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.
76 COt#iDEN Tl,c\ I,,.. McDivitt outside , which made it very difficult to see out when the sun's rays reflected on these particles that were on the outside of the windshield . To just summarize this thing , I think that we came off the booster with a fully unknown relative velocity which was much greater than what we anticipated, and it didn't seem to be an inplane relative velocity. It didn ' t seem to be an inplane local horizontal relative velocity. It was out-of plane and it looked like the booster headed down , with respect to us because i t started separating from us so rapidly , I t a l so had less total velo- city. I think that this was the first sur- prise . It started tumbling and immediately the rates built up in just a· very few minutes to something very high-- 40 to 50 degrees/second-- but it never got any higher , at least the best we could tell . When we last saw it over Mexico or over southern United Sta tes it was still tumbling at about the same rate , I guess around 40 or 50 degrees/second. I felt tret I got down to it all right and I was in reasonably good shape prior to Carnarvon, and from that time on until we came out of the darkness I lost it , And I think I lost it
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.