Documents / Official release

Gemini 7 Technical Debriefing, 1965

National Aeronautics and Space Administration · 1965 · 222 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is a preliminary transcript of the Gemini 7 technical debriefing, dated December 23, 1965, from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was made from tape recordings of the crew debriefing held December 19 to 21, 1965 at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida. In it, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell go through countdown, powered flight, insertion, station keeping with the booster, systems, experiments and training. The table of contents also lists a section on visual sightings during orbital flight.

From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: December 19-21, 1965, Cape Kennedy, Florida. This document is a preliminary transcript derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 7 flight crew debriefing conducted December 19-21, 1965, at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida. Lights and flashes are mentioned and there is discussion about having proper illumination for vehicle docking. Borman and Lovell discuss celestial and terrestrial observational anomalies and note sightings of Mercury, meteors, aurora, and lightning. They also discuss not being able to see any stars once the Sun comes up.

  • p. 9 …12.4 Mission Rules ............. .. ......•. .. ......177 12,5 Experiments••.•..•••••.•...•......•...•....•177 13.0 MISSION CONTROL 13.1 GO…
  • p. 39 …It resulted in a left yaw rate and this continued periodi cally throughout the mission. It…
  • p. 40 30 shut down 1 we put it in a different control mode and it still fired…
  • p. 104 …The controls were adequate. Data Recording? We tried to record as much data as we could…
  • p. 131 …period mission briefing. It followed the way we were briefed. Very good. Lovell Flight controll ers…
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some indication if the tape is on. On long flights you
can't ha.ve the tape on all the time like the short flights-
you ha.veto conserve tape. Cartridge change was no problem.
The controls were adequate. Data Recording? We tried to
record as much data as we could.
:Borman We didn't indulge in a l uxury many times of recording both
in the log book and on the tape. We only had 20 tapes for
a 14 day mission. If we got a good representation of it in
the log book-we didnJt put it on the tape. Now, we find
out we probably brought back some unused tapes, too.
Lovell We did. It was hard for a 14 day mission to adequately
budget the tape. We would try to budget it so th.at we could
get the in:f'orm&tion on there 'Without leaving long periods of
inactivity on the tape. However, we didn't budget it well
enough, and we left about 1 or 2 tapes without any record
ings.
:Borman Digital Command System updates were good, no problem--every
thing worked fine. Real-time transmitter, and delay-time
transmitter were no problem. As a matter of fact, tb.at
whole system I thought was excellent. The only problem we
had in the area of Digital Command System or the telemetry
was th.at we lost the tape recorder and••• goofed up the de-
1,cy-ed time. The procedure that we worked up for operating

About this file

Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 222 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.