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.
“Mission Control”5 pages
45 your per cent or miss verses per cent of capa.bility. And down on that range what it was really doing was, we were coming in a little bit sho~t, and it was sacrificing the cross range in order to get the down range cleared up, be cause the cross ra.nge wu vecy sm.e.11 ~• Lovell There -was a bias in the dow ra.nge needles between his ball and m:y ball, a.nd I think, th.&t fortunately,~ ball -wa.s the one that was out. Because when he was right on. :Borman You said we were overshooting &11 the time. Lovell Yes. Re was right on - I said you were overshooting, it wa.s about a needle and a half width bias. :Borman Okay. The initial indication of g's, I remember Jim called over and sa.id, "how ma.ny g's a.re we on now." I said l ess than one" and you said "get serious." I think you coul dn't believe it. The first onset you feel like you ha.ve about a ton on you, but then as it builds up it never seems to get mu.oh worse. It's almost u if it were a. step function. As soon as you get the g you rea.lly notice it, and then you don't notice it much more. And the ma.rlmum g's th.at we pulled during the reentry were 3.9. Lovell Yes, that a.ma.zed me. I actu&lly thought we did pull more g's. :Borman 3.9 g's. So, it was a long extended 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.