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.
71eo,~FtDENTIA'l narvon . Apogee should have been far t hest apart . Our perigee should have been closest together . It was almos t opposite . We were with it at Carnarvon , but we wer e way far away from it and getting f arther away from it as we crossed the United States , or Mexico, or wherever we came. I wasn' t looking out at the scenery; I was looking a t the booster . It.was extremely difficul t to t rack across the water and as we got to t he land it was almost an impossibility to track it , Here the distance i s extremely difficult to judge . It It could have been anywhere from 5 to 15 miles directly below us a t this time . If I had a range rate I could have told where I was all the time and with range rate I would have been able to rendezvous with it from a mile . I could have done the things I lmew had to be done , rather than try to do it .forcefully . I sort of feel the big problem was that we were so optimistic for those first three orbits that it is almost unbelievable . It became apparent when we tried to do the EVA that we couldn ' t do it in the t ime allotted. But anyway,I had dec ided by the time we had gone by Hawaii, or wherever it was a fter we had been in the C-eNFIDE-NTIAl
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.