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.
53€0NftDEM11:At~ you're separating away from something, whichever way you ' re going, if you point at the thing and if you t hrust in that direction you are to take out your relative velocity in all planes . So , it looked like the thing was off to the left or to the south of our orbital track by a couple hundred feet and it was going down rapidly . Losing altitude. After I thrusted this second time, I knew I had more than enough velocity, much more than I needed to kill off the 5 feet/second we'd added . I watched it and it looked like it wasn ' t going away from us anymore. It looked like our relative velocities had stopped. I wanted to ·· get the platform alined somewhat in case we did have---to come down in the 2~1. We really hadn't had much chance to check over the spacecraft yet. So I quickly went to as close to zero-zero- zero as I could get . I used the zero yaw and the zero roll off the ball and I went to a pitch at t i tude that looked like it was about zero and tried to get the ball to aline to zero-zero- zero . At that time the booster was mostly behind us--mostly back toward the Cape from us--back behind us with respect to our velocity back there . It iwas in the
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.