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
127 that I was going up hill or going down hill in the elliptical orbit. Lovell We saw one good airport. I thought it was Ellington, and it turned out to be Houston International. Borma.n We also saw that one in South America very well. I t stood out loud and clear, that white runway on the Apollo landmark. When we finally got over it there was a break in the clouds and at the last minute we got a picture of it. Lovell Airports in general would stand out. BOl!l!liBl1 Coastlines are the answer. They are by far the beet land marks you have. I do not think islands a.re too good for landmarks unless they are relatively large; small islands are tough to pick up. Lovell And they are usually covered by clouds. Borman Color contrast between land and water was very good, parti cularly along sandy beaches. We had onboard some photographs that were taken on GT-5 with the actual scene we were viewing. We were able to compare the color of these photo graphs. We found it then to be very, very close. One strange phenomena is that greens don't come through. The very green jungles of Brazil and Africa appeared almost a brownish-mustard color. The predominant color is blue, even at night time with a full moon. Lovell I thought the jungle even iooked blue, bluish-brown.
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.