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.
196 never contacted anyone else. We didn't go direct to anybody. Borman We might mention that the systems briefings were really of two types. We had preliminary systems briefings by our FCSD people at Houston. At Mc Donnell, du.ring the SD1S flights and altitude chamber tests we filled in the dead time with systems bri efings from the people at McDonnell. This was a good way to go also. For instance, while one crew was flying the MAC Rendezvous Simulator practicing station-keeping, the other crew was getting systems briefing. So, we didn't have any dead time. It worked out well. Borman The station-keeping , on the booster was more difficult than it was on GT-6, primarily because the booster was venting, and tumbling and trans lating. Also because of the fact that we really didn't have a lot of time. We were having to use fuel in order to get set up before night, for the separat~on burn. However, once we got it squared away, there was no difficulty at all staying with the booster at a distance, I'd estimate from about sixty to one hundred and fifty feet. During
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.