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.
8 yaw deflecting downward, more so than booster pitch deflec ting. Booster pitch deflected sli ght ly t o the right, indi cating, at guidance initiation, a booster-high trajectory. But, they both came right back to null just after guidance initiation, and that was it. Borman We did not have the feeling that we were lofted, and then a sudden pitch down. Lovell No , th9re was no change of booster performance at all. It was just t hat the needles deflected a t guidance initiation to say that we had gui dance initiation, and after that they nulled and stayed that W83' from there on. 2.14 BECO Borman At BECO, the whole spacecraft was engulfed in a red flame . I noticed that out of the corner of my eyes. Jim, you probably had a better view than I did. Lovell Yes . Flames came up thP. side there to the window. Borman There was a definite, very brief instant of it, probably in the order of milliseconds , but it did envelope the space craft and I, in my own mind, wonder if this is not the place where we are picking up some of the smudge on t he window. 2.15 Stagins- Lovell Well, I did not notice any smudge at the time of staging. Slayton You did not notice any? Lovell I did not notice any . Of course, things were going pretty fast. I did notice it after we got into o=bit, but not at
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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.