Gemini 7 Technical Debriefing, 1965

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.

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the numbers in the flight plan, and the SIM-NETS with
the entire network.
14.2 DCPS ( Launch abort s imulator)
Borman We used it and it was very effective. It never worked
closed loop as well as i t was supposed to.
We did not have any visual with it, but nevertheless
the runs that we got there I thought were invaluableJ
we certainly could not do without them. The noise
and the sensations seemed as close as you could get
to them without running on centrifuge. It was a good
program, the tapes were good.
Lovell I think it is a very necessa.ry simulator. It was not
working completely like we wanted it to work, but it
was just being put into operation when we were at
Houston. We did not have much of an opportunity to
use it.
14.3 MAC Engineering Simulator
Borman We ran a whole week at MAC, two days on reentries and
three days on station keeping, and that was a very
worthwhile week. It was concentrated effort, and the
station keeping simulation was as close to what we saw