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
Lovell Yes. Borman During the later part of it I started out in PULSE Mode and :rolled over the 55 degrees in PULSE Mode, and. then when we eot Guidance Initiate I went to DIRECT. I was finding that in order to keep the cros11 range zeroed, and we had been told that Wally had trouble with his cross range, I was banking back and forth quite frequently maneuvering the spacecraft around the full lift point, from one side to the other and I was overshooting a little bit in DIRECT. I was also starting to pick up some pitch and yaw oscillations, so then I went to single ring RATE COMMAND. And boy, this was really a great control mode, it "'8.S steady as a :rock. You could put it right where you wanted and it st~ed there. But pretty soon we eot dow a:round, I guess it was when the g's were coming off, after 3.9 g•s. I started losing it in single ring RATE COMMAND so I threw two rings on and it held it like a rock. :But they were sure firing. Lovell Oh, yes. Borman Boh, those thrusters were really firing. And we started getting abla.tion off the heat shield. It was coming back in and hitting the nose of the spacecraft, and that was pretty
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.