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
125 some prominent featu:res along coastlines in Africa. We have them logged and we will be able to go over them with t he Apollo landmark people. Even an area like Dakar, which you would think would be a r elatively clear area, we tried three times to photograph and each time it was cloudy. Lovell Mostly in the afternoon. Borman The maps and Apollo landmark data package was all right. One of the problems with the maps was it is difficult to orient the map segments on the page, so that several of the targets were anywhere near the middle of the map. You might end up with a map with an Apollo landmark right on the edge of it. It is then difficult to associate the surrounding terrain with it . The big map that we had in the front of the book solved a lot of this problem. We could get the big picture from the big map and then go to the detailed one for the detailed pictures. Borman Photographs, 350 and 352, the Cairo area, you don't need a photograph of the Nil e River running into the Mediterranean. That was one of the most prominent features we had. The Suez Canal , the Red Sea, and the coast of Arabia were loud and clear the whole flight. The junction of the two rivers, the white Nile and the blue Nile, were also very prominent. Again, you did not need a photograph to
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.