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.
“Cairo”2 pages
123 Lovell Right. Weather is the big bugaboo on Apollo landmarks, or using earth land.marks for Apollo. Borman The acquisition data was good. The pointing data was good on all the experiment updates, except for one. They missed the time on an S-5. We caught it, and did it ourselves be cause we knew where the a.rea was supposed to be. The point ing data given was great throughout the flight. The updat ing wa.s fine. We bad no problem.a at all. Pointing instruc t ions were good. Borman Concerning taking acquisiti on photographs for the Apollo l andmarks, it was pretty dam hard to determine anyt hing when we pitched 30 degrees down to pick up the landmarks. We could not pick out the air f i elds or anything. We would point the camera and take a picture, but we did not lmow what we were taking pictures of. We could not see it with the naked eye. I am thinking of the airfield in Brazil. We took this acquisition picture without any idea of what we were taking a picture of until we finally got to the nadir. Then, we looked down and could see the runw~. I think it was in Belam Province in Brazil . The weather was a very definite f actor in photographing the Apollo l a.nd ma.rks, and of course, it wuld be a very definite factor in using the Apollo landmarks o Lovell We had to use the sun angl e that we had at the time we got
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.