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.

  • p. 36 …a band we never mean by LK't.nd ·t red. l' 1.•f't't…
  • p. 89 …in the gawkr ol l , but it never, ever stopped unles s it got stuck in…
  • p. 92 …we turned the lights up and never even looked out . . Oh, you weren 1t dark enough…
  • p. 94 …come to t hat conclusion, but I never looked out at them to see how dim…
  • p. 110 …But you never can say that and I never would evet' say that, I c o…
  • p. 112 …And never get back do wn to the horizon, but if you es t ablish (a…
  • p. 135 …Y oure e wons P O 11:ID balloon gondola is never an tracking station and…
3Belt 17
And I personally asked Glen, Cochran, Schirr a , a nd Cooper if they say a
meteor and they all said negative.
And t hen you both said you saw a meteor.
No, a falling star . Ha Ha.
I think thcre ' e a diff rence betw en what w say and what ,;.re were expected
to se as f a ns meteors are cone rned.
Are you t a king about micro-,eteor.i tes striki ng the
No, I 'm t alking about meteors in the atmosphere .
O. K.
Below. O. K. Below we saw them.
Little ones .
Ah , little ones .
Yes . Now, one of the obvious situati ons is t hat you said you said a 7th
magnjtud otar. c o probably your visual sensitivit y was better than
another ob er vation. The window wa s better or something. Is that it?
Di d you make a count of the num.be of t he-
Wait a minute . What are file s you use success?
Well, if you have poor visual sens i tivity, then the number of meteors
observabl drops of f very qui ckly with the sensitivity of the eyes .
You sc, 10th magni tude , you could see a lot more meteors in the atmosphere
than you ·an if you .. . . . . 2nd magnitude . And the question arises
How many do I exc .cd .. . .
. 2nc o rel r of meteo1:s .
Yc a.11 .
They were ~nd or er. me t eor s and -

Cases discussed

About this file

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