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
50 and we got a cabin full of I don't know what it was. Lovel1 You had your hood off. Why? Borman I took my hood off to try to find the horizon , so I made the reentry with the hood off . Lovell Okay, I had my hood on, and I think when we opened up the snorkl e; the way that works, the snorkl e draws air through t he suit compressor, and then into the suit circuit• I had my hood on ; and the flow comes out of an opening back here in the hood, and flows down . I got an eye ful l of something that was an acid. Borman Acid, eh? Lovell Yes. Really burned my eyes. My eyes were watering when I finP,lly got the hood off. Borman We11 , we accomplished all t he checklists, and we had no problems; as a matter of f act, i t went pretty smooth in the time between the drogue deploy and the 10.6 barostat. 6.10 10 . 6 K Barostat Borman It was just like the s i mul a t or. One th i ng I did notice, initially, when we were on the drogue, t he altimeter was completely inaccurate. You couldn't even read it. We were oscillating so bad l y that it was jumping in thousands of f eet per second· , oh maybe not thousands, but the needles were going a l l over the place; and I remember thinking boy ,
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.