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.
“Hill”1 page
137 zon. And with no Moon, the best sextant sighting spot to use was the upper air glow, because it was the sharpest of the two. The area between the upper air glow area and the earth's horizon was too milky during a no Moon to get a good sharp contrast (you could see stars through it), but you couldn't find out exactly where the horizon was. So it varied between full Moon and no Moon. Borman Very drastically too. Also, your ability to pick out the earth, and determine yaw from earth's passage wi t h no Moon, wa.s zilch. With the full Moon it wa.s just as good as it was in the daylight. Lovell The fuon is very bright up there, very bright. :Borman Both atti tude a.nd translation thrusters firing were apparent. The a.ft firing thrusters were not apparent. But the- forward . thrusters were apparent &t night and so were the transla tional , up, down, sideways. The attitude t hrusters were also apparent with puffs, sort of like subdued flashbulbs appearing out to the side of the window. They wer e just little flashes of light in the ba ckground, and we couldn' t determine &nything from them. wvell We couldnJt determine a.nything. l3orma.n But you could on Spacecra.ft 6. wvell On Spa cecraft 6 t he thruster firings looked as though they
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.