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.
68 White McDivitt White McDivitt eo~~FtOENllAL would bring us up to it at the same time; but most of the thrusting I did was down . Then we just didn't gain on it . I started thrusting retro grade with my top thruster, but I was thrusting more back and downward. I just absolutely could not get down to the booster. It kept pulling away and pulling away until by the time we got to Hawaii . You were putting a lot of 6V i n there and we just weren't doing anything. We just weren't making any headway. It continued to pull away from us and it was falling farther and farther below us until finally-- You put in about 40 feet/second to do something with it and it hadn ' t changed a speck . By the time we got to Hawaii I told them I thought we were having difficulty doing it . k:J.yway, I had decided by that time that if we were going to do the mission at all, the only thing we could do would be to leave the booster. The fuel was down to around 75 per cent on my 'gage and the gage kept going up and down, so it wasn't a heck of a lot of help . I had burned around 85 or eor<IFIDE~~Tl:t\L
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.