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.
113 White McDivitt CO~◄ FH:>·EN'fl7'L whatever you want to 8all it, I wouldn't fire the thrusters . You asked that already wnen I was out . Yes . I asked you if you needed it and you said no . So , then I felt it would be better not to fire the thrusters , because you were drifting back up over the co~kpit . I could see that you were going up over us . I couldn ' t see back behind me , but I could see by the motions that you had when you went by me that yuu were going to continue on . I felt th~t it would be a lot safer if we just let the spacecraft drift unless it got into very high rates . I fired the jets a couple of times just to bo~k ,:,.ft the rates . I let it start drifting when y0u got on the tether so tha~ you wouldn 1 t get back there on top of one of those thrusters when I fired them. From abou-: the time? you ran out of fuel until you got back in I didn 1 t do mu-:::h attitude controlling. I did some . Everytime the rates got up pretty high, I 1d knock them off . You were able to ma...~euver around the spacecraft when the spacecraft itself had rates of say plus or minus • 2 degrees/second in a <;9·M'FID ENTIAl
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.