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.
“Cooper”2 pages
181 sure that in case something goes wrong with the thruster, they could utilize more fuel to keep that alignment. :Borman Right. Well , as it worked out, we came out all right, any way. Because we just said we were not going to do anymore if we got to 5 per cent to 6 per cent. Tb.en they came back and said that one time, I said, "Well, we're at 6 per cent," and they said, "we thought you would go ahead and go to 5 per cent." And this is an awful nebulous thinking. Lovell Besides the gauge is hard to read to that accuracy . Borman Th.a.t is r ight. Okey-. We have already discussed, I think, the consumables on the fuel cells and the batteries. We turned off the squib batteries, about the 10th~. The fuel cell consumables were never a problem. Lovell Main battery voltage was never reall y hi gh, I thought. I have been led to believe that 22.5 volts was sort of a minimum voltage for a battery. They were up about 23 or 22 .8 in the early part of the flight, and they were down to about 22.6, I guess, towards the end of the flight. 13.4 Flight pl an changes Borman If there was a flight plan change, the only one that I know of, that we were not aware of, was the one of updati ng our perigee in the first burn. We thought we were going to burn it to 102. It came out we burned it to 120 and I'd like to
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.