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.
“Gemini 4”4 pages
70 ate and after I started f lying the needles. Lovell Because you were overshooting with DIRECT? :Borman Right. I was not able to get the fine control I wanted. It would not stay in there. It seemed like the spacecraf't was picking up a torque in roll also, and I was having to watch it too close. Lovell And this was different th&n what we had in the simulation. :Borma.n Yes. REENTRY RATE COMMAND we never used. DIREC'l! we used once for tracking the Reentry Minuteman in order to catch it. It was moving so swiftly. We a l so used it in the ini tial phases of reentry, and it worked fine. The PULSB mode, of course, was the one we lived with most throughout the 14 days. I thought it was an excellent mode. Lovell It is a gas saver and even when you do have a platform the PULSE mode is adequate for mos t of the work you can do-- for any attitude control, ground terrain observations-except for rapid rotations where you need a faster authority. :Borman Right. All ground tracking, PULSi was adequate. We did not have any problem at a l l. We were able to track the Polaris using PULSE. Everything except the reentry~ we could use PULSE mode. The IlORIZON SCAN mode was fine. The only thing I noticed there was at sunrise and sunset some times, we were driven to a 30 or 40• nosedown pitch attitude
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.