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.
-- 54 White McDivitt <coNFU)1:l'tllA.b- window and I could see it. Well, I started alining the platform and left it there for a couple of minutes . The booster started falling again, descending below us . It actually went out of my view in the window. At the time though our relative velocities were quite small, so I felt I could let it go for another 30 seconds or a minute and not have it ge~~r away__!rom ......= ------- me . It looked like it was coming toward me again , but going below. So , I allowed myself about another minute and I pi tched down and looked for it. It appeared that during that minute it had gone a lot farther down than I had expected it to go . Yes , I was surprised . Remember that it looked like the orbit was sure something different than we predicted . Yes. It looked to me like the booster and the spacecraft weren't in anything that even resem bled the same orbit , at the rate it was descending. I don ' t know what the range rate was at that time. It looked like it was a lot more than a foot/ second , though . I don ' t know what it was . I quickly pitched back up to zero-zero-zero and C.ONF~DE~ :r.lAL
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.