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
273 \ohite McDivitt 5.7 TR- 0 Events McDivitt auto-retrofire. Ri ght . I did too . We went through the little discussion there from minus 30 down, and I knew what Jim's point was. I think I distrusted the system a tad more than Jim did, but I thought his logic was good. We had two systems work ing to fire the rockets. i was in full agree ment. We went through and saved fuel for four days so we could do an OAMS retrofire. I felt if we're going to adopt that sort of philosophy and go through that long of a lean fuel period, then we could afford another few miles of in accuracy thrown in by an early retrofire if we got the redundancy that you would get from a double-firing . So , I elected to go ahead and have Ed push it . Al though it probably con tributed on the order of 8 to 10 miles to our miss distance, I don ' t think it really hurt us that bad. I had the spacecraft in the retrofire attitude, and when t he retrorockets f ired, I-- 'Ee·N Fl0 ENTtft:t:-'
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.