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.
“King”1 page
272 White McDivitt want to p,mch it off ahead and have t he retro rockets go off early, but I figured t hat it· wasn't in a hurry that much. But if it c8Jlle on much earlier than that , i t was really going to make us short. So, I finally decided that we'd go ahead and ann the Auto-retro Button at about three seconds so that we weren' t going to be any more than 15 or 20 miles short as a result of the retrorockets going off early. We'd still get the auto- retrofire, signal through, so that if something went ·,:rong with the manual retrofire signal we'd still get the retrorockets fired . I felt t hat three seconds early would be better than a possible 15 or 20 second one in case we had to go through some non-nominal method of firing the retros in case the manual button didn't make it work . I told Ed to arm the auto-retrofire , a.nd he did this at about three seconds and i t fired automati cally at between two and one seconds, I think, in the count. Yes . I felt that we got a one-plus second early eo·~Ft0E~TIA1
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.