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.
“Frank Borman”10 pages
43 6.2 400K Borma.n Spacecraft attitude a.t 400,000 feet wa.s difficult to deter mine. We di dn't h.a.ve & horizon until we were below 350,000 feet, a.nd I was having & lot of trouble trying to find it. Jim, you got the horizon first on your side. Lovell Yes, the horizon ca.me up first on my side. Well, we did not have it right at 350 ,000 feet, but we coul d look out be tween RCS firings and see the air glow, if you'd stuck your face right up there and l ook out. But when you're doing the reentry on the instruments you have the lights up so, one guy ca.n't do it, you have to have two guys; one to look out and find out where the horizon is and- - Borman That was a heck of a thing. I'd like to be a.ble to cross check between the balls and the horizon once in a while t o make sure that I knew exactly where we were. As it tu.med out this was a completely instrument reentry. We fina.lly found the horizon &nd Jim would tell me yes, it's about in t he right pl&ce. But I just watched the ball. And I think that it would be vecy difficult t o back up a reentry by watching out the window. One person could provide backup guidance for you, and tell
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.