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. 72 …The sea condition was very goon ; 2 to ,1. foot waves . We bobbed around, although I…
  • p. 132 …Borman The Red Sea area was one of the clear areas all the t i me…
  • p. 135 …The Suez Canal , the Red Sea, and the coast of Arabia were loud and clear the…
  • p. 136 …Lovell The Red Sea and the Gul f of Eden as it goes into the Arabian…
  • p. 140 …We evaluated them looking at the Cairo area and the Dead Sea, and I see no…
  • p. 146 …About the only area that was consistently clear was the Sahara and the Red Sea a…
  • p. 166 …You could pick out the area of the Salton Sea there even from where we were…
183
the OAMS squib just to see if you can hear it." At this
stage of the game we were depending upon the OAMS fuel for
realignL"lg the platform. I thought that by then we were in
a stage of the mission that we were operation&l rather than
interested in blowing something to see if we cou.1.d hear it.
Lovell Especially for a night a lignment .
Borman Right . And I agree with you a thousand times it would not
make any difference, but on the thousand and first time, it
might have made a difference if we lost our OAMS, and I
could not see any reason to do it J so we did not do it.
Another item, that I did not like , came up as far as flight
plan changes go . The request that was put in as part of the
flight plan, and never was in the flight plan. That was to
get a blood pressure over Guaymas after retrofire. As it
turns out, we tried to do this , but we could not find the
horizon and so we did not do it. I woul d strongly, as a
matter of fact, I would not even consider it. After retro
fire, as far as I am concerned , the blood pressures, and
all the other non-opera tional equipment can go by the way
side .
Lovell Right .
Borman Right then the important thing is to get on the ground.
Lovell Yeah , actually the retrofire time , the triple orbits before

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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 222 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.