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.
~ONFl01:~TtAT 111 stopped that yaw, and I started t .1.·a.nsla:b.• 1-"' back toward the spacecraft . It was either on this translation or t~'1P. one following this that I got into a bit of a combination of a pi·tcl-i roll and the yaw together . I felt that I could have corrected it , but I knew tha.t i.t ww.~d h av0 ta.-<e.'1 mor,-: f...i.el than I had wanted to expend with the gun , so I gave a little tug Jn the tether and came back in. This is the first experience I had with tether dynamics and it brought me right back to where I did not want to be . It brought me right ba~k on the top of the sp~ce craft , by the adapter section. Jim was calling me and said that I was out of his sight . I told him that I was all right , that I was up above the spacecraft , I looked down and I could see attitude thrusters firing , littl-~ white puffs out o~ each o~e . I wasn I t very close . They looked just like what Chamberlain ' s report told us . It looked just like about a foot and a half or maybe 2 feet of plume from the space craft and certainly didnI t look omin-.11H.~ to me at all . In fact it looked kind of like the spacecraft was r eally alive and working down <;.eN·FtDENTfA-t,.
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.