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.
2 White McDivitt White McDivitt --, I ' m not sure. The caging of the thing with small- end-forward in the daytime was r elatively easy . At night I don't think it would be quite tha t simple . I think what you would have to do at night time is to point the spacecraft down at the ground pretty much so you can see the track ac ross the ground, I could see which way the land was moving under me . I felt--although I never did this--that if I could do that and then roll around to where I had no bank angl e , and fac e in my yaw direction, either small-end or blunt-end- forward , stop t he ro l l t her e and pitch up to the horizon I could cage there withi n plus or minus 10 degrees for sure . It was much less accurate at night, I felt, than in the daytime . You aren' t kidding! We both felt that on those dark nights when you really couldn ' t see anything on the ground, pure star reference for yaw was pretty rough . Pure star reference for yaw was almost impossible to use. That was the only place where that thing we decided not to take with us--the view of the stars through the window--might have been of some
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.