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.
55 White McDivitt s t ayed there for about another ten or fifteen seconds and went to Orbit Rate, I knew I didn ' t have a good alinement on the platform but I knew I couldn ' t stay there any longer and have the booster anywhere nea r us . So , I flipped around and pitched right straight down and here 's where the problems s tarted, To get down to the booster in a long rendezvous type maneuver, what I should have done was to jus t stay horizontal and fir e retrograde and t ake some total velocity out of the spacecraft . But , when you do this the booster continues to pull away from you for a whi l e , and then eventually you are going to drop down below it . Then you are going to be in a l ower-altitude orbit and you are going to pick up and catchup with the booster . Well, with the station- keeping we had to do and the fact that the darkness was only a matter of another few minutes-- Boy it was fas t ! It wasn ' t any time a t all . I didn ' t have time to play a rendezvous game with it , I had to over come this relative velocity we had with sort of brute force , s o I thrus ted right a t the booster again. I got going down and I used about 5 "CO t'-' FIO~NT+Al.
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 340 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.