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.
234 CO f'J F. IDEf'J +IA L 12.0 PRE- MISSION PLANNING 12 . 1 filssion Plan (Trajectory) McDivitt 12.2 Flight Plan McDivitt It is pretty difficult to debrief this pre-:-mission planning because we had so many pre-mission plans that we couldn't keep track of them all. I think that we started too late on the mission planning for GT-4 , because everyone was concent:r:ating on GT-3 . Then in the two and a half months that we had to do the mission plans , we changed it about three or four times , drastically. We nqt only changed the trajectory, but we changed the altitudes of insertion; a t one time we were shooting for a 87- 145 orbit and then a 87-161, and then we changed it from 90 degree launch azimuth to a 72 deg:cee launch azimuth. We changed how we were going to handle the decay of the orbit . All in all, I think our mission plan changed just too often . Same with the flight plan. We kept changing it around and changing it around and changing it around. It was r eally unfortunate . Up until about ten days before the flight we were really prepared for about two different flights, and finally we got COt>~FFDEt-~TIAl
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.