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.
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57 with them in the water. The communications with Houston via UHF were poor. Once we were on the drogue they kept calling us asking us to confirm main chute. I' m not sure they ever hear d us conf irm main chute. Lovell I've often wondered about t ha t . Watching the other apace craft come in, why they don't call; and I found ou t that they do call but they ca..~•t get through. Must be the rel ay pl anet troubl e or something. Borman Communi cations wi t h recovery forces on UHF was excel lent. HF: we ext en<ied t he HT<' ant enna, put out HF- DF t one for awhil e. Again I am not sure if anyone picked it up or not . We retracted it af ter i t had been up only 8 minutes , be cause of the f act that we did not want to get the HF antenna broken of f during the recovery operation. Lovell There was no need for HF communications since we vere so close to the recovery group. Bonnan The chopper was over us about 5 or 6 minutes after landi ng. We had much better UHF communications, so, we di d not use HF. On point of impact, onboard data. Within t he l i mits of the readability of that scal e, it was excellent . Down range and cross range needles were fine. We actually ended up about 8 or 9 miles from the carrier. You just can't get much finer infomation out of the down range and
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.