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
286 White McDivitt McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt White ~ 0 t>J FI l;)fNTIAi. Whichever way we saw it , it's on the tapes , because we discussed it pretty thoroughly . That ' s right , as we were doing it . But I sort of vaguely recall that watching the retros after us as we s]!lllrl around , it started glowing a little bit and then you could see t his big spray come off the front--shock or something. I t looked like it was just melting and corning away . It just looked like a great big orange mushroom back there, and that's when it really started falling behind us. We hadn ' t felt any g ' s at all . Had you felt any I gs? Not that time . I ' m sure that I hadn ' t felt any g ' s . I was wondering why we were so light . We were looking down at Florida. We had watched Florida go by and commented on it . Shoot , we real ly made a low altitude pass across the States . We should have probably filed a DD- 175 to get clearance . We had to come through the control zone , you know, at Eglin. They're kind of sensitive about
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.