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
124 over the target. Borma.n Evidently the people who called them up were taking this into consideration, because the sun angles for all the Apollo l andmark attempts were good as far as photography goes. Sightings were tough on a lot of them, primarily because of clouds. Lovell Apollo l andmarks of i nterior Afri ca, whi ch they gave us several times, (like islands, lakes, Leopoldville in the middle of the Congo) , were very difficult because there is nothing down there but jungle and little streams and things. Borman By far the best l andmarks a re interfaces of beaches and water. Lovell That i s right . Sandy beaches with blue water. There is no doubt about that. Borman There i s good contrast, and with a good map you do not need the photographs . I do not understand the value of the pho tographs, I do not see why they do not engage the Army Ma.p Service to aeri a l photograph these areas and print the pictures accordi.ng t o the see.le they want. It would be a rel ati vely easy j ob to do and certainly would be much less expensive than taking the fuel to do it on an operational mtssion. Borman The designated targets were clouded over more often than not. We did take some alternate targets and pointed out
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.