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.
42 So that was very good work on the gro-.md ' s part. Lovell It looks like the initial computation of retrofire time was off, and they already had a good o~bit on us. Borman I don't kno~ what it was, but they corrected it when we came in. 5.10 Post Retro Jettison Checklist Borman The post retro jettison checklist was accomplished with no problem. Oh, I'm thinking; we did have some discussion about as far as the retro goes. With the--we ' ll cover this more fully under su.i.ts. The question was whether to leave those hoods on or off for retrofire. We found th,'3-t the noise and the--I don't know why ~e didn't notice this at launch, but we did during reentry , the noise from the air blowing in the G5C suits was an impediment to crew discussion. Lovell It would go on the mikes and make a lot of noise on th; mikes. The mikes picked up a lot of whistle. Borman. Plus the fact that the vision out of that thing certainly needs to be imporved. So, we didn't kno,1 what to do--·,.;e finally decided to leave them on for retro.fire. 6.0 REENTRY 6.1 Reen-gz Parameters '[:edate Borman Reentry. 400,000 feet, we had that time updated; and at 400,000 feet I rolled left 55 degrees, because this... or fifty degrees, the value of the backup angles at tha t time.
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.