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.
“Gray”1 page
58 McDivitt White ~Ptt>fNT-l;4h sparkles everywhere . And it looked like almost a starlit sky, but it just didn't quite look right to me ; it looked like an artificial star- lit sky . It looked like some of these star dis plays they have created for us . And I looked over at Jim and asked him if he was seeing this and about the same time I noticed that he had nothing but dayl ight out his window. This was the first time that I had the daylight- dark experience of one guy looking into pitch black night and the other guy looking into a complete daylight window over there. Jim remarked rather disgustedly to me, "We are pointed straight at the ground!" About the same time I realized I was looking out at the fire flies everybody had s een, but probably in a much more profuse quantity than had ever been seen before , because we were getting all this fuel that was vaporizing into many , many particles from the booster and a little bit of a contribution from the spacecraft also. And we were thrusting, too . I ' m sure we had all that junk on it from our launch. That ' s right . And the whole area out in front of my view was just entirely taken up with these CONFIOENft-AL
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.