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
73 the flight plan. They e;a.ve us one minute and 16 or 17 sec onds, &nd the flight plan called for 46, I think. Borman Well, we may get that cleared up when we talk to the ground. But, it was greater than I thought we had planned to do. Updating throughout the flight was excellent. Checklist wa.s fine and, of course, we did not use the computer. Lovell We might mention here that both Frank and I think making adjust maneuvers without a platform is very feasible. You can use the reticle for alignment and use the stars a.s a reference. Since you a.re usu.a.lly using the aft thrusters, you do not have thruster light to worry about. You can turn down the lights. It takes two people thoughf one per son to burn, hold attitude on the star, and watch the star reference and the other person to time. It required two people, but it is & very feasible method of doing it. I think you get some very good accuraciea with it, because we found out from the second burn. 8.3 RCS Borman RCS operational checks were nominal. We had no problems at all with the RCS. System monitoring was perfect and it did not drop one bit during the 14 da.ys. After we actuated it, it vent from 3,000 to about 2,600 to 2,500 psi on the source pressure. No problems. Control mode-s, RATE COMMAND. .AJJ I
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.