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.
32 White 2 . 20 Steering McDivitt White McDivitt Whi te straight as an arrow when that thing shut off . There weren't any oscillations or roll . I was getting a sinusoidal oscill ation on my rate needles , and I don ' t know now whether it was pitch and yaw . I cal l ed it out a t the time , to you a:nyway, Eli . Right . And my attitude arrows were- - Your a ttitude arrows were right on? Okay. But I was getting an oscillation, very small, about plus or minus a quarter degree in rates . Not so that the needle was ac tuall y moving back and for th across the dots. It was pretty obvious that it was . Now, I sort of felt that I coul d feel that movement a litt l e bit, like this , but not annoy ingly and certainly the stabilization was holding i t close enough. But it wasn ' t that the rate needles were just constantly oscillating back and forth. It seems to me it was in pitch but I'm not really sure . A booster pitch, The attitude error needles were the only deviation we had at any time . Yaw was just about nominal all the time. We had the pitch deviation at guidance initiate. It went to full scale and steered right • COt~Ft0ENflAL
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.