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
108 Just off the nose it woul d blurr out. There are two theories, one group of peopl e sey it's the nose cover that is ablating on launch, others sey it is staging. We saw quite a bit of flame at staging and it looked like there were several streaks there caused by staging. There is also a general deposit like a stagnation point right there that might have been built up during the entire launch, which might be the nose cover. So, it might be the combination or both. Borman It might have accumulated due to the urine dumps throughout flight.seve~al times we saw urine crystals come·back e.nd hit the nose cone. We never saw them actually hit the window. I am not sure that some of it, that was practically invisible, might have hit the window. It did seem to get worse with flight. l-zy- window was not nearly as bad as Jim's. Lovell Frank's was better than mine. Whenever I could I would give him the cameras to take a picture. He did a lot of the Apollo landmark and S-5 and S-6 pictures while I was controlling the spacecraft. We have to improve the windows somehow. We've got to have some sort of cover or get some certain ty:pe of material. The windows were perfect when we got in the cockpit. The problem they had on GT-5, where they had fog and humidity because of the difference in temperature when the White
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.