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.
“Frank Borman”10 pages
s.ee Retro Pack&ge jettison. At reentry we didn't have a lighted horizon at 400,000 feet. We didn1 t have a lighted horizon until we were below 400,000 feet. This was not particularly to my liking; although we picked it up about 330,000 feet. After then, it was all right. Lovell We saw ionization. Borman Yes, we did. Lovell The whole window started to be just a glow outside. Then it got into the ri?18S of this ionization layer. It started out to be just glowi?18. Borman When we went subsonic it looked like there was a bunch of steam and flame that engulfed the nose eection. I think this may have been when the spacecraft finally went subsonic, right before drogue deploy. You could see the spacecraft oscillations, and you could reference them with the drogue, which was relatively steady. You could also reference them with the sky. You didn't have any stars or anything, but you could just pick out the motions across the sky. At times it was pretty violent. It would be intereeting to see the magni~u.d.e of the oscillations and the rates. Borman The drogue deploy was very evident. We saw the drogue chute. We saw the Rand R Can come off, and then I saw it following us down in the parachute, off to one side. Main chute
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.