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
74 have said, it is a very tight and fine mode. We used it during most of the reentry. REENTRY RATE COMMAND we did not use. DIREC~ I used for the first part of the reentry, and it seemed that we were picking up rolling torques , and I was also starting to pick up pitch and yaw oscillations as the gs were coming on. They were slight ones but I really wanted to get the spacecraft steady, end I was really trying to lock it in on the attitude indicator, so we went to RAT~ COMMAND. I didn't see any reason to bring back a lot of RCS fuel anyway. REENTRY RATE COMMAND we did not use. The PUISE mode wa.s used in the reentry prior to guidance initiate, and it worked fine. Retrofire attitude control was excellent and I'm gl ad we bad RATE COMMAND there because we had no outside reference at all. Retrofire was done on the ball with the rate needles, and I thought the rockets were outstanding. Yes.h, outstanding, I thought they were a little more powerful than I had anticipated. Lovell Q;uite all right. Borman Reentry attitude control deadbands and rate damping was fine. The only thing, I guess, that was wrong with RATE COMMAND was the fact that it uses an awful lot of fuel. But, it certainly holds that spacecraft steady as a rock. The heater lights - we solved that problem very easily. We
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.