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.
8. 1 Platform McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt 8.0 SYSTEMS OPERATION Actually, the first portion of any alinement is to cage the thing. The case of caging the thing is much more important than the alinement itself. In the daytime I felt that I could cage the plat form to a reference with an error plus or minus about 3 or 4 degrees in all axes . Did you think we could do that wel l? Only in the daytime. The yaw was a little problem. It took longer to get it, but if you kept after it for awhil e , I felt that you could get down to just a few degrees. Within a couple of degrees . The big thing is that you have to stop your yaw rates, and then sit there and look outside for awhile and see which way you're going, straight ahead or sideways . If you are going sideways you rotate around for awhil e and stop the rate and then look out again. Ri ght? I felt you could get the thing ca ged quite well. We. didn ' t do it BEF at all, did we? We never did cage in BEF.
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.