Gemini 7 Technical Debriefing, 1965

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.

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deploy was very nice.
Lovell Ma.in chute deploy, vecy enjoyable to watch.
Borman During landing and recovecy we had the S2F in sight before
we ever hit the water.
11.0 EXPERIMENTS
11.1 Celestial, Space, and Terrestrial Radiometry (D-4/7)
Borman I think we have more valuable data on D-4/D-7 than all the
others put together.
Lovell Right.
Borman Updating techniques and communications procedures were
excellent. Evecything cal led up on D-4/D-7 was right on
the money, including the time and pointing locations for the
reentcy vehicle.
Lovell They did an outstanding job of giving us the right
information onboard.
Borman We were perfectly trained in equipment setup and usage.
Jim didn't have a question about it. I think there was
no problem at all.
Lovell We got evecything going. I hope that we got some good data.
Borman Cooled Spectrometer checks were nominal.