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
300 White McDivitt White McDivitt White OOt ◄ FIDE~rtAL and see if the thing was going to become unstabl~ This is what I did . I turned off the RCS elec tronics . The thing was that they didn't get any worse . It didn ' t ge t any worse . I watched it. I could see enough of it to tell that we weren't becomi ng wistable. It was unstable to a point and then it stabilized out in this oscillation . That ' s right . It was really gyrating around . By that time we were down to 20 000 feet and I called , " 20 thousand feet . Pull down the handles" , or something to that effect . You called out 28 . Is that what I s aid? And then, I pulled the propellant valves, as I had planned to do, and turned the oontrol node to Rate Command rather that. Reentry , because I wanted to burn up all the fuel that I could out of those manif olds . As a matter of fact, I was interested in burning up all the fuel I could bef ore I got to the ground . I have a question . I thought you put it in Rate Command before you turned off the valves , and it pretty well damped itself out on the €QtqftDENffM
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.