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
78 \ White I ~ r:IcDivitt page six,I have already covered the things on platform alinement. I did not have time to aline the platform. I tried to get it to somewhere near the local horizontal so that in case we had to do a retrofire I ' d be able to do the Etrofire . I brought the spacecraft up to a pitch attitude that I hoped was zero,but I never got the spacecraft alined to see that it was zero. So we really went into this thing without my ever having seen a zero pitch a ttitude on the spacecraft . Obviously I didn ' t get a chance to see the 30 degree pitch down on the retrofire attitude. I didn't really have time to look out the window and do a single thing that would have prepared us to reenter at 2- 1 because we were so busy keeping track of-- You know another thing I ' d say also is that we were eternally optimistic. We felt we were going to aline the platform and watch the booster at the same time. As a matter of fact, while I was trying to get the alinement it became apparent to me that I could not aline it. I even thrusted vertically--
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.