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…
the dimmer the meteor, the shorter the trail.
r .u.aonti.blc .
1-,t • 'l : ,., ' I \ ,11
Belt 17 5
They don ' t occur up in th heavens , they occur down below you . This i s the
area that you spend a great deal of time looking at i n t he night. You're
looking up at the stars.
We came to the conclusion that you looked at the ground in the daytime,'
you looked at the horizon starting at night, and if you were looking some
where else , you really didn ' t see much. You find out that sky, in the
daytime you a.on 't see anything-
I was just curious whether it would be worthwhile to spend a little bit
of time looking sort of at the ground close to the hor izon and trying to
count meteors in terms of finding out what -
I 'm sure we c ould .
Getting a count on.
It occurred quite low do,m . . . . ... . . You looked down a t 300 and
there'd be meteors ; at 45° there'd be meteors. Obviously well below you.
Did they l ook any different from shooting star s from a baJ.loon?
The t hing that I noticed about them is that they were short and I think
this is probably because you're l ooking at them from above and the angle -
the lengt h of them - of short , and. you ' re seeing them a s they come down
through the atmosphere from above a nd so you see a line that's lonly that
long from above . Up there it ' s only that long , and then when you look at
them f'rom down below you see them .ome all the way down and they appear to
me-
'l'hey ' rc probably microscopic . The random slope direction.
~.iometime s they ' re real 11ttlc tiny short ones and-
1\.nd I think the short on 'fl would. more be an indication that they were very
d.im ones , b <;ausc
Well that :..:c'rns
I' I , i'

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.