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…
195
it's all well documented and scheduled. Another
thing that was very helpful to us was Mike
:Brzezinski, the way he scheduled all the systems
briefings and all the trai ning. We didn't fool
around with any of i t. It was set up well, and went
like clockwork. I think this was one of the real
fine points of our training. Mike came down to the
Cape a week early and the whole schedule was set up
a week before we got here, and with very little
change after that. He did an outstanding job,
and as far as I am concerned, that's the only way
to run it.
Lovell 'lhat's right. There's no sense running .around doing
it yourself when we have a nice, well run .organiza
t ion that can do t\his work for us.
:Borman As far as any figures or numbers on the time spent
i n the different phases of training, they are all
availabl e. I f anybody wants them we have the
fina.l report, and we have a weekly report.
:Borman It was very helpful to us to just have to deal with
one person, rather than dealing with the Planetarium
people, the people at MAC, the people at the Cape.
The only thing we did at all was contact Mike. We

About this file

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.