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.
that our timing was good on-board. They did come through but not until TR-10 seconds. At TR equals zero the s/c attitude was 20 degrees down. s/c rates were easy to con trol, but I thought that the thrust fro.m those retro-rockets was high. I really had a sensation of being accelerated. Didn't you Jim? Lovell Well, it was different from what I had expected because we were so used to zero g fl i ght. Borman The only thing I could do was fly instruments, the needles and the ball. Trying to hold it right on the ball. I was vecy glad that I was in RATE COMMAND. I had to con trol it in RATE COMMAND a. little bit,particularly on the fourth retro rocket. The first three went bing, bing, bing. Then there was a pause of about ½ a second and the fourth one went. The fourth one seemed like it was a little mis aligned, I think it was left yaw. I had to bring it back. I would like to emphasize this. I thought those retros were really powerful, and that you were holding on to something that if you really didn't have good control it could get away from you pretty easily. Lovell But, I was sure happy to hear them go.
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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.