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. 186 …GPO was very cooperative about everything. Of course, the big thing that we wanted, that we…
  • p. 219 …Everybody was very cooperative , I thought . But that was another it em that I strongly recommend…
199
at night . The 'l1ranslation and Ilocking Tra±ne~ • was
helpful in station keeping. We didn ' t r eally do
any training at McDonnell for the experiments .
Lovell We did mostly the station keeping and the reentry at
McDonnell .
Borman And you went to Ames.
Lovell Just for the sextant. The sextant briefing at Ames I
thought could have been done at Houston . I got more
information out of Bob ~ilva on the roof of the
Cape here , than I did really out of Ames . The two
I
simulators I used out there really didn't help me out
at all . I think the simulator and a star field in
the Gemini simulator plus work outside on the roof
would be more valuable than Ames, which I passed on
to Wally and Tom.
Borman We had many briefings..• Total t i me spent on experi
ments i s two hundred hours and thirty minutes. A
great deal of that time was briefing. I felt , that
by the time we took off, we knew not only the pro
cedures for every experiment, we knew the hows ,
the whys, and the wherefores . I thought we were

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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.