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.
103 White McDivitt White McDivitt and that puts a pretty good size forc e on it . I had a real tight hold on the hatch closing device , and when it popped open I was able to snub it . It didn ' t really open with much force , did it? Well, it did. It opened with a fai r amount . It popped and I couldn ' t stop it the first inch or so . Then , of course , as soon as it opened that much pressure bled off . I just sort of snubbed the thing to keep it from flying all the way open. Now if I hadn ' t been holding onto it, I don ' t think it would have gone open more than two or three feet . This is another point too . There ' s more force on the hatch actuator than I thought . I didn ' t just flip the door open with my hand . I had to actually forcibly push it open , similar to the forc e with which I opened the hatch laying on ti II my back under one g . That ' s about the force that I had to put on the hatch to open it . This extra force that we are talking about is due to the 0-rings they put in the pyres that are used for jettisoning the hatch . This is something that they put in just before the Ee-NFt0ENTIM.
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.