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.
“Nevers”44 pages
- p. 40 …The eyd.rogen
bottle I thought was never going to last. Forty per cent
of the…
- p. 44 …y on schedul e. ;;,
The digital clock never lost a second during the entire
fl i…
- p. 55 …but then as it builds up it never seems to get
mu.oh worse. It's…
- p. 57 …secti on; and I thought well, I never heard of this before,
and I was a…
- p. 63 …I was worried about this before
and I would never have been able to sit there…
- p. 80 …REENTRY RATE COMMAND we never used. DIREC'l! we used
once for tracking the Reentry Minuteman…
- p. 85 …We never
saw the light, and we did not have to worry about it .
The temperatures…
- p. 88 …During zero
g we were floating up and we never touched the back pa.rt of…
- p. 89 …The body was never really in the
flow but a very comfortable circulation pattern was set…
- p. 94 …Right, never hea.rd it.
It never actuated. The cabin pressure regulator was ae
- p. 95 …We never used tha.t until we got down to the
checkl ist during the reentry…
- p. 97 …We never used the manual heater on the E'.JS
o bottle.
2
Lovell As a…
- p. 100 …Borman Never on except during periods when the platform we.a running.
Lovell Right.
Borman Now…
- p. 101 …Never touched the---
Never touch the condensator.
The drink gun worked as advertised.
One thing I…
- p. 105 …We might mention in Sleep Configu
ration--we never used the Sleep switches bees.use we…
- p. 108 …We had been
told before the flight never to purge if you had a Delta P…
- p. 112 …I would suggest never going this way again. I think
we ought to change the meters…
- p. 113 …I think that is the way they
ought to be ~ecause you never touch them unless…
- p. 114 104
Bo·-m.a.n Yes, that is a switch that is never moved unless there…
- p. 115 …We used it continually, it
never varied one second in 339 hours. We never had to…
- p. 116 …We never used it in simulations. The red lighting
turned out ve-ry nicely when we…
- p. 118 …We never saw them actually hit the window.
I am not sure that some of it…
- p. 119 …We
never did use the thunderstorm light that we stuck in place
of the red light…
- p. 124 …Lovell We never had any l arge amounts of dandruff or anything
floating around.
Borman The…
- p. 136 …I never got the feeling
- p. 144 …We were never close
enough to see any satellites and to pick them out as far…
- p. 146 …In the daytime
I never noticed much of a difference between the horizon.
We've drawn…
- p. 155 …Lovell Of course we never saw Ascension s o I di d not ...
:Borman Yeah, we…
- p. 157 147
never worked and we fooled around with it for hours trying
to ma.lee it…
- p. 159 …I
found out that I never used the reticle during the full
M.oo.n or…
- p. 165 …I never did really
see the smoke pots, but we did see the dashes that they…
- p. 167 …We were at
such a low fuel state then that it was either then or never…
- p. 169 159
pictures over Brazil that have never been gotten before.
They were not called up. We…
- p. 170 160
Indian Ocean but we never did see it.
Lovell We had an S- 6 weather…
- p. 171 …I have never
been bet ter locked in on White Sands in my l ife than
- p. 172 …Ascension never got up, we never got ground
equipment at Ascension. We never got really good…
- p. 173 …Lovell We never had a good check of t his thi.ng t hought at night…
- p. 180 …The finger hole I
never used that at all. One of the big assets, we might…
- p. 184 …Borman Looked at a l l the angles, and we were never once abl e to…
- p. 191 …The
fuel cell consumables were never a problem.
Lovell Main battery voltage was never reall y…
- p. 193 …The request that was put in as part of the
flight plan, and never was in…
- p. 201 …It never worked
closed loop as well as i t was supposed to.
We did not…
- p. 206 196
never contacted anyone else. We didn't go direct
to anybody.
Borman We might mention…
- p. 210 …The ground
equipment a t Ascensi on never did come up , and I think
that if…
112
was a very , very fine job by FCSD people responsible for
them.
Borman Data books: We were using a system that was started in GT-4 ,
furthered in GT-5 and I think it is working out very well.
If there is any derogatory remarks on it at all , it is the
r equired amount of logging you have to do. It is really a
double entry system. But, hopefully this will cut down the
postflight activities and give people a better idea of
what they are looking for. I would not suggest even for a
moment that we change it. We did delete some of the redun
dancy to endeavor to save voice tape. We tried to log
everything in the book, but many of the things we did not
put on voice tape that were already in the book because we
wanted to save the tape. We only had 20 tapes for 14 days.
Everything that was done is in the books. Most of the
critical things that were time significant are on the tape .
Borman Star cha.rte, Polar and Mercator. We used the Mercator almost
exclusively.
Lovell I'm not saying the Polar was not any good, but the Mercator
was very adequate and we knew how to use it. I enjoy that
particular ty:pe of chart a little bit bett er.
Borman It was preference more than anything else. We did check the
Polar out during flight and it was apparently accurate. I
didn ' t see any reason to change those star charts either,
About this file
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 222 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.