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.
“Sea”7 pages
17 shadow, because the next time I looked at it, it looked just like a new engine. The booster itself had no apparent da mage. The only thing we could see was this big spewing where the venting was coming from. I did not see any vent~ ing from the roll nozzle at all. Did you? Lovell No, the venting ca.me from some line right along the bottom edge, near the engine section of the booster. Borman That is right. Lovell It was a line of some sort that was open, and fuel was spewing out of it. Borman I hope they got the data they wanted on the D-4 and D-7 Experiments. It wa.s,again,a very uncomplicated maneuver, one that we practiced many times, and it worked just lik~ it does in simulation. Had no difficulty at all. Toe lights on the booster worked fine. 3.4 Post station-keeping Borman We did not do anything with stowage on the first orbit at al l . D-ring, pins I have already mentioned, we did not get those in at all. Lovell Arm restraints went down at 55 seconds. Belts- We did not even loosen them until after we had done D-4, D-7. The life vests we left right on the harness for the entire flight, but the ha.mess did not stay on us for the entire flight.
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.