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.
McDivitt 241-cet"'4FIE>Ei'JTIAL I elected'to make a similar pass through on the following orbit, watching the stars and making sure that I had a good small-end-forward. I found out that the first pass through was pretty good until the tail end, where I thought the stars were in the wrong position . It turned out that this is just the way they came up, and I was good for both of them except for the tail end of the first run through, I logged in two small end passes through the South Atlantic Anomaly. I also ran the D-9 Experiment and I found that by using the fuel and having the H0rizon Scan to hold when you wanted it to hold, the use of the sextant and horizon in making measurements was considerably easier. I made what I feel was a good Apollo D-9 run. I ran the D-8 Experiment. I had two times to run the D-8 Experiment. I ran it at the Greenwich Mean Time of 01:30, I was to look for Pegasus at O2:28,straight up at 268 nautical miles, and I was all hot to watch Pegasus go over and was just approaching my straight up attitude when-- The sun shined on the window.
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.