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
297 McDivitt 6.7 50 000 feet McDivitt It went all the way back to about 96 000 feet again, and then it started down again. The second time it started down, it really started down in a hurry, and I was sure that we were still at 100 000 feet. So , I waited until the g level got about 3, which is around 80 or 90 thousand feet. I started slow ing the roll rate there. I wanted to get the thing to a zero roll rate by the time we got to 40 or 50 thousand feet, certainly by the time we got to 40. We started gyrating around some more, but I didn't think it was exceptional. The Reentry Rate Command started firing . As a matter of fact, I said!'H?re comes the Reentry Rate Command, "and then I was firing on top of .it so that we really weren't oscillating too much. Then we got to 40 000 feet and I put the drogue chute out, and that's where things really got exciting. I put the drogue out at 40 000 feet. We were nice and stable as we went down. We were a heck of a lot more stable than we were when we put the drogue chute out.
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.