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
47 sensational. Jim was giving vivid descriptions on what was happening, a.nd I was watching the ba.11. Lovell That's one thing that no one had ever told us before. I was a.ma.zed. Maybe it was peculiar to the spacec.raft. Borman No, Tom and Wally h.a.d mentioned it. Lovell Oh, is that r i ght? That ablative material went back and hit the forward end near the recovery section, rather the RCS secti on; and I thought well, I never heard of this before, and I was a little worri ed that maybe we were too fa:r off, a.nd the stuff was going to start getting into recovery sections. But it tiirned out to be okay. Borman Another thing was that the windows really got scrounged up on that ree.ntry; that's something else. I could hardly see out of my window. Stu.ff was coming over from the heat shield and hitting it. It was really gunky. 6. 3 Aceelera.tio!!,_Pro.file Borman Okay. The acceleration profile was very smallo It was a very high 11.ft reentry, and of course, this results in a low g and long duration build up. No problem at all. 604 Spacecr&ft Control Borman Spacecra.ft control was excellent until we g'Ot down to 100,000 .feet or even below 100,000 .feet. We turned on
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 222 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.