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
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,
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.