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
288 White McDivitt White McDivitt orange or pinkish flames coming out . It looked like the flame was coming up around my side of the spacecraft like this . Was it doing that on your side , too? Yes . It looked like it was almost coming from three points . Okay. Probably what it was doing was corning around both sides because of the angle of attack and going out this way. But I definitely could see the orange fire come up around the l eft- hand side of the spacecraft and out in front of the window, and pretty soon I saw some green fire-- Coming out of the top -- Oh, is that where you saw it? I didn't. I saw the green fire down close to the left- hand side coming up over the nose inside of the red fire , and then it was all swirling around there . Then while we were coming down, we were coming down in a r oll , but with our relatively high L/D, we were in a great big roll with a big wallow. guess this is really indicative of how much lift we had. ~FfDl:NrtA~ I
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.