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
77 White McDivitt £0N·~ll;)ENTIAl- because looking at a single light at night doesn't give you any depth perception at all. You just don't know where the booster is . I think that summarizes it . Ed, you want to add anything? You weren't watching it as much as I was , but you saw enough of it to know exactly what was going on. Well, you see I wasn't able to put the pieces quite together because I was either looking out, and I couldn't see when you were thrusting, or I was looking in and watching you when you were thrusting and listening and not looking out . I tried to interJect my thoughts as we went along and I agree with what you said. I don't believe I want to add anything else. Now that we've covered the tracking and the los ing of the booster, I think we ought to go back to the very beginning a t insertion and we will go through the checks that we went through as we proceeded along and the things t hat F,d and I were both doing aside from tracking the booster, the things that we were either doing to prepare to come back in at area 2-1 or t o stay in orbit and proceed with the FNA as we had planned, In looking over the fl i ght plan that we had and the briefing guide on 1tONf'IDENTIAt
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.