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
157 McDivitt White McDivitt Whi t e have with that hatch. If it failed we'd know exactly what it was. That ' s right. I personally had disassembled this cylinder and piston and spring combination up at McDonald prior to the altitude chamber, so I knew exactly what it was made of. I am sure the problem was t hat the dry lubrication coag ulated, or whatever a dry lube does, and was causing the piston to stick. I knew how we could do this thing . Carl Stone and I had dismantled it and put it back together, cleaned it out, put it back together, relubricated it , put it back toget her, and i t operated fine. I figured out how to make the t hing work with it not working properly by using your finger as the spring. That ' s the exact technique we had used. I f we hadn't had the training together that we had , and had not encountered all these problems before, I know darn well I would have decided not to open the hat ch. Maybe we wound overdramatic about the effort we made getting me back i n, and I 'll honest ly say it ' s one of the biggest efforts I ever made in my life, but I don't think we were all done then . CONFIE>ENTIAL
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.