Documents / Official release
This is a preliminary transcript of Part I of the Gemini 4 (GT-4) flight crew debriefing. The Spacecraft Operations Branch of NASA's Flight Crew Support Division prepared it on June 16, 1965, from recordings of the debriefing held aboard the USS Wasp on June 9, 1965. In it, astronauts McDivitt and White describe the mission from an operational viewpoint, covering countdown, powered flight, insertion, orbital operations, reentry, landing and recovery. According to the preface, visual sightings were left for a later part.
From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: 6/9/65, North Atlantic Ocean. This document is a preliminary transcript (Part I) derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 4 flight crew debriefing taken aboard the recovery ship, USS Wasp, on June 9, 1965. Astronaut Ed White recounts seeing “sparkles” during the flight.
101 We fooled with it a f ew times a~d it f inally engaged in t he UID.iOCK position , and Ed was able to go ahead and start . White The first indication of trouble was when I unstowed the handle to open the hatch . The handle freely moved up and dovm with no tension on it at all . I knew righ t away where the trouble was . It was up in that little spring on the gain pawl . So , I went up and manipulated it back and forth in hopes that I could break the lubrication loose in the spring to get it to work. We must have spent several minutes with t he hatch. I thought perhaps it might have been stuck in the manner that the hatch got stuck in t he Wet MOc k , where it just was stuck. You could ratchet it open , but the hatch itself wouldn ' t open. It was pretty apparent the trouble was in the gain pawl . I jimmied it back and for t h, and then I decided to go ahead and try the technique of actuating it in sequence with the hatch handle . If you actually replaced the operation of the spring with mechanically moving the gain pawl up and down, you can do the same work that the spring does . EONFtDENTIA~
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 340 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.