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.
“Frank Borman”10 pages
128 Borman Perhaps , the colors were a little deeper i n the photographs than were the landmarks but photographs are very adequate presentati on of colors . I think probably any variance in the photographs i s due to vari~nce i n sun angle . Lovell We understood the targets well enough, I don ' t see any problem there at all . We didn't use the maps with gloves on. You can hardly use anything with gloves on. Borman The best t hi ng you can do with gloves i s t ake t hem off and stow t hem as soon as possi ble. Lovell The Apollo Landmark Book size was adequate. Any smaller s ize in maps gets to be too thick or too small , and you really can't read them in detail. I did like the big map of the world broken up in four sections, because that gave us a good approach to the targets. We could use that much better than we could the orbital plotboard. Borman Probably all you need is that big map cut up in four sections and then a small scale map of the specifi c area. We don' t need the darn phot ographs. Lovell It's the thickest thing we had to stow. Borman Spacecraft control. As far as tracking ground targets, you could always achieve the rates in PULSE mode. Fuel was nominal, PULSE was no diff iculty. We tried to take everything at a 90 degree angle. We had no problems wi th spacecraft control to acquire and take pictures of the Apollo landmarks.
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.