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.
51 White McDivitt £.ONfll)ENTIAf I would estimate it at between 200 and 250 feet. Okay. We were in pretty good shape right then and I applied about five or six seconds of thrusting that should have come out around 5~ feet/second . I was in a hurry trying to get our separation velocity stopped, so I was thrusting. I had it in Rate Command . I pointed the space craft at the booster and started thrusting, and by the time I got the computer in the Catch- Up Mode and the Start Comp button on, I had already thrusted ' 2 or 3 -~ feet/second out and I counted up another · 3 feet/second on the IVI's . It looked like we were probably stopped, although I couldn't tell tlBt quickly. I knew I had as much f::.V in there as I had at separation, and possibly a little more, because I tried to hold the separation f::.V down to no more than •5 feet/second. We watched it for just a short time and then it was obvious that we hadn't stopped our separation velocity--our relative velocity--so we were still separating. So , I applied about ano- ther •• 3 or • 4 feet/second, which should have more than overcome the : 4 or · 5 feet/second I put in initially . It looked like we had stopped .CO NF lD-E-~IlAL
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.