Documents / Official release
This is a preliminary transcript of Part II of the Gemini 4 (GT-4) flight crew debriefing, prepared by NASA's Spacecraft Operations Branch, Flight Crew Support Division, and dated June 18, 1965. The debriefing began aboard the recovery ship USS Wasp and ended at the Manned Spacecraft Center. In it, astronauts McDivitt and White discuss how the spacecraft systems performed, including the platform, OAMS, RCS and control modes. They also cover operational checks, visual sightings, experiments, mission planning and training, and give recommendations for future crews.
From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: 6/9/65, North Atlantic Ocean. This document is a preliminary transcript (Part II) derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 4 flight crew debriefing taken aboard the recovery ship, USS Wasp, on June 9, 1965. Part II of this document contains the “Visual Sightings” section of the debriefing (pages 196-224), where astronauts James McDivitt and Edward White describe their observations while aboard the spacecraft.
212 McDivitt White McDivitt White very interesting things all the way down , including ourselves . We didn't observe anything in particular that happened at 400 000 feet. The ionization· was where we really started picking up the fire. I think we kind of timed that with what you were talking about the retro adapter up there . You said , "Hey , look at it starting to burn.: 11 , and about that time we were starting to throw a sheath around us to . That 's right. It looked l ike to me that it went from pink to orange and then went out to a reddish-orange, and then in the mids t of the reddish-orange you could see little tongues of green occasionally. It was quite pretty. I think another thing about it too is that there wasn't as much of it as I thought there would be . I can 't say that I was disappointed in not seeing more fire, but when I first heard about John ·Glenn's reentry, I envisioned more fire coming out . In this case you might call it just a sheath. That's right . There wasn' t a big blaze ,by aMcDivitt C0~51FIDE~JIAL
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 290 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.