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.
“Mission Control”2 pages
67
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
White
McDivitt
C-Ol<fFJ0ENT1Ai.
When it came out of the night and we saw it out ('"
there in the daylight- -
Right . I ' d estimate 30 degrees down.
It was above the horizon, just barel y . Or was it
above the horizon?
No, it was below the horizon .
I ' d say it wasn't more than ten or twelve degrees
below the earth horizon , but below our local hori
zon . It was in the neighborhood of 30 degrees .
If you looked out level to what you would call
level--but you lmow the horizon tilts away from
you , so - - .
So here again we were faced wi tr. the same kind of
problem- -to cater. up with the booster. _What I
should have done was to retrofire right then to
drop down , get a lower orbit, and come back up .
But we had to get to the booster right then or we
weren ' t going to get to it, becauae we had the
mission to take p~otographs of it across the
States . So I thought if I could close with it at
10 or 15 feet/second we could at least overcome
our problem. So I aimed behind it , so to speak,
and down , and I thrusted that way trying to get
enough closing velocity down and another one that
-E9NFJDE~llA~ 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.