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
105 Lovell We had to use the levers of the swizzle stick to get the thing back together again. This was bad. We also used the swizzle stick to keep the manual heater switch down on the FC H which is a real big pa.in. I t is a very a.mall swit ch 2 and you have to hold it for a long tiine. That gets to be a lot of trouble. Borman Lighting, indicators and instruments . There is one instrument in the spacecraft that should be lit that i s not. Tba.t is the digital timer. That is the most valuable instrument onboard. We used it continually, it never varied one second in 339 hours. We never had to reset that once. It was exactly on the money. We checked it periodically and it never gained or lost a second. Lovell But it had to be lit. Bor.man It should be lit because it is right on the center panel, and there is no lighting on it except for the bright l i ght from the back. Ma.ny times at night and when you are trying to :maintain dark adaptation you end up having to use the flashlight on it. Lovell It should be a red light for night work. In the day time you don't need it because the cockpit is lit up anyway. It really ruined night vision to turn on that flashlight to find out what time it was. Bor:ma.n The left panel was fine when it was lit up with the display ~
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.