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.
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30 shut down 1 we put it in a different control mode and it still fired t he same t wo t hrusters. Every time you turn off ACME bias power it would go"boop, " 11boop~ just like that. Every time we were without attitude control for extended periods we ended up with a left yaw and a left roll. Finally a.t 191>48 we got both crewmen suitless. That was the best decision in the whole flight. The perfor:m.e.nce of the Cryo bottles was fantastic. Lovell That was one thing we were worried about. The eyd.rogen bottle I thought was never going to last. Forty per cent of the eyd.rogen bottle was still left at the end of 14 days. One thing I wanted to try was to blow the squib. Remember they said t1Did you blow the squi b?" I forgot about it. Just prior to retro, I wanted to go over there and blow that squib that opened up into a vacuum. :Borman It would have taken several hours for it to do a:n:y good. Lovell Yes, I know, I just thought :maybe we could hear it or so.mething. :Borman One thing that cropped up more and more as the mission progressed, it seemed to get worse as it went along was the fa.ct that things were cm celled because of weather. We picked up large areas of clouds over the U. S •·and over s .
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.