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.
101 Borman Borman The MDU worked perfectly the entire flight. Computer modes, PRELADNCH, ASCENT, CATCH-UP, RENDEZVOUS , REENTRY, were all perfect , no anomalies in any of those, 8.8 Crew Station Controls and di splays, The sequent i al tel elights o~erated exactly as programmed. At minus 2:56, t hey came on to the second. They a l l turned green when they were punched, no probl ems there. The event timer was used only intermittantly throughout the f light for timing, and for the last 20 minutes. It worked f i ne. The IVI's also worked exactly as planned. The Flight Di rector Indicator was again, a nomi- nal case. One sli ght difference between the simulator and the Flight Director Indicator i n the spacecraft, was the little outer roll gimbal i ndi cator in the simulator always came up to the top. I'd grown used to flying the reentries by using that as a lift vect or. In the spacecraft when we got all set up for reentry, low and behold, the outer roll gimbal was down at the bottom, so I had to fly the reci procal of it. But it was just a minor change and I ended up acclimating to it with no problem. I think it is just a function of how you happen t o go through zero. If you go through zero just a little bit to one side, the gimbal goes to the top, and if you go through the other side, it goes to the bottom.
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.