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.
15 Borman Could you identify any type of the debris? Lovell No, pieces.That is all I could tell. 3.3 Insertion activities Lovell We followed the regular procedure. Borman We did not have s;ny problem with safing our switches. No problem. I did not even stow my D-ring at insertion. I was too busy trying to stay on the booster, and I did not get it stowed for the first orbit,I guess,or half an orbit. Lovell What we planned on doing was getting pictures of the D-ring. I got the br&cket up at staging, and I actually had a minute after guidance initiate to reach back there and get the bracket and stick it up. It worked out very nicely before the g's started building up again on second stage. The bracket was up and in place s;nd no problem a t all. Then at SECO, I went around to pick up the camera, because we had the camera. stowed where the Agena control bq..x ie l ~oated., I managed to get the camera up, and it was already plugged into the electric&l wire. ill I had to do was turn the auxiliary switch on, put it on the bracket, and push the button, and it started taking pictures. Just about that time, Frank mentioned be was going to start thrusting pretty soon so I had to go back and punch off the spacecraft. Then I read up address 72. So , I hope the pictures come out.
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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.