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. 6 …0 MISSION CONTROL 13.1 GO/NO GO ' s ............. .. .............. .... ........... 249 13 . 2 PLA and CLA Updates…
  • p. 92 86 McDivitt White McDivitt and near the end of the mission, we were down to 12…
  • p. 257 249 13.0 MISSION CONTROL 13.1 GO/NO GO 's McDivitt Okay. Mission Control. Mission…
  • p. 262 …Mission Control System. I think the Mission Control on this flight was nothing short of excellent…
  • p. 263 …0 TRAINING 14.1 Gemini Mission Simulator McDivitt Okay. Over on Training now. The first topic…
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McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
than I was. You were communicating during the
FNA work and also after I went to sleep. I heard
you working on the Communications Check and that's
when you went to the reentry antenna.
That's right, when we ran through these checks,
it finally became apparent to everyone that the
reentry antenna was doing a better job than the
adapter .antenna. And then later on, I switched
back to the adapter antenna for some reason which
I can't remember right now. We ran a couple of
more checks and it seemed to be--
I know what we did. We ran an HF check , Jim, and
we switched back to the a~apter so we could use
the HF antenna back there . We got just as good
U1IF transmissions at this time as we did on the
r.eentry a.ntenna .
When they checked them out again, they said they
still thought the stub antenna was better. So, we
went back to :reentry antenna.
We used r .eentry just about 95 percent of the
flight.
That's right. In the last 55 orbits it was great.
In the first eight it was lousy. I was really

Cases discussed

About this file

Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 290 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.