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
129 Borman Certainly this factor of weather l eads me to believe that the whole idea of na:vigating Apollo by a landmark needs t o be reevaluated. It seems to me that a much more desirable feature woul d be a series of radar beacons placed throughout the world, similar to the ones that are used by SAC, or some type of electronic gadget not dependent upon cl ear weather. You cannot choose the weather you want, and in our f ourtee.n day mission, for about el even days we had lousy weather. The number of primary targ~ts photographed. How many did you photograph? Lovell We have nine Apollo l andmarks logged in the Apollo land.mark section: Sequence 85 - clouds at nadir. Sequence 137 - no luck, clouds overhead. Sequence 94 - unable, because of c~0uds. Took a point of land nearby. Sequence 58 - Cloudy. Sequence 70 - Okay. Sequence 85 - Just weather is the remark. Sequence 108 - Clouds, resulting in poor picture . Sequence 130 - Weather. Sequence 97 - Weather. Most of the l andmarks they gave us, that were down below the 15 degrees north l atitude ended up with weather.
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.