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.
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122 9. 0 OPERATIONAL CHECKS 9.1 Apollo Land.mark Investigation Borman We should first mention the weather because this casts some reflection on the whole i dea of Apollo l andmarks as a navi gational aid. The weather was the big bugaboo i n this flight as far as achieving any Apollo land.mark photography . I do not know whether it was the particular t argets we were trying to get or what. Invariably, there were clouds. Lovell As can be seen from the map , anything south of 15 degrees north l atitude in Africa is no good for Apollo landmarks because it is i nvariably cloudy. South of 15 degrees north l at i t ude is invari abl y too cloudy for Apollo land.marks . Borman Right. Lovell Al l of South Ameri ca is out . As a matter of fact everything. south of 15 degrees north latitude all the way across the m~p is no good. We found out that North Africa and South west United States and parts of Mexico , as previous crews stated a long time ago, (that includes Saudi Arabia , Paki stan Valley) have predominantly clear weather in the morning, but not in the afternoon . Borman The Red Sea area was one of the clear areas all the t i me . Even the South-west U.S. and Mexico were clobbered most of the time on our flight .
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.