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.
“Harder”5 pages
296 White I t really had a good workout. 6.5 Spacecraft control McDivitt McDivitt White 6.6 100 000 feet McDivitt Spacecraft control was like a dream. A good engineering description. There weren't any oscillations. It was as stable as a rock . I don't think we need to say much more about that . It wasn' t like any failure simulation we've seen . It was the easiest thing to control, easier than any simulation I 've seen. Shoot! A baby could have done it. We started getting oscillations around then and the Reentry Rate Command fired a few times and I d~mped it in pitch and yaw. There really wasn't any control problem to it at all, I didn ' t feel. Did you think there was? No . I would have been watching closer if I had thought there was . The altimeter was at 96 700 feet throughout the entire flight. It started on down,and we were still at about 5 or 6 g 's when that thing started on down. It went on down to about 92 000 feet, and then the g's started off, and the altimeter started back up again.
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.