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
72 White McDivitt daylight for ten minutes or so, that i t was hope less, and I told that t o F.d . I told him I thought we had lost the booster for good . I don ' t mean I didn ' t s ee i t but t hat we weren ' t goi ng to get back down to it . He agreed with me . Yes. I think I could have gotten to the booster i n a dignified , normal , slow, easy manner if we di dn ' t have the constraint on us of being next to the booster in the first daylight pass over the States, and taking pictures , prepare for the EVA , and be r eady to emerge from the spacecraft an hour after we came out of t he daylight on our first pass , which was about two hours i nto the flight . I just felt that if I had had more time, I could have gone ahead and done some of this without using brute force to overcome the difference between the booster and myself. I could have gone into a l ower orbit and chased it t hat way. I could have just gone horizontal and r etrofired and f allen away from the thing initially and caught back up with it l a ter on, but it was getting so far a way from us to start with that to purposely put your- self fart her a way from it so that you could catch eor'4FIDEMT+AL
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.