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.
“Harder”5 pages
154 McDivitt White McDivitt right in that the bar and the attachment on that bar and lanyard were not strong enough . I re membered that and I knew h ow hard you were pul ling on that thing. I t hink , if nothing else, they ought to :Je sure . How many times did we break that attachment at the bar? We br oke the attachm~:mt ab od; three or four t imes on the zero-g airplane. Everytime they kept telling us it wasn't made out of the right kind of stuff and the st~ff we were going to have in the spacecraft would be the right material. ~•'ell , it didn't break in the spacecraft . Just coin cidently, or maybe because we both had doubts about the strength of that particular piece . The same thing crossed through my mind . I was thinking t hat the success or failure of this hatch closure depends on whether this hatch closing device s t ays hooked onto t hat space- craft and doesn ' t break offo We would have been flat out of luck! We would have been in deep trouble ! I 'm not sure we woul dn ' t have been able to get the hatch closed, because we had put that canvas strap on t here and I might have been able to pull you ~rbENIIAt
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 340 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.