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.
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298 White McDivitt White McDivitt White That ' s right by several orders of magnitude. When we put t he drogue chute out, we were concerned about the thing destabilizing rather than stabilizing. So I intended to put the drogue out and leave the control at Reentry Rate Command . This I did, and we oscillated all over the sky . We estimat ed pl us or minus 40 degrees , and I t hink we were at leas t every bit of that . We were, and when the drogue chute came out , I was right in the sun so I couldn ' t see i t , and I didn't know whether we had one or not, You called it out , and about t he t ime you cal led it out , I coul d see it up there gyrating wildly around . I never could tell whether the thing dereefed or not. I had a lot of goop on my window and the sun was out , and all I could see was the shape of the dr ogue up there , and it really was fluttering around . We wer e plus or minus 40 degrees to it without any doubt , and I wouldn ' t be a bit sur prised if we wer en ' t plus or minus 60 degrees to it . We wer e r eal ly getting tossed around . It was just jer king a l l around . It was fast , but I don ' t t hink it was that big a GOMftB·Et'4TIAt
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.