Documents / Official release

Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part II, 1965

National Aeronautics and Space Administration · 1965-06-09 · 290 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

  • p. 279 …I think only by a lot of noise ma.king, I
  • p. 288 …You have any concluding comments? I think we've been ma.king conclusions all day long…
270
ting it . I thought this was very good. We had
another briefing on experiments in the flight
plan review about six weeks before the flight,
and we had another experiments review about
ten days to two weeks before the flight . Again ,
I felt that each and every one of these was
certainly time well spent. I think that,
probably,the first experiments briefing might
have taken place a little sooner .
White I've got a comment on D-6 here . Ten days before
the flight, they came in with the infor mation
for D-6 and said, "How do you want to run the
tracking on D-6 and send the infor mation up? "
This was not the time to bring up this type
of information or try to make this type of
decisions. These decisions should have all
been firmed up at the six- weeks briefing, and
this is what the six-weeks briefing was for .
It was to tell us how we were going to run our
experiments. After that time there weren 't
supposed to be any changes to the procedures ,
and 10 days before the flight was just to
incorporate any last-minute changes a.nd solidify

Cases discussed

About this file

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.