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.
290 arc was that this thing cut out. That thing was a real lifting body. You ' re really getting a lot of lift initiall y, and if you roll around there, you ' d kill it all off; and your aero dynamics is such that you really can't tell, because the stability is so loose right there . White You know you're going to get some lift if you have an offset CG, but you couldn't tell where it was going , McDivitt You ' re in the area where you're getting a lot of lift so i f you do a roll , you've lost that range right off the bat . We came down on this great big spiral, and here I think we ought to get into 6.4 Acceleration Profile McDivitt - - the acceleration at retrofire. I called down on the ground and told them that we had four retros . We got automatic. We got auto retro . We got all four in sequence . We got auto- retro . Auto- retrofire appeared to be about a second and a half early . In the acceleration profile I said, "Well, here come the g ' s, Ed . " and I felt the g ' s going up. He said yes.
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.