Documents / Official release
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.
“space dandruff,”1 page
1JO pitch down at guidance initiate. Attitude indications were nominal all the way through. At insertion , the nomi nal velocity on address 72 was 25,804 and when we read it up, i t read 25,804 . The orbit maneuvers using the computer and the platform were right on the money. The accelerometer bias did not vary, and we burned them off on the IVI 1 a by insert i ng them through the MDIU, and it came out very well . I did not burn on time , we burned on t he IVI 's. Borman The updates were all made in the PRELAUNCH mode as agreed on before fl i ght . There was no problem, no mi sunderstanding, I think F0D did very well i n this regard. I know t hat in Gemini 5 t here was a little mix-up, but we had none of that. Borman Retrofire occurred automatically at the exact second. All four Retros f ired and the IRS was right on the money. Reentry guidance was nominal. I t was very s i mi lar to the s i mulations that we had f l o.m. There was one little anomaly in the guid ance, i n t hat we were gi ven back-up reentry angles of 50 degrees. We computed wi th our onboard char t s a reentry angle of 50 degrees, back-up angle of 50 degrees. But t hen after tracking, the ground called up a 35 degrees which proved to be closer to what we actually f l ew. I am still not aware of the reason for change; why it changed from 50 degrees t o 35 degrees. The important t hing i s t hat it did change and the ground was able to update u s in real time, and it agreed very well with the a
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.