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
157 I had not had a chance to warm up for 10 minutes. We were at such a low fuel state then that it was either then or never, so we did it, and I hope they got the data. Now this window measurement business was always a l ittl e nebulous to me. am not sure exactly what they were going to get out of it. :But it seems like they a.re scratching. Lovell I do not understand the procedures too well. I mean I went th.rough the procedures, followed them exactly, but the pho tometer left me out to lunch. We tried to get the dope, but I do not see what they are going to get out of it. Borman We did not have mu.ch confidence in that. We did it exactly the wa;y it was practiced. We did practice it in the simu.la. tor and it is recorded on voice tape. They came ba.ck though and said that TM did not make much sense to them, and I think that is probably right. Voice tape recorder usage, by and la.rge this wa.s another experiment that was well han dled, preflight a.nd during flight. We admit that we spent a l ot of time on this one 8Jld with all the visu.a.l a.cuity data they got a.head of time, and were briefed by the princi pa.l experimenters ma.ny, many times. I thought that it was handled a.s well as it could be handled. The site in Aus tralia. We were over Australia
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.