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.
31 Ameri ca. About the only area that stayed clear was North west Africa. A lot of the experiments a.nd a lot of the Apollo landmarks were shot because of clouds. Borman On the 6 l auncht the second ti.met we were abl e t o track it. We were not able to pick up lift-off because of c l ouds again, but whe.n i t got t o the con l evel t above the cl ouds, we were able to pick i t up a.nd we tracked it using IR until we coul dn't see anymore. Even above the con l evel I think we were tracking the exhaust from the stage two en gines using PULSE mode. I hope we got some good data on that. Borman At 2661 16 we really got col d; the sui t i nl et t emperature dropped below 40 degrees a.nd we started squirting.water out of t he sui t inlet hoses. We informed Houston about thi s a.nd they determined that the water boi l er had frozen up a.nd they recommended a procedure t o cl ear it. We did thi s with Gemi ni 6 watching; esse.ntially i t involved putting the radiator t o BYPASS and changing some switches. Lovell Evaporator heat on. Borman Put the evaporator heat on and setting up t o 10 degree per second r ol l rate. Lovel l That's the picture you saw i n the movies. Borman It actual l y threw a lot of fue l out a.nd a lot of water out. It l eft a g lob of ice on the side of the S/ C, about 10
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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.