Gemini 4

[triumphant music] Little about the flight went wrong.

The reentry computer went out of whack, but they brought the Gemini IV down within 40 miles of the target area with the retrorockets.

They attempted a near rendezvous with the booster rocket but gave up the chase when they and mission control felt they were using up too much fuel.

Otherwise, the saga of the Gemini IV exceeded even the most optimistic expectations, and the world will long remember those moments when a hatch was opened and Major White stepped into the void.

Gemini IV speeds around the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour.

Here is the historic moment as Major White removes his lifeline from the tether bag.

The oxygen communications cable is slightly shorter than the 25-foot safety line that leashes him to the capsule.

and was selected as part of the second group of astronauts in 1962.

Following on from Grissom, he was the pilot of the Gemini 4, and accordingly on the 3rd of June 1965, he became the first American to make a spacewalk.

He was also the backup command pilot for Gemini 7, and because of the usual pre-rotation process, he was due to pilot the Gemini 10, which would have made him the first of his group to fly twice.

Instead, he was promoted in 1966 to be the command module pilot for AS204.

[laughs]

Number two, "Many believe that it was discovered from space by the astronauts on the Gemini 4 mission.

However, the object has actually been known since the 19th century." Oh, I guess I was wrong.

Look at me.

And we have documented proof of how dangerous this is.

The transcript from Gemini IV, featuring Ed White, the first American to perform a spacewalk.

It's chilling if you know what you're listening to.

White opens the hatch, floats out into the vacuum, and he's immediately gripped by this profound euphoria.

So no real mystery to this one, just flakes getting dislodged off the surface of the craft and floating into space.

The Gemini program had two unusual sightings, the cylinder spotted by James McDivitt during Gemini 4 and the bogey reported by Frank Borman during Gemini 7.

The, the, the cylinder with the sticky bit has to be something like space debris or space ice or something, right? Space ice, just ice or something, right? I guess it would technically be space ice.

We can call it space ice.

From NASA, the view from above, the Gemini visual acuity experiments.

NASA's Gemini IV and VII crews conducted the first in-flight visual acuity tests to verify claims that astronauts could see fine detail from a hundred miles up, and the experiments confirmed they could indeed spot roads, ships, and other features on Earth.

The tests, which used large eye cue charts and a binocular-style viewer, also showed that an astronaut's vision remained stable over the two-week missions.

While early skepticism ranging from doubts about the astronauts' eyesight to psychiatrists warning of hallucinations surrounded the reports, the data proved the observations were genuine.

That's Mets yearbook, Shea Stadium, Flushing, New York.

America's Gemini 4 has set two worlds face first.

At 9.36 p.m., Gemini 4 passed the American 22.9 orbits duration record set by Gordon Cooper in May 16, 1963.

At 9.41 p.m., McDivitt and White log more time in space, 68 hours and 51 minutes, than the total log by all eight previous astronauts.

Now we go to the sixth inning, and Eddie Cranepool is up against Bob Fred.

One of the main things they want to know is the effect of prolonged weightlessness on the human heart.

McDivitt and White chatted with their wives.

White told his wife he can't wait to tell her about the fabulous 20 minutes he spent maneuvering outside the Gemini 4.

Control will be, from launch time on, at the Mission Control Center, a spanking new room in a new three-story building costing something over $100 million at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.

And we expect to get a report within just a few s- uh, seconds on the latest status in these final moments of the countdown on the launch of Gemini 4.

Paul Haney in Houston.

This is Gemini Control Houston with a count T minus five minutes and counting.

The Russian colonel came within one hour of spending five days in orbit.

Medical men are calling this flight the most critical yet by the US.

They will constantly monitor the pilots of Gemini 4 as they orbit the Earth.

They are gravely concerned about man's ability to survive in sustained weightlessness.

... really in the scheme of things.

3.5 Pro, 4.4, G- you know, Gemini 4, they are still a long way off.

The, I think, parallel between what's going on on the AI side with Demis Hassabis and Jeff Dean being, you know, ousted sort of, kind of over the last couple of weeks, Demis Hassabis moving into a, um, chairman role at Deep, uh, at DeepMind and Jeff Dean leaving to start his, his own, uh, drug discovery AI startup that's being funded by Google but is not part of Google.

I think all of this is just Google trying its best to get back into a place where it can compete, uh, on, on, on the state of the art, and there's a lot of great reporting this week from, from Reuters and, and The Verge and, and, and Bloomberg about, like, what happened within the shuffle and why and The fact that even though DeepMind was the heart of Google's AI, uh, it was still located in London, which meant that Sundar Pichai did not have direct oversight, uh, the way that he would if it was in Mountain View.