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.

  • p. 136 …Borman We saw small towns along the coast of Mexico. Lovell Also South America. I wonder…
  • p. 169 …Borman We a l so took a seque.nce a l ong the southern coast from…
147
never worked and we fooled around with it for hours trying
to ma.lee it work. I a.m sure somebody is going to sit down
stairs now and ground check it okay, but, it did not work.
Lovell We did everything and we traded it back and forth to .make
sure that both of us saw the same results.
Borman We had been briefed on this, we used it in the set up
at St. Louis where we had seen how it changed. We had
bad adequate briefings. We had accurate presentations
on it.
Lovell Primarily you could not calibrate the equip.ment, the
reticle would not change fro.m red to green.
Borman We made a couple of measurements where we just used the
calibration lmob at a certain setting and let it alone.
But this equipment was inoperative. I thought it was a
little strange, too, when they called up and said, ''We
have just found out that this equipment is sensitive to RF
interference." "Turn off all your transmitters and see if
this affects it." I think we ought to know before
we go charging into the 3rd or 4th day of flight that
the equipment is sensitive to RF interference. It see.ms
to me tba.t perhaps there was not a very good Qual.
test done on this piece of gear. I have

About this file

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.