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.
“space dandruff,”1 page
111 Lovell Borman Lovell Borman Lovell Borman Lovell Borman Lovell Borman best way to do it would be to fly over them with an airplane and then change the scale to whatever you wanted it. The photographs were important , but I don ' t think you have to spend valuable fuel and time to get them. An airplane can do the same job getting photographs that we need for Apollo landmarks. That's right. No questi on about that. I found it difficult to move the map overlay. It got better as the flight went on. Yes , because we wore it in. The overlay we have , with periods , orbits , and the map underneath , I think that can be improved. We needed a very simple device with two rollers on the end, or some system a little bit more elaborate, but a lot easier to handle. I don't know , it worked all right toward the end, Jim. I f you get it too elaborate, or too easy to roll , then it is going to change on you. It has to have a system where it can ' t change . It was valuable. You knew where you were all the time. We used it more than we used the star charts. Mainly, we - used the star charts for the no platform burns, for retro fire posit i on, and for SEF and BEF positions. By and large the maps and overlays were well prepared. They were available early to us. We knew how to use them and i t
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.