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.
“Gemini 4”4 pages
182 know whether this was programmed, or whether we just burned too long. Other tb&n that the .flight plan went very well. 13.5 Systems Borman One of the items tha.t I objected to a littl e bit in the flight, and it was the natural tendency with people on the g:roundJ was the tendency, when we had a. littl e systems mal f'unction, to exp l ore it to the greatest depths without re gard to the r est of the mission. For instance, when we had the failed thrusters and we were ve-ry, very low on i'u.el, they wanted me to put & 3 second direct burst th:rough the tb:rustersJ so they could get TM on what was happening. Well, this is fine, except when you do this, you are intro ducing the problem of the thrusters sticking, and losing all your i'u.el there. Or at least you are !!quirting out 3 sec onds of valuable .fuel, which is a heck of & big chu.nlc in DIRECT• .And if. you were to induce ignition or even with three seconds of just venting fuel through the thruster you pick up a great ra.te, and then you have to ston so you would use a tremendous amount of fuel this~- I wills~ when I refused to do it, though, they acceded, so it was all right. .Another thing I didn I t like, wa.s this idea of blowing the OAMS squib. Remember? "This isnI t in the flight pla.n"-"if you feel like doing i t, I want you to blow
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.