Documents / Official release

Gemini 4 Experiment Debriefing, 1967

National Aeronautics and Space Administration · 1965 · 224 pages · text from the file's own layer

This NASA file from 1965 combines Mission Operation Report M-913-65-04 on the Gemini 4 (GT-4) flight with related correspondence. Memoranda from the Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight describe the planned four-day mission with James McDivitt and Edward White, including a spacewalk, a rendezvous with the booster second stage and thirteen experiments. Later letters and telegrams from NASA's Manned Space Science office concern the astronaut debriefing and requests for GT-4 photography and film for scientific analysis.

From the source: Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: June 3-7, 1965, Low Earth Orbit. Gemini IV was the second crewed mission of the Gemini series. Astronauts James McDivitt and Edward White successfully completed the four-day flight between June 3 and June 7, 1965. The mission included the first American spacewalk. This collection of documents contains a transcription of the astronauts recounting their observations of bright particles outside the spacecraft, dated circa June 25, 1967, on pages 78-81, and page 101.

M-913-65-04
• MSC-2, Proton Electron Spectrometer
• MSC-3, Tri-Axis Magnetometer
• MSC-10, Two-Color Earth's Limb Photos
• S-5, Synoptic Terrain Photography
• S-6, Synoptic Weather Photography
UNUSUAL TASKS OF THIS MISSION
One of the interesting tasks of this mission is the duration of the flight. It
will be the longest ever to be conducted by a two-man crew . Another highly
interesting item is that control of the mission for the first time wil I be from the
Mission Control Center (MCC) Houston. Some elements of the Mission Control
Center at Cape Kennedy and the GSFC computing facility will be standing by as
a backup during the launch phase. The computing facilities at GSFC will also be
used as a backup to MCC-Houston during the orbital phase. Flight controllers will
man the MCC in three shifts to give complete round-the-clock coverage of the four
day mission. Crew control of reentry will be ac~omplished by tracking the roll
needle rather than nulling the down-range and cross-range needles as on GT-3.
The experiments will, of course, contribute much information for the scientific
and medical communities. The G4C suit which replaces the G3C suit used on
GT-3 has the fol lowing new featu res: a triple overvisor, a redundant pressure
closure seal (zipper), and thermal and meteoroid protection integrated in the
outer cover layer. Abort procedures to be utilized by the astronauts in the
unlikely event it becomes necessary for them to terminate. a mission before orbital
insertion are different from those used in the Mercury program . In that program,
the fireball that would have been created had a conflagration occurred on the pad,
would have been large enough to ABORT PROCEDURES
engulf an ejecting astronaut, so
it was necessary to add an escape
rocket to Iift the entire spacecraft
free of the area. The GLV, on
the other hand, uses self-igniting
fuels which, upon mixing, create a
fi reba II sma II enough so that the
astronauts can eject from the
spacecraft in much the same man
ner as is done in today's high
performance jet aircraft. This
is called the Mode I abort pro
cedure. The three abort modes
are more fully defined by the
altitude and elapsed time-after
launch parameters depicted on
Figure 2.
FIG . 2
MOOE I - EJECT AfTEll SHUTDOWN
MOOEll - SALVO RETROS AFTER SHUTDOWN
MODE ID - SHUTDOWN, SE PARATE, TURN AROUND,
RETROFIRE
-□~ OEIAYEO
MOOE
n
(WA IT 5
SECS )
15,000FT. _ _ ____.____~--'<-+--~-
' ~' MOOE
I
50
SECONDS
SEA LEVEL-----------''----L--'--
5/24/65 Page 2

Cases discussed

About this file

Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 224 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.