of RCS heater lights . It took about 5 minutes to extinguish the light . It was t he A-ring,then the B- ring, and then the A-ring. I t s eemed to alternate each time back and forth and it came on for about 15 to 20 minute periods of
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.