Documents / Official release

Gemini 7 Technical Debriefing, 1965

National Aeronautics and Space Administration · 1965 · 222 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

  • p. 9 …12.4 Mission Rules ............. .. ......•. .. ......177 12,5 Experiments••.•..•••••.•...•......•...•....•177 13.0 MISSION CONTROL 13.1 GO…
  • p. 39 …It resulted in a left yaw rate and this continued periodi cally throughout the mission. It…
  • p. 40 30 shut down 1 we put it in a different control mode and it still fired…
  • p. 104 …The controls were adequate. Data Recording? We tried to record as much data as we could…
  • p. 131 …period mission briefing. It followed the way we were briefed. Very good. Lovell Flight controll ers…
44
you where you a.re and what the ba.nk angle looks like with
the horizon. But, I don't think tha.t a person that i s fly
ing the reentry ca.n. cross check between the ball a.nd the
horizon. I think you have to ma.ke your choice and l ive with
it. Okay, roll commands were just like the simula.torJ t ime
correlation was good. The guidance initiate came right on
the money, and the needles jumped indicating an undershoot,
a slight undershoot. From then on we just flew it the way
we 'd flown them a hundred times in St. Louie and in the sim
ulator. I think we were ve-ry well prepared for t his . I
tried to fly it so that we took i t down.range, and we got a
slight overshoot indication on downrange of about 1 needle
width, 1 dot. Then as we got down to a.round 2 g's or 2½- g's,
I tri ed to start zeroing it out , so then when 3 g's oameJ
the downra.nge was pegged right on the money. And we were
indicating zero on the cross range. And at 3 g's I switched
to flying the roll bug, and. just zeroing the roll bug; and
a.s we came on down further and further the do'Nnrange stayed
zero, but the cross range started going off full scale.
Well, this really doesn' t mean anything because all the
cross ra.nge is indicating is

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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.