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.
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McDivitt White McDivitt White McDivitt It looked to me like we could have gotten as close as 200 feet . It was extremely difficult to tell how close we were. What's your guees , Ed? Just pick a number. I wouldn't say that close . I 'd say you ' re more in the ball park in the neighborhood of 700 to 1000 feet. Okay. You could be magnitudes off. Before we got to Carnarvon, I remember , we were in reasonably good shape , because I had finally gotten down to the booster. I felt if I could just keep it down near the booster we would be all right . Then it looked to me l ike we were closing rather rapidly. So I thought we were going to get next to it and then we were going to be all right. 'I'he reason I felt this was because I could see the two lights . It must have been rotating in such a manner that I could see the two lights . Almost every fifth or tenth time they blinked I could see them. I could see two of them. So I knew by the distance that we were in quite close and everything looked pretty good then . And then for a long, long, long period of time after that I never
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.