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.

McDivitt
in the beginning when I was unstowing equipment .
I continued to scratch it throughout the mission.
When I finished , the visor was considerably
scratched up as you would pr obably notice if
you looked at my suit . I don ' t know what there is
to do about this other than to accept a scratchy
visor .
If you ' ve got the visors down in front of your
face, you don ' t tend to scratch it up as much .
I think it was really worn out because you
started opening up your visor and leaving it up
over your head a lot earlier than I did. At about
the two and a half or three day mark , I looked at
your visor and it was really a mess . I took the
helmet off and cleaned the visor because it was
dirty on the inside and the outside . I looked at
my visor and had very few marks on it . I had a
few l ittle scratches , but very minor. Then I
started putting my vi sor up more and mor e be-
cause t hey wanted us to stay open . Because I ' m
a lot taller than you are, I really started beat
i ng mine up . In the last day, I think I caught
up with you and maybe even surpassed you in the

Cases discussed

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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.