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.
18 The sequence light test. This was done after the first orbit. We really had this insertion checklist in two phases, one at insertion and then one after D-4, D-7. 4.0 ORBITAL FLIGHT Borma.n We have already disou.ased the station-keeping. That is no problem. I think the situation that we used,going off with about 2 seconds--2 to 3 seconds--a.nd thrusting back with 5 seconds while you a.re still on your side getting back to the booster as quickly as "POssible ,solves the problem and takes a lot of the orbital mechanics out of the situation. I hope the film comes out. The one thing that did make it & little difficult on this one is when we looked back, we were looking back into the sun, and the booster was right in line with the sun. It was ju.at like flying formation when the leader makes a. turn, a.nd you are down,..sun. It is dif ficult to see, and I tried to move off to one side and swing around and look a little bit more to the north. I think it was north. I guess I was trying to look to the south where I could get the sun out of my line of sight. also had a cut-off on the booster at station-keeping at 88% fuel, so that at 88% fuel we were already in darkness, al though we had not reached the time for the D-4, D-7 separa tion which we.a to ooour a.too, 25.I think it was about '00: 23 or I
Not linked to a story yet.
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.