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.
52 White McDivi tt White McDivitt then . Our relative velocity looked like it went to zero . Here, I thought, we were out around 500 or 600 feet. F.d thought we were: probably in closer than that. Yes . I thought we were in a little closer. I put in a tota l of around· 9 feet/second in the first minute and a half after we turned around . I think we commented together on the speed with which the booster was going away ~om us . Right off the bat it looked like it wa.s- -it surprised me that it actually looked like it separated ·rrom us as fast as it really-- It looked like it had a lot more velocity than the 4 or 5 J feet/second I added at t he separation. It looked to me , as an off- the- top- of:. my- head-guess , that something in the spacecra ft separation thing had really built up a lot of relative velocity between the booster and the spacecraft . I don't know why or how. Al so , it looked like we weren ' t inplane anymore . It was actual l y out-of- plane so that we had an out- of plane rela tive velocity that I took out . I pointed at the booster because , obviously , if --EONffOfNTt~t.
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.