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
90 feet/second . I had numbers in all three of the windows, and of course since I was changing atti tudes and thrusting in different directions those numbers were going all over the place . So I made up my mind then that i t looked like a hopeless task and that we had better stop this stuff or we were going to lose all the fue l for the whole mission. We probably wouldn't be able to catch it, and we wouldn't be able to do what we were going to do . I think the only thing we could have done to save the whole thing would nave been for us just to go forward on t he local horizontal and retrograde a large amount on the order of 20 to 30 feet/second, fall down below the thing and catch it .an orbit or so later and actually perform rendezvous with it . But because the flight plan was such that we had to get all the EVA done in the first three orbits , and because Chris and I had talked this over and decided the EVA was the more important of the two things , I felt t hat the best thing to do woul d be to abandon trying to catch up with the booster. White Let me interject something else , too . See if you had the same feeling . I had the feeling that the ~QNFIDENT.IAL
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.